WE all of us, like the worm, the weevil and the great white whale, are essentially alimentary canals. The northern end of the canal is generally regarded as agreeable, and everything south of it increasingly disagreeable. But we are in essence - like the worm, the weevil and the great white whale - canals which evolutionarily preceded everything. The brain, the limbs, the lungs, the reproductive bits came later.
Anorexia nervosa is a tragic attempt to rebut the primacy of the canal. It seeks to maintain life without the abominable chemistry of the abdomen, and those who adhere to this heresy to its logical conclusion will die of it.
Albigensian creed
For anorexia is a heresy, like the Albigensian creed was a heresy for which thousands once freely laid down their lives. Equally today, hundreds of young women are prepared to lay down their lives in order to make themselves so perfectly thin that there is nothing left.
Is it not strange that many of the great heresies of Christianity started at the end of the first millennium, just as anorexia is the heresy of the end of second millennium? Millennialism, the desire for perfection on this earth, is the characteristic of both disorders. For the anorexic, perfection is the subordination and conquest of the alimentary canal.
The prime sufferers of anorexia are the most impressionable and fragile creatures on this earth teenage girls, who in an earlier epoch became the vehicles for religious hallucinations around which entire cults centred. Young girls do not get visions any more. Instead, they starve themselves to death in a different kind of religious frenzy.
Organised Christianity based religion is all but dead in Europe. The new religion is appearance. The energy women once expended on novenas and piety is now squandered on the Cult of Beauty. The core business of newsagents today is women's magazines, which are cathedrals and prelates to the new religion of beauty. Observe more closely - see how many of these magazines worship at the shrine of the heretical god Anorexia.
That heresy is everywhere. It forms centres of worship even when its adherents are consciously unaware of what they are worshipping. But it is there nonethless in ally its sublime wickedness. I think it unlikely that the staff of, say, Vogue, would regard what they are doing as wicked. They would regard the term as preposterous, ridiculous; but I have no doubt that their adoration of the god Anorexia must influence thousands of agog teenage girls who seek bodily perfection with the same devout piety that their great grandmothers in their teens revered the Virgin Mary.
Feminists have often alleged that the image which anorexic girls hanker after, the perfect and perfectly unobtainable elfin body, is part of a greater oppression of women within a new heterosexist male patriarchy. Really? So why are so many top designers homosexual men? One might additionally ask how many designers, whatever their orientation, actually like real women? Few enough. I'd guess.
Run by Women
But the real arbitis of taste are not the designers but the fashion magazines. These are almost entirely staffed and run by women; and the fashion writers, who at the top level of their profession are as powerful as cardinals, are women too.
Take Vogue. Of the top 20 positions in its London operation 18 are held by women. Its art director and its design directors are men; the rest of the positions - editor, artistic director, fashions director, fashion editor, beauty director - these are all women. Between the lot of them, they have contrived to produce a shrine to the god Anorexia.
Two photographic features in the latest Vogue make my point. One is titled Last Resort, a nostalgic look at "the spirited chic of the 1950s" and at the cruisewear inspired by Liz Taylor. This is garbage. Liz Taylor was always a buxom woman with breasts and hips and buttocks and - one may reasonably guess - adult sexual urges. The tiny creature used in the Vogue photomontage is an epicene and translucent infant who looks as if she sips dew for nourishment and has the libido of Tinkerbell.
The other photo feature is on hipsters - "central to the new lean silhouette are hipster trousers. Wear them tight, sexy, well below the waist." In other words, show how thin you are. The neatly fleshless model modelling hipsters predictably has no hips.
The overall impression is that the ideal woman should be shaped like a malnourished, pre adolescent boy. There is no sexuality here, no womanhood, nor even adulthood. The worship of the god Anorexia is expressed in a kind of chaste paederasty.
Not Blameless
Chaste, but not blameless. These models and their more famous peers, like Kate Moss and Jody Kidd, are role models of Anorexia. They are the Woman Made Perfect - porcelain slender, light as thistledown, a living refutation of the notion that Woman is an alimentary canal. Every fat girl, every chubby teenage female who is bullied and tormented in the school playground, can be like these elfin, ethereal delights, free of the appalling consequences of alimentarianism, if only they have the will.
They have the will. By God, they have the will. As despairing doctors have learned over the past decade, there is no will as indomitable as that of the child martyr going, to her doom before the altar of the god Anorexia. And this desire for martyrdom is fed by magazines which exult Thinness as proof of Divine Grace.
Feminists have been vocal enough on the issue of girlie magazines - but the magazines which should really feel the cold wind of an advertising and sales boycott, are the ones which worship at the shrine of Anorexia. It is time for girls to be fat as they want and to rejoice in the alimentary truth which connects us all with the worm, the weevil and the great white whale.