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In defense of girls eating

Recently I have taken it upon myself to ask my friends what they like to eat. The variety of the answers shocks me: for breakfast, as an example, my friends eat eggs, bagels, bacon, kale, spinach, cereal, toast, avocado, yogurt, granola, berries, pancakes, waffles, apple, banana, crackers, cream cheese, salmon, tortilla and cheese; they adorn these foods with ketchup, jam, peanut butter, honey, mustard, sriracha or salt; and then they wash it all down with tea, coffee, orange or grape cranberry or pomegranate juice, milk, citrus juice, smoothie or water. And this list comes from a single meal of the day, and traditionally the one with the least amount of variety. Things get even crazier for lunch.

It is a pleasure unknown to everyone but our grandmothers to hear how our loved ones successfully nourish themselves –– in listening to these stories, I share some of this joy. Despite my bliss, though, one trend quickly defines itself: namely, that girls ate less and skipped more meals than guys.

This is something I have learned again and again (and have forgotten each time). This summer my boss refused a piece of cake I had made because she had just had “a big salad.” In “BossyPants,” Tina Fey recounts how her love interest, a University student, told her how much he liked another girl. Why? Because this other girl only chews a half a stick of gum at a time. And French women, I learned while abroad, forswear the best cuisine on earth to maintain a certain cigarette silhouette. I suspect this insecurity is universal among girls –– as is the fear that, should their bodies change a certain way, they will no longer be worthy of attention.

This is supposed to be a humor article, so let me now insert a joke.

Question: Why do so many young girls struggle with eating disorder?

Response: Because they have grown up in a culture where their very right to eat is challenged by absurd and arbitrary body standards, which are tailored specifically to disenfranchise women of color and women of the working class, and which are propagated by a capitalist machine that makes an excess of $20 billion a year on weight loss products.

Okay, nevermind about the joke.

Briefly this summer our culture went through a phase in which we celebrated the “dad bod” –– the formless, pasty body type that sends some girls crazy, but which reminds me of a swollen worm. It would be too obvious to say male bodies are held to looser standards than female. Going beyond this, though, we see that, despite the best efforts of the body-positive movement, the gendered gap in eating is no smaller than it was decades ago.

My solution? Create a system of standards by which men’s bodies are as intensely imposed upon as women’s. Target them right where it hurts: their baldness, their weird dongs and their shortness. Let’s make men shave all their body hair and forbid them to sweat in public. Let’s refuse to laugh at a male comedian unless he is wearing whatever the counterpart to a dress is –– a suit? Shorts? A button-down? A nice hat? Let’s take every novel with the phrase “she used to be beautiful” and replace it with, “he used to be less fat, and he used to fart a lot less, too.” Let’s mock male athletes for the theatrics female athletes would never dare attempt. Let’s casually remind men how many calories are in drinks and never look them in the eyes when they talk.

I’ve got it! I finally remembered a joke I can use.

Question: Why should we be critical of men’s bodies?

Response: Because men are disgusting.

Maybe that’s a bit harsh. But let’s do some math: if smooth armpits were first labeled as a desirable trait for women in 1915, that’s at least 101 years of bodily insecurity on women’s part… By my calculation, if we start mocking men today, we will be able to close up the gap by 2117!

I have run myself out of this rant, not because I am no longer angry, but because I am too tired to write any more. Though this issue is more complicated than I can address here, I want to end this by insisting that we do everything we can to ensure women can build healthy relationships with food. Food is everything. Food is heritage and kindness and motherhood and love. Food is life. And to estrange someone else from food, then, is a kind of slow murder.

So just eat the damn cake, Anna!

Drew Kiser is a Humor writer.

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