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INTRODUCTION

APPETITE IN THE WORLD OF NO

ONCE UPON A TIME, in a land as different from Renoir’s world as Earth is from Jupiter, I weighed eighty-three pounds. I was twenty-one years old, five-foot-four, and my knees were wider than my thighs. My normal weight is about 120 pounds, and the effort to pare off thirty-seven of those—more than one third of my body—was Herculean, life-altering, and, I believe, exquisitely female.

In Renoir’s world, a woman’s appetites are imagined as rich and lusty and powerful, the core of the female being celebrated as sensual, deeply attuned to pleasure. In my world—a place that unquestionably still exists, that’s inhabited with varying degrees of intensity by all too many women—appetites had a nearly opposite meaning, the body experienced as dangerous and disturbing and wrong, its hungers split off from each other, each one assigned multiple and contradictory meanings, each one loaded and fraught. This disparity eluded me at the time; had I seen a Renoir painting, I would have thought: Feh, fat women, and turned away in fear or contempt, perhaps both. For three years, I ate the same things every day: one plain sesame bagel for breakfast, one container of Dannon coffee-flavored yogurt for lunch, one apple and a one-inch cube of cheese for dinner. I ran: miles and miles, a stick-figure with a grimace. I was cold all the time, even in summer, and I was desperately unhappy, and I had no idea what any of this meant, where the compulsion to starve came from, why it so drove me, what it said about me or about women in general or about the larger matter of human hungers. I just acted, reacted.

Nearly two decades ago, at age twenty-four and hovering near ninety pounds, I started to see a therapist, a specialist in eating disorders, who began to broach the subject of appetite in ways that baffled me for a long time. The word disturbed me—my associations went straight from food to loss of control to fat—but when he used it, he struck a broader chord, hints of Renoir in the undertones, as though describing a more complicated, possibly even gratifying matter of passion and sensuality and psychic hunger instead of a strictly physical issue of food. He’d use the word in strange contexts; when he questioned me about joy, for instance, or worried aloud about whether I was having enough “fun” in my life. I don’t recall many specifics from those early meetings, only that such references seemed to hold a key of sorts, a code that one day might decipher or at least reframe the various struggles and tangles that had brought me to his office in the first place. What gave me delight? What fully engaged me, turned on all the senses? These seemed to be appetite’s pivotal questions in his framework—they had to do with what a person really hungers for, with what makes one feel truly fed—and like the stubborn and recalcitrant patient I was, I found them annoying for many years, as though he were missing the point instead of illuminating it.

This spring, the therapist and I began to finish our work together, not because I’m “done” or “cured” or conflict-free but because I’ve finally (or so we hope) gotten the point. Appetite is the hook on which all my ancillary struggles have hung, the ocean from which all internal rivers (my own, those of so many women) have sprung. Appetite is about eating, certainly, and that’s a piece of it that defines life for many women, a piece I, too, know well, but it’s also about a much broader constellation of hungers and longings and needs. It is about the deeper wish—often experienced with particular intensity and in particularly painful ways by women—to partake of the world, to feel a sense of abundance and possibility about life, to experience pleasure. At heart, it’s about our distance from the women in that Renoir painting, and about our abiding, often poorly articulated hunger for what they appear to have: joy, peace with body and soul, bounty.

I have probably grappled with the matter of appetite my whole life—a lot of women do; we’re taught to do battle with our own desires from a tender age, and reinforcements are called in over time on virtually every front—but if I had to pinpoint a defining moment in my own history, I’d go back twenty-three years, to an otherwise unmemorable November evening when I made an otherwise unmemorable purchase: a container of cottage cheese.

Innocuous as it sounds, this would actually turn out to be a life-altering event, but the kind that’s so seemingly ordinary you can’t consider it as such for many years. Certainly, I didn’t see anything remarkable happening at the time. I was nineteen years old, a junior at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, vaguely anxious, vaguely depressed. I was also, less vaguely, hungry. This was 1979, Thanksgiving weekend. I’d gone home to see my family, then returned to campus the next day to write a paper. My roommates and most of my friends were still away, I didn’t especially feel like slogging over to the campus cafeteria to eat by myself, and so I put on my coat and walked up the block to a corner grocery store, and that’s what I bought: a small plastic tub of Hood’s cottage cheese and a solitary package of rice cakes.

Cottage cheese, of course, is the food God developed specifically to torture women, to make them keen with yearning. Picture it on a plate, lumpy and bland atop a limp lettuce leaf and half a canned peach. Consider the taste and feel of it: wet, bitter little curds. Now compare it to the real thing: a thick, oozing slab of brie, or a dense and silky smear of cream cheese. Cottage cheese is one of our culture’s most visible symbols of self-denial; marketed honestly, it would appear in dairy cases with warning labels: THIS SUBSTANCE IS SELF-PUNITIVE; INGEST WITH CAUTION.

I didn’t know this back then, which is important to note. Naturally thin, I’d never given my weight much thought before, and although I knew plenty of women who obsessed about their thighs and fretted over calories, I’d always regarded them as a rather alien species, their battles against fat usually unnecessary and invariably tedious, barely a blip on my own radar. I, in turn, had very little personal experience with cottage cheese. I’d never bought cottage cheese before, I’m not sure I’d even eaten cottage cheese before, but on some semiconscious level, I knew the essential truth about cottage cheese—it was a diet food—and on some even less conscious level, I was drawn to it, compelled to buy it and to put it in the mini-refrigerator in my dorm room and then to eat it and nothing else—just cottage cheese and rice cakes—for three consecutive days.

And a seed, long present perhaps but dormant until then, began to blossom. A path was laid, one that ultimately had less to do with food than it did with emotion, less to do with hunger than it did with the mindset required to satisfy hunger: the sense of entitlement and agency and initiative that leads one to say, first, I want, and then, more critically, I deserve. So as inconsequential as that purchase may have seemed, it in fact represented a turning point, the passage of a woman at a crossroads, one road marked Empty, the other Full. Not believing at the core that fullness—satiety, gratification, pleasure—was within my grasp, I chose the other road.

I stayed on that road for a long time; three days of cottage cheese and rice cakes became three years of anorexia, then three more, and the attendant battles around nourishment and pleasure would linger long after my weight finally stabilized, making their presence felt, albeit less extremely, in arenas well beyond the realm of food: in relationships, in questions about exercise, in matters of material indulgence, in just about any area, really, where longing can bump up against constraint. How much is too much? How much is enough? How hungry am I and, more to the point, for what? For what? These questions have dogged me like gnats, flitting into view whenever hunger announces itself, whenever it begins to rap on the door and demand a response, which it invariably, insistently does.

The why here—why I chose to starve, why appetite itself became so colossally complicated—is a big question, much of the answer idiosyncratic and personal. There is always a family at the center of an eating disorder, and I had a characteristically complex one at the center of mine, dominated by a set of brilliant, inhibited, often unhappy parents whose marriage was riddled with ambivalence (on my father’s part) and frustration (my mother’s). They were loving and generous people, but also reserved to the point of opacity, and their expressions of affection were so coded and veiled I wouldn’t learn to decipher them until I was well into my thirties. Before then, I often felt mystified and apart and anxiously insecure, a kid who’d get dropped off at summer camp and never feel quite certain that I’d actually be retrieved at the end of the six weeks. My siblings, an older brother and a twin sister, seemed to have had a more innately secure sense of familial belonging, the result of a style that meshed with the family style, perhaps, or a kind of internal wiring that left them more apt to feel understood than unmoored. I lacked that. I suspect I felt personally responsible for my parents’ quiet unhappiness and reticence, the bad kid who’d somehow poisoned the air we all breathed, and I felt compelled from an early age to compensate, as though my right to stay needed to be earned: I was quiet, shy, clean, perfectionistic. I got A’s. I scrubbed the kitchen without being asked. My earliest memories, no doubt born out of the most intricate combination of family dynamics and brain chemistry, have to do with a sense of thwarted connections and emptiness, of a yearning for something unnamed and perhaps unnamable.

That sensation actually may date back to the very first days and weeks of life. I weighed four pounds, eleven ounces at birth, more than a pound less than my sister (she weighed in at six), and was dispatched immediately to an incubator, where I spent my first two weeks, basic needs attended to but probably not a great deal more. During the next several weeks, at home, part of my care fell to a nurse my parents had hired to help out, and as family legend has it, she determined early on that my sister was the healthy, vital one while I was sick and weakly. Apparently driven by some kind of twisted Darwinian logic, the nurse acted on this conviction by diluting my formula and increasing the strength of my sister’s. My mother, who subsequently would refer to her simply as “sadistic,” discovered this after a few weeks and fired her on the spot, and while I’m not sure how much weight to give to these early experiences, the stories feel resonant to me, threads of hunger and uncertainty about the concept of satiety woven into my life’s fabric from the very beginning.

It would be tempting, and quite convenient, to end the story there—early experience sets the stage; the kid who never quite felt fed at home ends up having difficulty with the concept of feeding later in life—but if all it took to become anorexic were complicated parents and an inadequate ancillary caretaker, the vast majority of humans would be on that road. Starving, like all disorders of appetite, is a solution to a wide variety of conflicts and fears, or at least it starts out resembling a solution: Something feels perversely good, or right, or gratifying about it, some key seems to slide into place, some distress is assuaged, and the benefits of this are strong enough to outweigh whatever negative or painful feelings are aroused, such as shame, confusion, or physical hunger. This is very seductive stuff, the beckoning of demons, and I think it’s bigger than family, the allure at once more all-encompassing and more specific to time and place.

That cottage cheese foray took place in a context of enormous promise and enormous anxiety, for me and for women in general. A year shy of graduation from an Ivy League college, I was facing a landscape of unparalleled opportunity, doors nailed shut to women just a decade or two earlier having been flung wide open. That year, I was thinking about moving to Arizona to live with a boyfriend. I was thinking about applying to medical schools, or Ph.D. programs in literature, or the Peace Corps, who knew? I was contemplating questions my own mother hadn’t dreamed of at my age—whom to sleep with, where to live and with whom, what kind of future to carve out for myself, what kind of person to be—and as blessed and wonderful as all that freedom may have been, I suspect I found it terrifying, oppressive, even (though I couldn’t have articulated this at the time) slightly illicit, as though the very truth of it somehow contradicted a murky but deeply-held set of feelings about what it meant to be female.

Into this, cottage cheese and rice cakes, which felt strangely alluring from the very start. I didn’t begin to starve in earnest for quite a while after that purchase, several years, but I did spend a long time dabbling, an amateur scientist conducting experiments on the side, and even these initial flirtations with restraint had a seductive effect; something about the deprivation felt good, purifying almost. I lost some weight that fall and winter, my junior year, but I was only vaguely aware I was doing this deliberately. Mostly, I recall a detached feeling of curiosity, a pull to know more. What if I skipped dinner? What if I didn’t eat anything during the day, drank only coffee? I wonder how that would feel.

It felt . . . interesting, little tests of will that gave me glimmers of things I seemed to covet: a quiet sense of strength, a way to stand out, the outlines of a goal. At night, I’d often go with friends to a bar near campus where the waitresses served oversized baskets of buttered popcorn along with pitchers of beer. I’d determine not to eat the popcorn, not even a single kernel, and I found this oddly pleasing, this secret show of resolve. Others would reach into the basket, grab handfuls, ask the waitress for more. I’d sit back from the table and smoke a cigarette, a little surprised and a little proud to find I could exercise such restraint.

I ate less and I grew thinner. People noticed, as they invariably do. “Oooh, you’re so skinny!” they’d say. Or, “Oooh, you’ve lost weight!” I’d raise my eyebrows and shrug, as though I hadn’t really noticed. “I have? Huh.” But inside, that little kernel of pride sprouted, watered by the attention and by what I understood to be envy; without even trying very hard, I could do what others tried and failed to do. So many women lived and died by the scale, self-worth dictated by it. To me, it was just a game.

Anorexics are masters of exaggeration; they take a certain satisfaction in going the average woman one better, internalizing her worst fears and then inflating them, flaunting them, throwing them back in her face. Food had never been one of my big preoccupations, but I’d certainly witnessed its centrality in other women’s lives, and in some rudimentary way I understood that this excruciating focus on size and shape—the fleshy curve of a hip, the precise fit of a pair of jeans—communicated something more complicated about the larger matter of female appetite and its relationship to identity and value, a notion that a woman’s hunger was somehow inappropriate, possibly even grotesque. I saw how quietly tyrannized women could be by food and weight, how edgy they’d get when confronted by choices. I heard the high, anxious voices, the weighing of longing against deprivation, the endless, repetitive mantra: “Oh, I shouldn’t, I really shouldn’t.” Decoded, the imperatives here were clear; we all live with them. Size matters. Control of size (of portions, of body, of desire itself) matters. Suppressing appetite is a valued ambition, even if it eclipses other ambitions, even if it makes you crazy. I paid attention. I lost five pounds, then another five. Message absorbed, amplified, and then (“How do you stay so thin?”) duly rewarded. Other women might struggle with hunger; I could transcend it.

Starving, in its inimitably perverse way, gave me a way to address the anxiety I felt as a young, scared, ill-defined woman who was poised to enter the world and assume a new array of rights and privileges; it gave me a tiny, specific, manageable focus (popcorn kernels) instead of a monumental, vague, overwhelming one (work, love). Starving also gave me a way to address some nascent discomfort about my place in this newly altered landscape, a kind of psychic bargaining over the larger matter of hunger; permitted, at least in theory, to be big (ambitious, powerful, competitive), I would compensate by making myself small, fragile, and non-threatening as a wren. Starving also capitulated, again in exaggerated form, to a plethora of feelings (some handed down from my family, almost all of them supported by culture) about women in general and women’s bodies in particular, to the idea that there’s something inherently shameful and flawed about the female form, something that requires constant monitoring and control. And, of course, starving answered whatever long-standing feelings of yearning and emptiness and sorrow I’d carted off to college in the first place; it deflected all that longing into one place, concentrated it like a diamond. Food, over time, became a terrible, powerful symbol—of how much I wanted on the one hand and how certain I was that I’d never get enough on the other—and my denial of food thus became the most masterful solution. I’m so hungry, I’ll never get fed. If that is one’s baseline understanding of the world (and I suspect it was mine at the time), starving makes sense, controlling food becomes a way of expressing that conflict and also denying it. Your needs are overwhelming? You can’t depend on yourself or others to meet them? You don’t even know what they are? Then need nothing. At a time when I felt adrift and confused and deeply unsure of myself, starving gave me a goal, a way to stand out and exert control, something I could be good at.

I was very, very good at it. I grew smaller and smaller and smaller over time. I stopped menstruating. I began wearing jeans inherited from a friend’s twelve-year-old brother, who’d outgrown them. I literally ached with hunger: My stomach throbbed with it; my ribs dug into my sides when I tried to sleep at night. I took painstaking note of these changes—how visible and pronounced my bones became, even the tiny finger bones; how my abdomen curved inward, a taut, tight “C”—and I found each one of them both profoundly compelling and inexplicably satisfying. I could not express what I’d been feeling with words, but I could wear it. The inner life—hunger, confusion, longings unnamed and unmet, that whole overwhelming gamut—as a sculpture in bone.

Today, I eat. That in itself is a statement of triumph, but the road toward a more peaceful relationship with food—which, of course, means a more peaceful relationship with my body, myself, my own demons—has been long, circuitous, and (would that this weren’t so) full of company. It’s hard to think of a woman who hasn’t grappled to one degree or another with precisely the same fears, feelings, and pressures that drove me to starve, even harder to think of a woman who experiences the full range of human hungers with Renoir’s brand of unfettered delight. Satisfying hungers, taking things in, indulging in bodily pleasures—these are not easy matters for a lot of women, and I suspect my own troubled relationship with food merely reflects the extreme end of a long continuum, and one venue among many others.

Food, sex, shopping: Name your poison. Appetites, particularly as they’re experienced by women, have an uncanny shape-shifting quality, and a remarkable talent for glomming onto externals. One battle segues into the next, one promise proves false and another emerges on the horizon, glimmers, and beckons like a star: Follow me, this diet will do it, or this man, or this set of purchases for body and home; the holy grail as interpreted by Jenny Craig or Danielle Steele or Martha Stewart. In my case, starving gave way to drinking, denial of appetite—which made me feel highly controlled and rather superior and very safe—gradually mutating into a more all-encompassing denial of self, alcohol displacing food as the substance of choice. For others, the substances may be somewhat less tangible, but they’re often no less gripping, and no less linked to the broader theme of appetite: Obsessive relationships with men; compulsive shopping and debt; life-defining preoccupation with appearances; “isms” of all kinds—all of these are about emptiness, about misdirected attempts to fill internal voids, and all of them tend to spring from the same dark pool of feeling: a suspicion among many women that hungers themselves are somehow invalid or wrong, that indulgences must be earned and paid for, that the satisfaction of appetites often comes with a bill. Eat too much, want too much, act too sexual or too ambitious or too hungry, and the invoice will arrive, often delivered with an angry hiss of self-recrimination: You’re a pig, a sloth, you suck. Desire versus deprivation, indulgence versus constraint, nurturance versus self-abnegation; these are the constants on this stage, the lead players in a particularly female drama.

This, of course, is a profoundly human stage—the clash between the desire to satisfy appetites and the fear that they may overwhelm us, control us, lead us astray is as old as the story of Adam and Eve—but the female journey across it can be experienced and expressed in particularly painful and confounding ways, women being the gender born and raised on the notion that the female appetite is limited and curtailed to begin with, that female hungers should be reined in, permitted satisfaction in only the most circumscribed, socially sanctioned ways. “Eat to survive.” A thirty-six-year-old television producer who’s wrestled with weight for most of her adult life was raised on that mandate, spoon-fed the admonishment by her mother, who believed that anything beyond subsistence-level consumption was greedy, dangerous, unfeminine, wrong. “Don’t be such a smarty pants; it’s not becoming.” A fifty-two-year-old scientist still has bad dreams about that one, which came from both parents and carried a similar warning: Good girls (interchangeable with desirable, deserving girls) have limited appetites for knowledge, limited brain power, limited aspirations. “So you really do wear high heels.” A forty-two-year-old architect, just out of graduate school at the time and quite pleased with her new professional identity, recalls being met by those words nearly twenty years ago, when she picked her mother up at the airport for a visit; the statement was contemptuous, laced with disappointment, and still stings two decades later: “The implication wasn’t that I was trying to be sexy by wearing high-heels and failing. It was that I was sexy, and therefore I was disgusting.” These are tales from the World of No. The messages may be delivered far less directly, or they may be mixed and contradictory, but if you’re a woman who came of age in the latter half of the twentieth century, you’ve no doubt heard them in one form or another: Don’t eat too much, don’t get too big, don’t reach too far, don’t climb too high, don’t want too much. No, no, no.

That these mandates exist is hardly news, but their cumulative effect on women’s lives tends to be examined through a fragmented lens, one-pathology-at-a-time, the eating disorder lit on the self-help shelves separated from the books on women’s troubled relationships with men, the books on compulsive shopping separated from the books on female sexuality, the books on culture and media separated from the books on female psychology. Take your pick, choose your demon: Women Who Love Too Much in one camp, Women Who Eat Too Much in another, Women Who Shop Too Much in a third. In fact, the camps are not so disparate, and the question of appetite—specifically the question of what happens to the female appetite when it’s submerged and rerouted—is the thread that binds them together. One woman’s tub of cottage cheese is another’s maxed-out MasterCard; one woman’s soul-murdering love affair is another’s frenzied eating binge. The methods may differ, but boil any of these behaviors down to their essential ingredients and you are likely find a particularly female blend of anxiety, guilt, shame, and sorrow, the psychic roux of profound—and often profoundly misunderstood—hungers.

With anorexia, I merely elevated to an art form what so many women do with their appetites all of the time, whether or not the behavior blossoms into a full-blown disorder. Weighing, measuring, calculating, monitoring. Withholding and then overcompensating. Reining in hunger in one area, letting go in another. The female appetite moves in guilty, circuitous ways, and although my own relationship with food is probably as normal today as it ever will be, I still carry around a flickering awareness of hunger’s pushes and pulls all the time, a chronic tug between the voice of longing and the voice of constraint that feels like a form of heightened alert, something that can make its presence felt in any arena where taking something in is at issue. A woman I know determines exactly how much she will eat from day to day based on the amount of exercise she gets: If she runs two miles, she gets second helpings at dinner; three miles, she gets dessert; no workout, no extras, no goodies. She understands that this is irrational (“It’s crazy,” she says, “Who’s keeping score?”), and she can’t say when or why she developed the system, which she recognizes as completely arbitrary, but she adheres to the rules every day, and has for so long she can’t fathom living any other way. Another woman, an economist who’s been craving recognition in her field for years, found herself glaring at her reflection in the mirror the day after she was nominated for a major award. She was at the gym, pumping away on the StairMaster, her face tightened into a scowl, and she was thinking: You fucking fraud; who the hell do you think you are? “Where does that come from?” she wonders, unable to answer. “Why is it so hard to just take the good stuff in?” Appetites for sex, for beautiful things, for physical pleasure—all of these can feel baffling, and all of them can leave a woman confused about the most ordinary daily decisions. Are you eating that second helping because you’re hungry or because you’re sad? If you work out for an extra thirty minutes, are you heeding the call to health and well-being or engaging in a bout of self-punishment? If you spend $600 on a fabulous jacket you don’t really need, are you permitting yourself a little well-earned luxury or are you spiraling out of control? Where are the lines between satisfaction and excess, between restraint and indulgence, between pleasure and self-destruction? And why are they so difficult to find, particularly for women?

Despite its common association with food, the word “appetite” has a fairly broad meaning. Webster’s Third New International dictionary defines it as: (1) a natural desire; (2) an inherent or habitual desire or propensity for gratification or satisfaction; (3) an object of desire. I take a similarly wide view, using the word to refer to the things we take in and to the activities we engage in when we feel empty or restless or wanting, to the substances and behaviors that we imagine will make us feel full, satisfied, complete. In this sense, appetites differ from “needs” or “instincts” in that they’re not necessarily matters of life-and-death (an unsatisfied need for food or drink will, in due time, kill you; an unsatisfied appetite for chocolate probably won’t; a flight instinct that malfunctions in the face of a predator can be lethal; in the face of a destructive relationship, it will merely make you miserable). Instead, appetites inhabit the murky middle ground between survival needs, which are concrete and unambiguous, and desires, a more general and all-inclusive term. Appetite is desire in the “drive” gear, more revved up and goal-oriented than generalized wanting, a destination always on its agenda. Appetites give specificity to the inchoate and shape to the formless; they’re the feelings that bubble up from within and attach themselves to the tangible and external, turning elusive sensations (longing, yearning, emptiness) into actions, behaviors, substances, things. This meal, those shoes, that lover. The most obvious appetites, of course, are the physical ones, for food and sex, but I also consider material goods, ambition, and (perhaps above all) recognition by and connection with significant others to be among our most central and life-defining strivings. Along with food and sex, these are the things that propel us forward, that ignite craving, that guide and often dictate our behavior and choices.

Today, at the turn of the most accelerated century in history, a woman’s appetites are (theoretically at least) under her sole control, hers to indulge or satisfy at will, for we live at a time when our most compelling hungers are almost wholly divorced from their essential purposes. Thanks to the sexual revolution, to widely available forms of contraception, and (for the time being) to access to abortion, a woman’s decisions about sex may have little, if anything, to do with reproduction; separated from procreation, sexual appetite becomes both less rule-bound and more personal, less socially and physically threatening and also more confusing. So do her appetites in other life-defining realms. Liberated, at least to an extent, from her economic dependence on men, a woman today exercises an unprecedented degree of control over such matters as what and how much to eat, what to do with her time, how to look, where to live, and what objects to acquire. More important, thanks to the period of abundance that has characterized national life almost without interruption for the last eighty years, those decisions are rarely matters of sheer survival. For the bulk of middle- and upper-middle-class American women today, even in our current economic downturn, questions about diet, material life, livelihood, and relationships have far more to do with individual striving and self-definition than they do with basic subsistence. In short, the things we once needed in order to survive—food, shelter, intimate partnerships—have become the things we want in order to feel sated.

But satiety is itself a tricky subject, in large part because our culture—visual, commercially rapacious, oriented toward quick fixes and immediate gratification—both fuels and defines the wish for it at almost every turn, on almost every front. To the internal voice that whispers, I want, I want, consumer culture offers the reassuring, seductive words, You can, you can; it’s right here, within your grasp. And it does so relentlessly, so much so we may barely be aware of its persistence and power. In 1915, the average American could go weeks without observing an ad; today, some twelve billion display ads, three million radio commercials, and 200,000 TV commercials flood the nation on a daily basis—most of us see and hear about 3,000 of them a day, all of them lapping at appetite, promising satisfaction, pulling and tugging and yipping at desire like a terrier at a woman’s hemline. This is true for both genders, of course, but women in modern consumer culture are in the odd position of being both subjects of desire—people who are encouraged to desire things for themselves—and desire’s primary object, mass imagery’s main selling tool, sultry and thin and physically flawless. Thus, women are told not just to want but what to want. And the unstated promise here—that to want properly will make you be wanted—can create a powerful feeling of discord: Although in theory we may have the freedom and resources to satisfy our own appetites any way we choose, we have comparatively little freedom in determining, for ourselves, what those appetites should be, what true satisfaction might look or feel like. In one of the largest surveys of its kind to date, nearly 30,000 women told researchers at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine that they’d rather lose weight than attain any other goal, a figure that alone suggests just how complicated the issue of appetite can be for women. This is the primary female striving? The appetite to lose appetite?

In fact, I suspect the opposite is true: that the primary, underlying striving among many women at the start of the millennium is the appetite for appetite: a longing to feel safe and secure enough to name one’s true appetites and worthy and powerful enough to get them satisfied. That a lot of women lack both sensations in sufficient measure is evident not just in the numbers on dieting and preoccupation with weight (which are stunning) but also in the kinds of gnawing sensations that can keep a woman up at night, worrying over questions of balance and perspective and priorities: There’s the awareness, sporadic perhaps but familiar to many, that we spend entirely too much time trying to suppress appetite instead of indulging it; there’s the sense that a lot of us waste precious energy worshipping false gods, trying to get fed in ways that never quite seem to satisfy (if losing ten pounds won’t do it, maybe that job will, or that house or that lover); there’s an ill-defined but persistent feeling that on the whole this is a painful way to live, that it leaves us more anxious than we ought to be, or more depressed, or somehow cheated, as though somewhere along the way our very entitlement to hunger—to want things that feed us and fill us and give us joy—has been stolen.

It could be argued, of course, that women (and men) should lie awake nights worrying about appetite: More than half of all Americans between the ages of twenty and seventy-four are overweight, and one fifth are obese, meaning they have body-mass indexes of more than thirty; obesity, which has been called a “national epidemic,” is linked to diabetes, high blood pressure, and neurological disorders; the cost of obesity-related illness is expected to reach into the hundreds of billions within the next twenty years.

But obesity’s relationship to appetite (specifically, to the inability to curb it) is hardly clear. Morbid obesity in many cases may be genetic in origin, and the expanding American girth has at least as much to do with contemporary lifestyles as it does with restraint (or lack of it). Innovations in food processing and agriculture have made food cheaper, more abundant, and much higher in calories than it was fifty years ago, while technological changes (labor-saving devices that have left us more sedentary) have decreased the collective caloric expenditure: We live, in other words, in a fat-fueled and fat-fueling age. Obesity also appears to be a class issue: Cheap (and fat- and carbohydrate-rich) fast food is much more plentiful and accessible in poor urban areas than free-range chicken and fresh vegetables; health care, fitness facilities, and preventive education are far less accessible; not surprisingly, the poorer you are, the higher your risk for obesity and obesity-related disease.

But appetite is not just about eating and weight gain, and in a sense the national hand-wringing over obesity distracts from a more nuanced emotional consideration of indulgence and restraint, particularly as they’re experienced in women’s lives. Our culture’s specific preoccupation with weight—particularly women’s weight—has a lot to do with our more general preoccupation with women’s bodies, not all of which is benign or caring, and a woman’s individual preoccupation with weight often serves as a mask for other, more intricate sources of discomfort, the state of one’s waistline being easier to contemplate than the state of one’s soul. More to the point, when appetite is framed narrowly—as a matter of proportion and calories and fat—the larger constellation of feeling aroused by a woman’s hunger is eclipsed. How a women reacts to cultural mandates about beauty and sexuality, how much self-acceptance she does or does not possess, how much pleasure she feels permitted to have, how much anxiety or guilt or shame her hungers arouse—these are the kinds of issues a woman may bring to the scale (or to the bedroom or the shopping mall or the workplace), and as the female preoccupation with dieting and body image alone suggests, they can generate an exquisite amount of pain and confusion.

Granted, these are not (or not always) life-and-death issues; to an extent, the brands of unease I’m interested in can be seen as colossal luxury problems, the edgy blatherings of women who have the time, energy, and resources to actually worry about their thighs or their wardrobes or their relative levels of personal fulfillment. And to an extent, that view is entirely correct. The women I describe and address in these pages are primarily white, affluent, and highly educated; they belong to one of the most privileged populations in modern history. While I won’t speculate here about how race affects a woman’s feelings about appetite (an African American or a Latina woman’s experience of the body, her conceptions of beauty, power, and entitlement may be subject to forces beyond my scope), I do recognize the defining power of class and social context. My own battle with hunger is wholly different from that of a single mother living below the poverty line in my own city, or an Afghani woman living under the Taliban, or a Kurdish woman trudging across a mountain, child on her back, in flight from her war-torn home. Worrying about losing a few pounds is not at all the same as worrying about survival.

But the struggle with appetite, even in its “luxury” form, is important, at least in part because it gets at complicated questions about female entitlement and freedom, the psychic qualities that one might have expected to spring up alongside the legal entitlements and freedoms that this population of women now enjoys. Divorced from issues of basic sustenance and freed from legal restraint, appetite becomes a largely internal phenomenon, its capacity for satisfaction wrapped up in an emotional framework rather than a physical or political one, and so a woman’s relationship with hunger and satisfaction acts like a mirror, reflecting her sense of self and place in the wider world. How hungry, in all senses of the word, does a woman allow herself to be? How filled? How free does she really feel, or how held back? Feeding, experiencing pleasure, taking in, deserving—for many women, these may not be matters of life and death, but they are certainly markers of joy and anguish, and they may have much to reveal about where the last four decades of social change have left us, and where they’re leading us still.

By all accounts, I should feel as free and entitled on the appetite front as anyone. I came of age in the 1970s, in the progressive city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and like many women of my generation and the generation behind me, I had the luxury of believing, in a not-very-politicized and no doubt naive way, that the battle on behalf of women had been fought and won, the munitions stashed away in the great cupboard marked Feminist Change. Women my age were the heiresses of the women’s movement, of the sexual revolution, of relaxed gender roles, of access to everything from abortion to education, and to a large extent, that legacy blasted open female desire: We had more opportunities and freedoms at our disposal than any other group of women at any other time in modern history; we could do anything, be anything, define our lives any way we saw fit. And yet by the age of twenty-one, I’d found myself whittled down to skeletal form, my whole being oriented toward the denial of appetite. And at forty-two, my current age, I can still find myself lingering at the periphery of desire, peering through those doors from what often feels like a great distance, not always certain whether it’s okay to march on in.

That story, with its implicit conflict between the internal and external worlds, is in essence the story of appetite. It’s about the anxiety that crops up alongside new, untested freedoms, and the guilt that’s aroused when a woman tests old and deeply entrenched rules about gender and femininity. It’s about the collision between self and culture, female desire unleashed in a world that’s still deeply ambivalent about female power and that manages to whet appetite and shame it in equal measure. It’s about the difficulty a woman may have feeling connected to her own body and her own desires in an increasingly visual and commercial world, a place where the female form is so mercilessly externalized and where conceptions of female desire are so narrowly framed. And it’s about the durability of traditional psychic and social structures, about how the seeds of self-denial are still planted and encouraged in girls, about how forty years of legal and social change have not yet nurtured a truly alternative hybrid, one that would flower into feelings of agency and initiative, into the conviction that one’s appetites are good and valid and deserve to be satisfied in healthy and reasonable ways.

Evidence of the female struggle with appetite is everywhere. Five million women in the United States suffer from eating disorders; eighty percent of women report that the experience of being female means “feeling too fat.” More than forty percent of women between the ages of eighteen and fifty-nine report some kind of sexual dysfunction, from lack of interest or pleasure in sex to an inability to achieve orgasm. Estimates on compulsive shopping range from two to eight percent of the general female population, fifteen to sixteen percent of a college-age sample. Something is wrong here, and it’s not anything as simple as Low Self-Esteem, that great pathologizing scrap heap onto which so many female behaviors (our obsessions with weight and appearance, our apparent proclivity for self-destruction) tend to get tossed. That’s always felt like very thin gruel to me as a rationale, about fifteen ingredients missing from the soup. A woman who is actively hurting her body or beating it into submission, a woman who is clinging to a relationship that hurts her or who’s shopping her way into stupor and debt is suffering from a good deal more than a poor self-image: The phrase captures none of the sorrow and emptiness that leaches up alongside a thwarted appetite, and little of the agony that accompanies a displaced need, the anguish of truly not knowing why desires get channeled in so many wrong directions, of not knowing how to live—and feel—a different way.

Today, nearly two decades into my own battle to live differently, I can’t quite say I resemble a woman out of Renoir; whether individual or collective, change is glacial in nature, progress charted not in victories but in inches and slight degrees, and I imagine that for me, as for many women, the challenges surrounding appetite will be both lifelong and life-defining. But I can say, in a grudging nod to victory, that I’ve redefined both the holy grail and the effort to reach it, a process that’s internal and deeply personal and bound up with the extraordinarily slippery concept of well-being.

Once upon a time, a “good day” for me meant eating fewer than 800 calories in a twenty-four-hour period: case closed, well-being measured by its absolute inaccessibility. Today, a good day might mean several different things. It might mean that I start the day sculling along the river near my home, an activity that makes me feel competent and strong and alive. It might mean that I put in a solid day’s work, that I spend some time laughing on the phone with a friend, that I eat a good meal, that I curl up at night with the two beings I love most in the world, one human and one canine. A good day usually means successfully resisting my worst impulses, which involve isolation and perfectionism and self-punishment; it means striking some balance, instead, between fun and productivity and connection. Finding my way toward good days, and toward a more sustaining definition of well-being, has meant creeping, gradually and often painfully, in Renoir’s direction, a sixteen-year crawl toward a kind of freedom to be filled.

What liberates a person enough to indulge appetite, to take pleasure in the world, to enjoy being alive? Within that question lies the true holy grail, the heart of a woman’s hunger.