Psychotherapist and psychoanalyst Susie Orbach’s recent book Bodies examines the current ‘beauty terror’ and how it manifests itself in various forms of eating disorders and body dysmorphia.  Orbach published a hugely popular and influential book in the late 1970s called Fat is a Feminist Issue, prompted by her own struggles with bulimia. Decades later,  she was therapist to Lady Diana – thus instrumental in bringing bulimia into the public consciousness and the paparazzi  to her doorstep. She was columnist for the Guardian for years, and more recently was the consultant  behind the Dove Real Beauty Campaign. According to an incongruously brash press quote on the back of Bodies  ‘is, aside from Sigmund Freud, probably the most famous psychotherapist to set up couch in Britain’ .

What has this got to do with a lesbian blog you may well ask… and you’re right, ‘lesbian’ doesn’t even appear in the index! But I’d hazard a guess that as lesbians (and especially through puberty and the teenage years) many of us have fairly complex journeys with our bodies and the  tyrannies of an increasingly narrow beauty aesthetic for women – one that often bears little or no relation to women we find desirable or indeed any connection with our own bodies, desires and appetites.  Some studies (like this recent Australian one) have shown that, in general, lesbians have a healthier body image than heterosexual or bisexual women.  But even the language of such surveys shows we are not immune –  note it’s that we are, sadly,  ‘less dissatisfied’ rather than more delighted with our bodies… !

This series of essays by Orbach is very readable, analytical but not particularly academic.  It is very much in this cultural moment – so plenty of statistics about the (rapacious!) diet industry, plastic surgery trends and references to our reinvented  bodies in ‘second life’ .  She is fairly scathing about the so-called ‘obesity epidemic’, she sees BMI measurements as utterly fabricated, and offers the alarming fact that in the US there is almost as much spent on diet products as education!

“Diet companies rely on a 95 per cent recidivism rate, a figure that should be etched into every dieter’s consciousness.”

Indeed she threatened to sue Weight Watchers for false advertising..!  She  also presents an interesting statistic that low maternal weight (the newly-coined ‘pregnorexia’, fuelled by celebrity culture) is a trigger for infants to become overweight as adults, priming the infant to ‘act like a famine victim’. She notes that body hatred is one of the West’s hidden exports- citing a shocking statistic that 50% of Korean girls seek a ‘westernising ‘eye procedure.

“Celebrity culture has brought us an invidious version of sharing. By creating internationally recognisable iconic figures, it appears to be inclusive and democratic. In reality the visual nature of our world sucks out variety and replaces it with a vision that is narrow and limited as far as age, body type and ethnicity are concerned. The sexualisation of our children’s world is caught up in a consumerism and a false erotic, leaving them confused about the sexual as they are about where their bodies and their body-based needs begin and end.”

Orbach notes that the idealised female body has almost yearly modifications- increasingly taller, bigger-breasted- every modification rendering it more precarious, and of course less attainable. And this whole notion of ‘attaining’ the perfect body, whether buying it through bogus wonder-drugs, a surgeon’s hands or the middle-class obsession with body-sculpting in gyms,  comes under scrutiny.  On a personal note, my half-sister who is six foot tall was offered drugs (which she refused) during her pregnancy to ensure that her daughters would be of a more ‘normal’ height… how times have changed,  a six foot woman is now considered a super model!

Drawing very directly from her work as a therapist, Orbach explores the ‘hated body’ through various case studies- and, in deeply psychotherapeutic fashion, puts a lot of store in experiences of food, touch and safety in infancy.   There’s nothing shockingly new in this book, but it’s timely, stimulating and necessary to remind ourselves of these issues.  Her aim makes utter sense to any of us who want to enjoy diversity in our bodies and those we love:

“Our struggle is to recorporealise our bodies so they become a place we live from rather than an aspiration always needing to be achieved.”