More than 10 million women in this country are suffering from some form of eating disorder. Although we tend to think of anorexia and bulimia nervosa as adolescent and young adult problems, more women are suffering from these conditions in mid-life or later. From today’s New York Times:
Cynthia M. Bulik, director of the Eating Disorders Program at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, says that though it was initially aimed at adolescents, since 2003 half of its patients have been adults.
“We’re hearing from women, no matter how old they are, that they still have to achieve this societal ideal of thinness and perfection,” she said. “Even in their 50s and 60s — and, believe it or not, beyond — women are engaging in extreme weight- and shape-control behaviors.”
For middle-aged and older folks, eating disorders often begin with a desire to “get healthy” which becomes an excessive habit of self-starvation and exercise:
A 58-year-old yoga instructor in St. Louis, Ms. Shaw says she was nearing 40 when she decided to “get healthy” after having children. Soon, diet and exercise became an obsession.
“I was looking for something to validate myself,” she told me. “Somehow, the weight loss, and getting harder and firmer and trimmer and fitter, and then getting recognized for that, was fulfilling a need.”
. . .
And though one doctor suggested that Ms. Shaw looked as if she needed to “eat a cheeseburger,” most praised her efforts to keep her weight down and her commitment to exercise.
“One of the things we’re working very hard to do is to make sure this stays on physicians’ radar screens so they can recognize and distinguish between menopause-related changes, real health problems and eating disorders,” Dr. Bulik said. “Often they don’t ask the question because they have in their mind this stereotypical picture of eating disorders as a problem of white, middle-class teenagers.”
For Ms. Shaw, diet and exercise overtook her life. She spent more and more hours at the gym — even on family vacations, when she would skip ski outings with her husband and sons in favor of workout time.
“None of my friends, my ex-husband, no one ever said anything,” she said. “It was no one’s job to fix me, but I wish someone had said to me: ‘I miss you. You’re gone. You’re so obsessed.’ ”
While eating disorders are complex bio-psycho-social phenomena, the article from today’s Times reminds us that there is a moral dimension to eating disorders as well. Although there is a major problem in this country today with obesity (in fact, yesterday’s Times had an article on fighting obesity in schools), our societal acceptance and perpetuation of a very thin ideal for women is having detrimental effects.
My own research in this area focuses especially on the role of thin-ideal images as playing a major role in the onset and maintenance of eating disorders. Research shows that girls and women are significantly more dissatisfied with their bodies after viewing thin-ideal images, especially in fashion magazines, and are significantly more likely to develop symptoms of an eating disorder. While some eating disorders seem to have an underlying biomedical cause, many develop overtime as a result of certain habits that become obsessive like dieting, working out, and criticizing one’s body.
In his book Moral Wisdom, James Keenan, SJ emphasizes how little everyday actions that we might not think of as morally significant (like exercising or reading fashion magazines) play a major role in determining our moral character. Drawing on the moral theology of Thomas Aquinas, Keenan writes,
Thomas believed that we become what we do. What does this mean? Thomas appreciated that anything that we intentionally do (and he always meant intentionality in the broad sense) makes us become what we are doing. If we were rude in getting to work this morning, we are becoming more rude people. If we were able to laugh at some problems that affected us today, we are developing a sense of humor. If we stopped to help a person in need, we are growing in compassion; if we did not, we are becoming more callous (143).
This pertains especially to the consumption of thin-ideal images and the development of eating disorders. The more we look at and strive to conform to images of women we see in magazines, movies, and television, the more dissatisfied we become with our bodies. This does not mean that we should not try to cultivate healthy eating and exercise habits, nor does it mean that we should blame women who do develop eating disorders, but it does mean that we should be aware (and help those around us be aware) of when those seemingly healthy habits become excessive, and may be forming us into the sort of person we do not want to be.
Beth, I think you’re on to something here, and I think Jim Keenan is right on this. Everyday actions do affect our moral character, though I’d probably rather put it as: “everyday actions habituate us to think of ourselves in these terms.”
This relates to the big issue I always face when I teach CMT: how to get students to see beyond the Big 3 (abortion, homosexuality and war) as “ethics”. And even with those 3, they tend to see them as “opinions” that we each have, so an “ethics” class is really about getting to have scintillating discussions. It’s much more difficult for people to see the non-scintillating stuff as matters of moral importance too – and that in fact, moral theology ought more prominently be seen in relation to spiritual journies and conversion rather than in terms of canon law and the catechism, which is where I see so many lay people want to situate the conversation. In other words – more Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castles to go alongside Thomas Aquinas?
Jana,
Thanks for these thoughts. You obviously have more experience teaching CMT than I do, but as I was preparing mock syllabi for job interviews last fall, one of the things I was really impressed and surprised by are the number of moral theology “textbooks” which totally go beyond the moral casuistry and quandary ethics that have made the big three as big as they are. Textbooks like Paul Wadell’s “Happiness and the Christian Moral Life,” Patricia Lamoreaux and Paul Wadell’s new “The Christian Moral Life: Faithful Discipleship for a Global Society,” and our own Bill Mattison’s “Introducing Moral Theology: True Happiness and the Virtues,” all frame moral theology in terms of happiness and the good life, particularly in everyday actions. My own opinion, and I think you see this in our blog’s contributors, is that moral theology is going through a generational sea change that distinguishes the younger generation from the earlier generations in the way we frame moral problems and look for moral solutions. To this extent, I think you are right about Teresa of Avila: moral theologians today are looking to her as a moral authority. They are using fiction to teach ethics. They are using art. And hopefully, this makes morality much bigger than “Hey, what is your opinion on abortion?”
Great central stuff here. I worry sometimes that while I agree wiith Beth on the ddesirability of the sea-change, in PRACTICE, we still tend to work more seriously on these “big” (notice how “big” here means “politically big”) issues.
Virtue is evidently the way forward here, but much work remains to be done connecting virtue to casuistry in more precise ways. I actually think environmental ethics is a key area here – because it does involve so much attentive to everyday choices.
You know, David, I think you are right. I think the big three have more of a public element, which as Jana rightly notes, one can have an “opinion” about, whereas eating disorders or even an environmental ethic which tries to inform everyday choices seems a lot like moralizing or telling people how they should live their lives. Part of what is at stake here is the importance of autonomy, at least in the way it has been understood in ethical debates (I am thinking of bioethics) for the last few decades. Another issue is privacy. I think there is an assumption that ethicists might have a say about matters of abortion policy or judgments on war, but not “what I do in the privacy of my own home.” In my dissertation, I kept having to say something along the lines of “Look, I am not trying to moralize here.” What are your thoughts of relying on an ethic of virtue without making ethics look like telling other people how they should live their lives?
I think that people should have opinions on how others live their lives… because their lives affect me as mine affect theirs. Example: the cry room at church – it is much more difficult to raise my kids to have manners when other parents in the cry room are allowing their kids to run rampant, scream loudly, etc. In the current way that opinion and right are meant, their retort is: you raise your kids your way and I’ll raise them my way. But that really sidesteps any conversation at all about how we all want to live together. I mean, I hope others have an opinion on how I live my life – especially insofar as I am following Christ or not. This is not the same thing as saying I hope they do what I say – but it is a plea for at least some conversation.
Hi Beth– Nice response. It crystallizes two things for me:
1. MacIntyre is right that any real virtue ethic faces a real problem with modern tendencies to “compartmentalize” life. From After Virtue right on through essays in the 1990’s, he’s constantly highlighting the fact that as long as we accept life as compartmentalized, we will not be able to see everything in life as sets of interlocking practices, and if we don’t see things as sets of interlocking practices, then we won’t be able to understand virtue fully. Needless to say, the public/private distinction is enmeshed in our thinking as THE key “compartmentalizing” move – thus, when David McCarthy makes Catholic sexual ethics truly a matter of “social ethics,” OR when I relentlessly point out that economic and environmental ethics are ultimately a matter of all our everyday “lifestyle” choices, we are transgressing the social imaginary. And we need to.
2. Related to point #1, if “social ethics” collapses into “public policy ethics,” we run into problems. That is, can we only have moral debates over policy recommendations? But then what happens when we have to deal with the 98% of issues which cannot effectively be encapsulated in policy choices? (If I were a true “Hauerwasian”, I guess I would say 100% – j/k) Seriously, I recognize the importance of public policy measures. Public policies have a real impact on who gets paid just wages or what options we have for the environment. But the policy debates themselves are deeply constrained by people’s “lifestyles” – and so one really does have to attend to the lifestyles. Policy is easier for everyone to argue about, because it’s easier to avoid having it hit home. People love making moral arguments that show they are not sinners. Maybe one of the virtues of pre-V2 legalism – for all its faults – was that at least we were interested in arguments where we DID see ourselves as sinners. If we say “we see,” then our sin remains. Has a faintly biblical ring…