The Private Mantra

As the members of ECHO (Eating Concerns Hotline Outreach) were postering during Eating Disorders Awareness Week one afternoon, a couple approached a freshly-plastered bulletin board and began reading a poster aloud: "If the average male fashion model were of the same proportions as the average female fashion model, he would be 6'5" and 160 lbs."

"That's so whack," the man said. "6'5" and 160 lbs? That's sickly...I had no idea that women models were that ridiculously disproportioned."

"I know, it's crazy," responded the woman. "It's disgusting. How about this poster: `By the year 2000, Americans will be spending $77 billion on weight-loss, or the entire GNP of Belgium.' Can you believe that we spend the worth of an entire small nation to lose weight? How warped is that?"

The man shook his head, "Yeah, the world's really screwed up."

Throughout Eating Disorders Awareness Week, peers commented on and questioned the prevalence and power of the posters, and myriad library-goers engaged in extended dialogues on our postings in bathroom stalls.

In one stall, we found written on a poster about fat hatred: "To ECHO--I don't think this sign helps. It only reminds the overly-weight conscious of how much the world does care about how s/he looks." Someone responded, "Do you mean to say that in your opinion our culture does not have weight issues?" Not everyone agreed, but we were still successful: dialogue began and that was our goal. As someone responding to the same poster so aptly put it: "Self-awareness is always a good thing."

During Eating Disorders Awareness Week and throughout the entire year, ECHO hosts workshops, outreaches, discussion groups, postering, speakers and movie nights in order to promote awareness and create a community dialogue regarding eating disorders, eating concerns, body image and self-esteem.

As we've discovered, this discourse is desperately needed. Often our outreaches begin with nervous giggles and jokes about purging, someone shifting in her seat and dead silence at our opening remarks. But inevitably, after a few minutes of probing questions, their opinions, thoughts, concerns and personal stories urgently replace the silence.

Listening over and over again to the intense discussions, we remain ambivalent about our success: while we're excited that we have provided a forum in which people can share usually private thoughts and concerns, we are frustrated to see people still skirting many of the issues and details. Too much still remains taboo.

Anorexic women often stop menstruating and grow excess body hair. Anorexia has the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorder. Bulimics often purge upwards of five times a day. Fat people don't smell and aren't always lazy. Binge eaters have no concept of hunger or fullness.

Instead of watching our professors, some of us are critiquing our neighbor's thighs. Instead of talking in section, some of us are counting calories. Hands turn orange, laxatives get consumed, hours get lost hunched over a StairMaster. Some of us can't even eat our own birthday cake.

And in our heads we just keep saying, my thighs are too fat, my breasts are too small, my tummy jiggles...These are the fears that are still too taboo to discuss in public, so we keep them inside. This private mantra that goes on in women's heads gets so loud that sometimes we can't even hear the conversations going on around us or the conversations in which we're participating.

So we stop participating, we stop acting in the world, too consumed by this private and shameful monologue of calories and thighs and pounds. In doing so, not only do we lose our agency and voice, but we also isolate ourselves from everyone else, including the others who keep repeating: my thighs are too fat, my breasts are too small, my tummy jiggles. Indeed, those others are many--the mantra is epidemic.

This epidemic must be combated. However, it cannot be combated successfully until we as individuals and as a community are aware of both its existence, its intimate details and its source.

And the only way to accomplish this awareness is by making our private mantras public. While we would eventually like to see more wide-spread activism, the Harvard community still desperately needs to become aware of the pervasiveness of these issues on our own campus and in our own lives.

Therefore, ECHO is focusing on engaging Harvard in dialogue, both on the personal level through our hotline, and on the community level through our outreaches and discussions. This two-part dialogue is an essential step towards successful activism.

After all, by muting our inner voices and thoughts, we weaken ourselves. It is only once we share and unite them that we become strong and enact change.

Discussion leads to personal and private action; discussion is the source of change. Indeed, it is often our most personal acts that are the most successful forms of political activism.

As Abra Fortune Chernik said in her essay "The Body Politic," "Gaining weight and getting my head out of the toilet bowl was the most political act I ever committed."

Judy Batalion '00 is a history and science concentrator in Adams House and Melissa L. Gibson '99 is a women's studies concentrator in Winthrop House. They are co-directors of ECHO.