Terri Schiavo: A Life Out of Control
Pacific News Service, Youth Commentary, Russell Morse, Posted: Mar 31, 2005
Editor's Note: A young man says that men's desire to control women's lives and bodies, and Terri Schiavo's efforts to assert some kind of control through food, form the real tragedy behind Schiavo's death.
SAN FRANCISCO--Did you know that Terri Schiavo's photograph is on the "tell me if I'm cute" Web site "Hot or Not.com"? Well, it is, and it's not a "before" picture, either. It's the same photo we've all been seeing on MSNBC, with buck teeth and eyes that can't focus. What's worse, America's voting public gave her a three out of 10.
That's why she's dead.
While pundits are arguing that this is a right-to-life issue or some kind of Christian vs. heathen, red state-blue state nonsense, they're missing the point: This is about sexual politics and female body image in America. God has nothing to do with it.
When Terri was 18 years old, she weighed 250 pounds. She developed an eating disorder, lost 100 pounds, got married and trimmed down to a Calvin Klein-acceptable 110. The only problem was, she was killing herself doing it. Her bulimia likely led to a potassium deficiency, which ultimately led to cardiac arrest and severe brain damage. Then she became the Terri we've come to love over the past few weeks.
I take an interest in this issue because every girl with whom I've ever been romantically linked had severe body image issues. Several of them had eating disorders. One girl took laxatives every day to "pass" everything she ate, another one never ate in front of me and another one was on Atkins, which I consider just as severe.
I kind of like big girls, so I never cared. But I do have a messed up sense of humor, so when she would ask me, "Do these jeans make me look fat?" I would say "No, but your ass does." For a joke. But these offhand remarks gave me some bizarre control over women whose self-esteem was so low that they would never leave me. I never did it on purpose, I was just so oblivious I thought that they liked me a lot.
One of the girls explained to me the relationship between control and her anorexia. She grew up in a very strict and abusive household, so she felt like she had no control over anything. They made her dress a certain way, come straight home after school every day, do insane chores all day and what's worse, her father molested her on the regular. So the only thing she had control over was her diet.
She would come home, sit down at the dinner table, stare off into space without touching her food until her mother asked her, "Why aren't you eating?" And she would say, "I'm not hungry," every day. And they would scream at her and beat her but they COULDN'T MAKE HER EAT.
This is, apparently, a common thing in the anorexic community -- women striving for control. An essay titled "Anorexia Explained" on pale-reflections.com, an "eating disorders community," puts it this way: "Anorectics try to regain control by denying themselves food, whereas bulimics purge their body of food in order to re-establish some control, even if only for a temporary period of time."
When you apply this consideration to Terri Schiavo's case, I don't think the word "ironic" really does justice. To have her father and her husband, the Supreme Court, Congress, some decrepit turds on Hardball and the rest of America arguing over who is allowed to force feed her -- a woman with an eating disorder who essentially tried to starve herself to death -- it's just sick, really.
The only thing sicker is that Paris Hilton got a 9.9 on Hot or Not.
PNS contributor Russell Morse, 24, is associate editor of YO! Youth Outlook, a magazine by and for Bay Area youths and a PNS project.
Also by Russell Morse:
Youth Voting Does Not a Movement Make
Drugs, Alcohol, Baseball: Hanging With Youths Outside the DNC
We Youths Get Our Election News Wherever We Can
Take Cover: Columbine Art Is Coming Your Way
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