Bodies at Middlebury
By Annaliese Terlesky
Cover photo by Iman Behbehani
Disclaimer: Eating disorders have to be diagnosed by a medical professional, and there are many criteria that fall into such diagnosis. Anyone can have disordered eating, which can lead to eating disorders, and often people have undiagnosed eating disorders.
I would like to thank the Middlebury students I interviewed in the process of writing this article, who shared their stories with me and provided many of the insights below. They have been anonymously quoted below, besides Charlotte Gray ‘21, who asked to be named for the sake of open, honest conversation about body image and eating disorders here at Middlebury, and for the sake of removing the shame and stigma surrounding these issues.
Of course, fashion’s canvas is the human body. Fashion is body-conscious because it has to be, but this should not be a mandate to control the human body or to place it into an arbitrary beauty standard or mold. Rather, through fashion, we can adorn and celebrate the human body, whatever it may look like. When we look at Middlebury, what is our relationship with such a canvas?
Even before arriving on campus for my first tour, I heard that Middlebury is a thin, beautiful college. And while visiting, next to the beautiful, pristine buildings I saw well-dressed, thin, athletic students - it was even a bit intimidating.
Nearly everyday, “I haven’t eaten anything all day” is a testament to popular restriction and work ethic often overheard in the library, Crossroads, amongst friends, nearly everywhere. In several of my interviews, I brought up this comment, and immediately it resonated and rung bells. “I hear that every single day,” an interviewee told me. “It’s so exhausting because what is really the point of saying that? It’s always a weird, triggering flex.” Another expresses it is all a part of the culture of perfectionism here, to aim to impress and to be so dedicated to one’s work and tasks as to forget, or neglect, the basic need of eating, which then feeds into the alleged “achievement” and impression that is thinness, that is behavior classified as ‘skinny.’
This is only part of our culture and leading rhetoric here of body image and food. We center these topics in our conversations, going so far as to center identities upon appearance. “People talk about appearance so much. Sometimes I feel like that’s all people define you as,” explained another student I interviewed. It would not be a problem if it were matched by an equal discussion of non-appearance characteristics, they went on. “But it’s the first and only thing mentioned.” A trend develops where, as Middlebury students, if someone is not skinny or seemingly perfect according to a standard that normalizes thinness, it might mean we do not consider or appreciate said person’s other qualities. We might give more time and attention to someone who is conventionally beautiful, meaning thin. “I feel like they’re not even going to look for other qualities if the first thing they see isn’t attractiveness,” which is of course subjective.
Culture is influenced by the stories we tell, both about others, but more importantly about ourselves, which others witness and listen to carefully. In my interview with senior Charlotte Gray, she talked at length about the role of the relationships we have with our bodies and the culture surrounding body image. She explained that of course, when someone asks if they should go get more food, it is “universally” supported. Similarly, when someone says they look fat, feel bloated, feel ugly, of course their friends will sincerely disagree and shut down these comments. However, she continued that while people are very comfortable with the concept of body positivity when it comes to others, when it then comes time to show it in themselves, they do not show up. She believes, quite rightfully, that “to be a force of body positivity, you have to actually believe that you would be beautiful if you were fat. Because you have to show it, you cannot just say it. The actions always speak louder than the words, and the words are always, ‘Yeah, go get more, go treat yourself!’ But the actions are that everyone at Middlebury is skinny. The words: everybody at Middlebury loves everyone, no matter what size they are, they do not care about all that. But I think the actions are more important.” And by refusing to grab a dessert or a second plate ourselves when we want one, when restriction is normalized in our own practices, we create an unhealthy culture by our lack of participation in the healthy one we attempt to create with our words.
With this in mind, if you are to tell someone heavier than you that they are beautiful, but turn to the mirror to say that you look bloated or bigger than you thought and you are unhappy with that, there is a harmful disconnect here, Charlotte explains. It becomes more harmful to police ourselves in front of our friends, than it is to police our friends directly. Of course, we all love our friends and would never think to put them down or police their eating habits or bodies, because we want them to love themselves. As Charlotte puts it so poignantly, “loving your friends means showing your friends how to love themselves by loving yourself in front of them.” We cannot go from loving a friend unconditionally, to policing ourselves in front of them.
However, one student explains, “part of being woke here is not commenting on other people’s habits with food,” which, in turn, encourages disordered eating. “But I feel like if someone would have reality-checked me, I would have realized I wasn’t eating a lot of food. But nobody said anything, so I took that as a cue that it was normal.” Disordered eating and eating disorders are deeply personal, but especially socio-cultural, influenced and encouraged by others. Not beginning a dialogue, not verbally, assertively criticizing restrictive eating, opens the door to a culture where it is more normal to be at war with our bodies, criticizing them and ignoring their basic needs when we go to feed them.
To make matters worse, the pandemic has drastically affected our relationship with food on campus. There is something to be said about how food has changed during this past year of pandemic living on campus, in which food has taken on different forms and meanings in our lives and routines. One student expresses their concern with carrying to-go containers to and from the dining halls, as one becomes “self-conscious about people knowing they eat.” However, they continued, “everyone eats and needs to eat,” so there being such a concern here surrounding eating points to, of course, the normalization of dieting and restricting, rather than normalizing eating full meals. Furthermore, due to the pandemic, the food options themselves are much more limited, and several interviewees complained about the increase in unhealthy foods and the frequent unavailability of fruits and vegetables. What is more, as the dining staff now serve us, students no longer have the option to serve themselves and thus control portion sizes. Whether this is a good or bad thing remains debatable, because for some this removes the personal pressure to make a decision to eat more or less food, while for others, the sizes they are served create stress, raising the question, “Is it okay to eat this much?” Finally, I myself and others have witnessed the habit of quickly shutting containers so as to not eat all the food one is served.
To make matters even worse, as testified to in Quinn Boyle’s well-known and well-received article “The skinniest college in America” published in The Middlebury Campus, Middlebury lacks the necessary support to address such an issue, both in creating a healthier culture surrounding food and body image, and in providing helpful, essential resources for students with disordered eating habits, eating disorders, troubles with body image, and the list goes on. Charlotte explained that when her bulimia was at its very worst at Middlebury, the closest doctor the school could refer her to was in Burlington, meaning she would have to find a ride and make a two-hour-long round trip in order to receive the vital treatment that would keep her in school. Similarly, Quinn explains that resources within and outside the college are “slim,” and that the lack of help Middlebury can offer is “not only careless, but negligent.” It leaves students like Charlotte and Quinn left to resolve their eating disorders themselves and seek distant help, which is not exactly in line with any eating disorder’s thinking.
How do the clothes we wear play into all of this? Though it feels like real “going-out” nights were decades ago, when the weekend would roll around, I remember hearing overwhelming talk about appearance and body image on the weekends, particularly in the dining halls at dinner. Students, typically femme-identifying ones, would openly talk about restricting calories the day of going out so as to avoid bloating for their going-out outfits. One interviewee explained that because the typical party outfit at Middlebury involves jeans and a crop top, there is even more consciousness surrounding body image. Along with Middlebury’s infamous, prevalent hook-up culture that puts pressure on many students to be desirable in line with the beauty standard, this ideal of thinness centers skinny as what is beautiful, and any variance is critiqued. Furthermore, with the rise of talk about sustainable fashion comes the idea of building a wardrobe that lasts. But how can the effort to stay thin partner with a wardrobe that should last forever, when our bodies naturally change so much? How can we celebrate, or at least not antagonize, our ever changing bodies as we dress ourselves? Though the fashion industry itself unquestionably idolizes the ultra-thin female body, this is not a mandate to participate in such standards ourselves.
Of course, I am writing this as someone who has been intentionally underweight for much of my life. I have bought and I continue buying into so much of what I criticize here, and so much of what I become so frustrated with everyday surrounding food and body image. But, like one of the students I interviewed said, I am exhausted. Many of my friends and classmates are too. And I hope, more than anything, that we can realize not only that our words shape the culture we live in here, but also our actions. We learn from seeing, we imitate, and imitation becomes practice, which becomes culture. So, I ask, what if we stopped talking about it so much? What if we stopped talking about our bodies as consistently flawed, never achieving a perfect standard that is ableist, heteronomrative, discriminatory, and flawed itself? I have no answers, being a guilty party myself, so I can only propose questions.
In my interviews, I encountered a few potential answers. Every student brought up the obvious un-sustainability of disordered eating, how restrictive eating habits are not only harmful to athletes, but to every body meant to feed and fuel itself for a lifetime. One student suggested eating at the same time everyday, while another explained that this rigidity in fact defined the peak of their own eating disorder. In regards to fashion, one interviewee argues that “as long as you’re dressing up for yourself and not others, there are no cons. But then, I think, inadvertently you end up dressing up for others because we want someone to appreciate our art. It is an art.” Another suggested gratitude channeled at other parts of the self that are not the body, including our ability to think and recover from illness and injury. They concluded saying, “we’re so powerful and incredible, it’s so sad we’re told to hate our bodies.” So, to oppose such a culture of body-hate, of forever reaching for but never achieving arbitrarily defined beauty, we can tell a healthier story, more representative of what our bodies actually look like - this, in fact, can and should be what beauty means.