In Response to Melissa A. Fabello’s: Why We Need More ‘Hunger’ and Less ‘To The Bone’

Sheree Strange
Jul 10, 2017 · 3 min read

I — like many others on Medium, I would imagine — have about a floppity-jillion posts bookmarked to read later at any given time. That’s why it took me a few days to get around to reading Melissa’s piece Why We Need More ‘Hunger’ and Less ‘To The Bone’. I’m glad I didn’t let it get any further down the list, because it made me feel a lot of things and spurred this response.

I think this is the most important piece I’ve read, for my own personal development, in quite some time. I would encourage you all to click the link right now and read it for yourselves, before deciding whether to bother with my little thoughts/feels-vomit below.

It worked me into quite a lather, really. I found myself gearing up for a very emphatic and vocal agreement with every single thing Melissa said. I find it gross on an unparalleled level that we glamorise and celebrate the logical outcome of our collective “healthy” pursuit of wealthy white thinness. It’s no accident that the eating-disorder-in-popular-culture narrative excludes those stories that don’t resemble what we all “should” be emulating. This goes all the way up to big flashy film releases and book covers, and all the way down to bit parts on television shows about cops and doctors: the person with an eating disorder is always a young white girl from a relatively affluent family, and she pretty much always recovers completely by the end. (They never die — even though anorexia nervosa is widely recognised as having the highest mortality rate of any mental illness.)

About halfway through her piece, Melissa embedded the trailer for Netflix’s To The Bone. I hesitated before I hit play. It was actually the first time I’d seen it. Up until that point, I think I’d (only semi-consciously) avoided it, the way I do a lot of content that might just suck me down a rabbit hole of anger and fear, zapping the precious creative energy that I need to focus on other things right now. I’d read enough about it on the periphery to know that To The Bone was probably a one-way ticket to the bottom of that rabbit hole, another pretty white girl with wide eyes and great hair, an in-patient in an expensive clinic, the teachers’ pet and the hero of a motley crew of fellow patients. But, it seemed important to watch it, in order to fully understand and engage with what Melissa was getting at, so I did… and sure enough, I tumbled right on down.

The fucking whimsical music! The styled hair and the “natural” make-up! The wise world-weary Gandalf-doctor guiding the spunky young firecracker girl on her road to redemption! The promise of a party and a kiss with a leading man at the end! Happily ever after! UGH!

It ticked every box on the rom-com trailer checklist, and I nearly fucking vomited. Really? Have we really reached that point? We’re now telling stories of crippling and debilitating illnesses as though they were fucking romantic comedies? Let’s set aside the fact that we’re being inexcusably exclusionary, just for a second: why are we doing this? Haven’t we over-simplified and romanticised the highly-strung middle-class white girl’s “desire” to be thin enough?

But wait.

I had to stop myself here, because I’m doing exactly what Melissa warned against in her amazing piece: I’m sinking my teeth into an emotional critique of this bastardised glossy re-telling of an all-too-familiar story, rather than using that time and that energy to celebrate and share the stories that don’t get this kind of platform. I could have written another thousand words dissecting all the ways in which this trailer is wrong and bad for the world and all of that, but what does that accomplish? How could that possibly amplify the voice of anyone else who might tell the types of stories to which we really should be listening?

So, I’m choosing to wrap this up by: (1) echoing Melissa’s support of The Body Is Not An Apology in particular (a fantastic resource, I’ve followed them on Facebook forever), and (2) resolving to stand at the top of that rabbit hole and hand out helpful pamphlets to anyone else who looks like they might just fall in. That’s how a narrative changes.

Sheree Strange

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Just another millennial who quit a corporate job to chase the dream | Blogging about literature at www.keepingupwiththepenguins.com

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