Some anorexics in refusing meat may show more awareness about reasons to escape today’s oppressive society of enjoyment-seeking than many carnivores. Anorexia can be a way of refusing the undistanced, unrestrained call to enjoy in a society in which enjoyment is elevated into something to which one is not strictly free to say “I would rather not to”. The logic of the anxious and permissive society of enjoyment says: one has to achieve all one can achieve, you must because you can. One thus feels guilty for not making the most of one’s capacities or for feeling guilty without having something to feel guilty about. One feels guilty for things one didn’t do and take part in, rather than for things one did do. And this irrational guilt is harder to escape and more encompassing than the hold that guilt used to have over us in the society of prohibition in which one was expected not to enjoy, in which one felt guilty for things one did that were prohibited.
