Women in the early to late Middle Ages who starved themselves were later worshipped as saints, such as Wilgefortis (meaning strong virgin), Rose of Lima, Orsola Giuliani (known as Saint Veronica Giuliani), and probably most famously, Catherine of Siena. Almost all of these young women stopped eating when their parents were arranging their marriages. Catherine of Siena’s parents were hoping she might marry the widower of Catherine’s adored older sister, who died in childbirth. Catherine was less than thrilled at this idea and starved herself until any thoughts of marriage were moot....The self-denial of Catherine—and the others—was seen as akin to holiness. While it’s tricky to compare eighth- to fifteenth-century women with twenty-first-century ones, the phenomenon of girls and women starving themselves has existed for millennia. And even if Catherine of Siena and Zhanna Samsonova were not classified as suffering from the same syndrome, they both learned that a woman not eating is an effective way for her to seize control when she feels otherwise powerless. All the saints listed above stopped eating at the time their parents were urging them to get married. I paused time by starving and arresting my puberty.Anorexia gave me nothing. All it did was take away my teens and twenties. But for the medieval girls, it gave them enormous power.
Arresting puberty as a means of self-empowerment has obvious parallels with the puberty-blocking drugs sought for teenagers today -- and with the more-permanent surgical options. Also, in the case of women, with birth control and abortion.
All of them are alike in finding power, as they describe it, in being able to deny their nature. This is an odd locution when you think about it. Both "power" and "energy" are usually described as the ability to do work. "Horsepower," for example, is the mechanical ability to lift 550 pounds one foot in one second. Here "power" is being sought by preventing function rather than enabling it.
What sort of power is this? The power of the will over the physical, but what is being willed? It is not to be what one is, not to change, not to have one's body develop and flourish according to its nature; not to marry, not to conceive, not to move from girlhood to womanhood, from womanhood to motherhood.
It is a will to stillness and the absence of change, which is to say that it is a death-wish. It is therefore not surprising to find that it ends in death.
So does life, of course.
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As for young women trying to avoid arranged marriages in the medieval era, I can certainly see their objections and understand the desire and will to avoid that fate. For them, do you also think they were willing themselves not to be what they were? The physical damage seems like more of a side effect, or collateral damage, of willing not to be some strange man's wife, of resisting an unnatural fate.
I don't think that marriage per se is unnatural; in fact, its function is exactly as Aristotle suggests the function of art to be, i.e., the perfection of nature. Human nature entails both a need for replacement generations and a capacity for producing them; marriage as an institution is designed to ensure that the produced children come to be in a stable environment that provides for their sustenance and education to the point that they can become adult members of society. It is directly related to our nature, aimed at providing the necessary supports to that nature, and as such can be said to be natural in Aristotle's sense.
[Theologically, if you're interested in that, marriage is not an Aristotelian institution but a sacrament: that is, a gift from God that transforms a sinful aspect of humanity into something good. That's a more extended argument, but it still takes an aspect of human nature -- fallen sinful nature -- as its basis. Thus, the Church would not consider marriage unnatural but divine.]
As for whether arranged marriages are unnatural, I don't think that's obvious even though American culture has a very strong moral sense that they're inappropriate. I've encountered arguments that they are reasonably functional in societies that have them as a longstanding feature, and the statistics I've seen suggest that they are an order of magnitude more stable than American marriages.
That's not to argue in favor of adopting the practice, just to state that I don't see it as unnatural in the way that, say, starving yourself to death to protest it is a denial of your nature. This, we are told, gave the dead women great power -- and perhaps it did, if indeed they rose into Eternity as saints with the ear of God Almighty. It did not in the more pedestrian sense, however: death robs man or woman of all mortal power. It is not in an ordinary sense empowering.
That's a very reasonable answer. I object to the coercive aspect of arranged marriages, but since living in Japan have often thought many Americans could benefit by arranged courtships, which at least back in the 90s was still a thing there. No one was forced to marry, but the matchmakers took the time to get to know the individuals involved and tried to make good matches for them, and they often did result in marriages.
The two key differences I see between that and the medieval European practice are, of course, the coercion, but also that the marriages then were arranged for political or financial benefits, not in consideration of what was best for the individuals involved. If starving oneself is a means of resistance to unjust coercion, I could see it as legitimate, and we do see it used that way in more recent times in hunger strikes, for example.
I'm of course not saying it is always or even usually legitimate. That would have to be decided on a case-by-case basis.
On the other hand, it seems unnatural to me for a parent to insist on a daughter going through with a marriage she is so opposed to as to starve herself to death to avoid. That would seem to defeat the purpose of having children.
a parent to insist on a daughter going through with a marriage she is so opposed to as to starve herself to death to avoid. That would seem to defeat the purpose of having children.
Well, Catherine of Siena was the 23rd of at least 25 children born to her parents so they had some to spare.
More seriously, I don’t think all the women mentioned in the article were starving themselves for the same reason. Catherine of Siena didn’t want to marry her brother-in-law, true, but according to Wikipedia she had also already “vowed to give her whole life to God.” So you can put her hunger strike down to a commitment to God rather than a rejection of marriage. Or, more secularly, Catherine used starvation to force her parents to give her her own way - although she would say “God’s way.”
The anorexic influencers are using starvation as a way to get social media attention. Clearly they have a mental illness but the power they derive is not about denying their nature but about receiving attention. (One of them sounds like a case of parental abuse.)
The author of the article describes her own anorexia as stemming from “a fear of growing up and becoming a woman and I didn’t feel ready to separate from my mother.” I don’t think that’s about power - it’s about fear. And I think the adolescent girls who claim to be transgender are acting out of fear, also. We have made growing from girl to woman so confusing and difficult that some girls would rather not. Neoneocon refers to this:
particularly among adolescent girls dealing with the conflicts inherent in going through puberty and becoming a woman in an era in which they feel pressured to be sexually active, and are aware – many through internet porn – of some of the more violent and extreme aspects of sexuality.
Along the same lines, I have seen claims (do not have a cite) that transgender girls don’t want to be boys; they just don’t want to be girls.
As for abortion and birth control, they may be about “finding power … in being able to deny their nature.” But if so, that applies to men as well as women. Men are as insistent on birth control and abortion as women and those interventions deny men’s nature as fathers just as surely as they deny women’s nature as mothers.
https://ussanews.com/2023/09/19/watching-girls-die-online/
https://www.thenewneo.com/2023/07/06/the-trans-proliferation-part-ii-whats-the-rationale-for-transgender-medical-treatment-and-surgery-for-minors/
Elise, you raise an excellent point even in your less-serious comment. It's always a difficult stretch of imagination to begin to approach how and why people would have made decisions in vastly different material circumstances than ours. Having dozens of children is one of those, especially in a pre-industrial, pre-agricultural-revolutionary era in which all forms of scarcity were greater. It's hard to say what calculations would seem rational in such circumstances.
I don’t think that’s about power - it’s about fear.
It may be fear that is driving them to find a way of exerting control against what frightens them, which is quite understandable. I'm not trying to suggest that they are motivated by an illegitimate desire for power per se, just that they describe themselves as seeking power or "empowerment." I think that's an odd formulation for pursuing activities that weaken, sicken, disable and even kill them.
...that applies to men as well as women.
Yes, I agree. The context here excluded men from the discussion, but it's perfectly fair to include those of them who use such "powers" to exert a kind of control.
they describe themselves as seeking power or "empowerment." I think that's an odd formulation for pursuing activities that weaken, sicken, disable and even kill them.
I see your point. Leaving aside the saints discussed, the interesting question is why these women feel that is their only power. I think this ties back to something you posted a little while ago about why so many women remain angry about their society - particularly about the unfair "expectations" of society. Expectations are - or should be - the problem of those who have them, not of those who are subject to them (absent actual coercion). So, again, why don't women exercise their power to tell those expectations to take a long walk off a short pier?
And thus this also seems to tie in with something I wrote about years ago: teaching our daughters, literal and metaphorical, to say, "No." The context is different but I this seems like a variant on the same issue, 12 years later:
Be that as it may, learning to say “No”, to stand up for themselves can help women who are encouraged to doubt their own wisdom, their own knowledge, their ability to stand on their own two feet. Learning to say “No” is crucial if women are going to stand up to the kind of societal pressure Badinter is talking about and decide for themselves the best way to raise their children and the best way to live their lives.
(This may all apply to boys and men, as well. I don't know.)
https://grimbeorn.blogspot.com/2023/09/an-inversion-of-categories.html
https://firebrandblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/simply-green.html
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