The Paradox Of Women With An Appetite
“I like a girl with an appetite”.
Men often say it as if they’re the first to ever think of it, but it always comes out rehearsed and mechanical, as if they practiced saying it in the mirror earlier that day. The ‘girl with an appetite’ began as a cliche reserved for romantic movies but is now inferred whenever a woman dares to eat anything more than a side salad. Under patriarchy, women’s desirability and their relationship with food exist on two sides of the same coin. Or, in other words, women can enjoy food, but only if they look like they don’t. Here lies the paradox of women with an appetite: it is perceived as ‘hot’ for women to order burgers and down beers like ‘one of the boys’, and be delectably relatable in their attitude to food, but only if they align with patriarchal standards of beauty, thinness, and whiteness.
Growing up as a teenager with a culturally-inherited inclination towards starvation, it always stood out to me that female characters rarely eat in films. They might twirl spaghetti on long-handled forks as they hungrily perform for the male gaze, or sip seductively at the rim of their martini glasses, but, on the whole, women never eat on-screen. Women are only allowed to eat conceptually as if eating is a thing they must infer but never be seen doing.
There is an iconic moment in Gone Girl that exemplifies this paradox. The ‘cool girl’ monologue has become a mantra of sorts for women who are pissed off at the ways the male gaze has permeated their identities. The monologue, above all else, is about female performance, but particularly the female performance around food. It’s about the dance that women do to convince men and themselves that they are carefree, effortless, and unphased by the ever-present voice that tells them to diet. ‘Cool girls’ don’t starve themselves, they don’t order a salad, they don’t go to the gym - except they do. In this scene, Amy, played by Rosamund Pike, explains how she has performed for her husband for years, playing the role of the effortlessly cool woman who can “eat cold pizza and remain a size two”. Whilst, on one hand, she must “drink canned beer watching Adam Sandler movies”, she must also comply with traditional femininity in her smallness and passivity. Women must caricature themselves into fun-loving, easy-going cartoons who let the patriarchy wash over them, whilst simultaneously keeping up with strict beauty regimens and exercise routines to curate an image of laid-back perfection. Essentially, women can’t win.
During this monologue, we see a montage of Amy lighting a cigarette, messily biting into a burger, buying donuts, eating crisps, and downing a litre bottle of coke. It’s no coincidence that Amy’s empowerment at this moment revolves around the act of indulging in food - women eating without performance is nothing short of revolutionary. Since the dawn of patriarchy, or since the dawn of patriarchal media, women eating without performance was coded as sincerely ~unlikable~. It’s near impossible for a woman raised on conventional media to be unaware of the male gaze, and this plays into eating habits, rules, and ideologies until the individual and her performance are indistinguishable from one another.
Perhaps the most striking example of this paradox was Jennifer Lawrence’s 2014 self-branded ‘relatable’ era. We all remember her oh-so-authentic ‘where’s the pizza?’ moment, in which she aligns herself with the ‘hungry fat girl’ trope, but, crucially, in a thin body. At a glance, it seems harmless, almost progressive. A beautiful celebrity unapologetically proclaiming her love for food can certainly be branded as empowering. But, the complication with Jennifer Lawrence’s ‘relatability’ in this moment is that this empowerment is limited to women that fit within the narrow confines of westernized beauty. Cited by Cosmo as “the world’s most beautiful woman”, to declare one’s desire to eat and be applauded for it is a privilege reserved for few. It is moments like these that cement, in the popular imagination, the idea that a woman can openly enjoy pizza, but only if she can fit neatly into a Dior dress at the Oscars the very next day. This isn’t to say that Lawrence’s brand of a food-loving thin white woman isn’t authentic, but it is to question how productive it is. Life imitates art, or at least, life imitates media. And, for each beautiful, slim woman who is celebrated for her public love of food, there are thousands of women who do not align with strict beauty standards being villianised for doing the exact same thing.
Whilst internalised misogyny would have us hating Jennifer Lawrence and other women that code themselves as ‘cool girls’, the real problem isn’t that women perform, it’s that society demands performance. The individual women are not to blame; the fetishisation of ‘the girl with an appetite’ is a systemic device that seeks to market women’s oppression back to them under the flimsy guise of ‘empowerment’. Despite the desire to possess women who will eat burgers with an ever-diminishing waistline, it seems authenticity and perfection can never truly go hand in hand. Perhaps the patriarchy can’t have its cake and eat it too.