Cooking has been a work overwhelmingly done by women. According to Douglas Bowers, in 1900 time spent in domestic work was equivalent to that of the paid labor force in the United States: 44 hours a week. This unpaid labor was done by women and most of the work hours involved activities related to the preparation of meals. Marriage, as the basis of a heterosexual relationship contract, and the lack of ways for women to avoid or control pregnancies, meant large families that had to be cared and cooked for. The close entanglement of the roles of motherhood and being a wife, which can also be considered forms of labor, did not spare women that additionally occupied a space in the paid working force in the public sphere from being attributed the work of providing meals for the rest of the family. Moreover, during pregnancy and postpartum we could think of a woman’s body itself as a sort of a food source, generating the nutrients necessary to the development of the fetus and after, the baby.

At the same time, we have an increase in psychopathologies that involve eating. In fact, anorexia, one's deprivation from the act of consuming food, was a common manifestation of what was named by male physicians in the beginning of 1900 as hysteria. Hysteria was a disease that can be understood as women, well...being sick of having to be women in a context where male power dictated most aspects of life. With the establishment of medical and health specialties, such as psychiatry and psychology, a particular attention started to be paid, specially in 1980, to the fact that most of those developing mental health problems such as nervous anorexia and bulimia were of the female sex.

While some health experts and researchers, notably men, understood this in an essentialist manner, trying to locate what exactly in women's biology could be the cause for such a disparity, female psychotherapists such as Susie Orbach took another route. When you work with a feminist framework it becomes clear that the social conditions and the power structures that mold womanhood have a big part in the development of these maladies, just as they have in other highly gendered disorders. This explanation goes in a direction that points out that culture (from the norms of femininity to how families are usually organized) not only exacerbates a condition of problematic food consumption, but produces it. Not only that, but what we call a pathology, in this case, can actually be understood as just an extreme in a spectrum (or as Orbach says, a “continuum”) of normative female suffering.

Femininity teaches us, literally and symbolically, to occupy less space, to feed others rather than ourselves. When this is done in a “proper” amount, that is to say, in a manner that serves the purposes of patriarchy while keeping women functioning and playing their roles, it is considered normal. When it becomes so extreme that it creates a psychological problem with a high death rate, as is the case of anorexia, it becomes a pathology. Here lies the importance of understanding psychopathologies not only in an individual manner, but as collective manifestations that can point to problematic structures of power.

When I say that girls and women are taught to feed others rather than themselves, to put others' needs ahead of their own, the word “self” comes to play in multiple ways. Objectification Theory, developed by Barbara Fredrickson and Tomi-Ann Roberts, was created as a framework to explain why pathologies such as depression, eating disorders and sexual dysfunctions disproportionately affect women in comparison to men. Cultures where women and girls value are extremely based on their appearance, how they look and how they can serve others can end up creating a phenomena called self-objectification. The concept of “self” has more than one meaning in psychology, but can roughly be interpreted as the subjective experience that we have of ourselves, which includes how we see and treat our bodies. Self objectification happens when we internalize a third person perspective as a primary vision of our own body, in a way where we end up treating ourselves as objects to be looked at.self-objetification”) tem mais de um significado em psicologia, mas pode ser interpretado aproximadamente como a experiência subjetiva que temos de nós mesmos, que inclui a forma como vemos e tratamos nossos corpos. A auto-objetificação acontece quando internalizamos uma perspectiva de terceira pessoa como uma visão primária do nosso próprio corpo, de forma que acabamos nos tratando como objetos a serem observados.

With the rise of social media, we are being more and more flooded by images. Actually, not flooded, fed. And it’s not just propaganda anymore, that comes from an outer source. It is we that feed these networks with pictures of us: the famous “selfies”. Getting positive feedback (in the form of “likes”) in the virtual world includes having a “good” body, which in turn, especially for women, means looking as thin as possible, no matter what. In order to post beautiful “selfies”, a lot of girls are developing prejudicial forms of selves, spending energy and efforts constantly thinking of how others are seeing and evaluating their appearance. Body image problems, a frequent symptom of anorexia and bulimia, are becoming increasingly common. How are we feeding our bodies and our senses of self in a virtual era based on photos?

From 1900 to now, things have definitely changed. We are certainly no longer taught femininity through handbooks on social etiquette that said a polite woman cooks the meals, but eats delicately and little. But we are still learning what being (and looking like) a “good woman” entails through other, more technological and disguised, manuals. Female hunger is still an issue. Hunger not only for food, but for power. For a world where we are valued (and treated) as human beings, not objects. A world where our identities are not centered on being pretty.

I don’t know if this happens in other countries, but in Brazil it is common that dishcloths are ornamented with hand painted drawings and phrases, usually religious ones. Being an object that stays in the kitchen, you can imagine how happy I was when I found one with the following phrase: “You can’t fight the patriarchy if you are hungry”. Touché dishcloth, touché.