There is a long-standing tradition of female self-denial. The most prominent beginning for this historically was the medieval virgin martyr, one who remained an unmarried virgin by dedicating her life to the glorification of God. Self-starvation was common. The woman aimed to move closer to God by partaking in the suffering of Christ. Food acts were even subverted into punishment. Catherine of Genoa apparently used to eat only bread so blackened that eating it would tear open her throat. Common also was the desire to drink from the oozing wounds of Christ made during the crucifixion. One saint sought to drink from the pus of a leper.

Today’s woman has replaced God with the godhead of the image. It is not new that women shine out of billboards and television screens, impossibly thin and impossibly alive. Women are presented as a narrative of images, untouchable snapshots of pure sex. These images are prescriptive; they beckon for all of us to flatten into their form and to smile odourlessly from the paper and the screen.

Becoming the image is a commitment to rejecting basic human instinct. It is a question of hygiene. Eating is messy, eating is dirty. Food smells. Think of the school hall. A group of girls sitting and eating various and different foods emitting various and different smells was the epicentre of neurosis. I had a friend who used to eat her entire lunch with her hands in front of her mouth. Another friend ate only a packet of ready salted crisps everyday for her lunch, because they were the most scentless food the petrol garage sold. There were foods acceptable and unacceptable to consume. Tuna and eggs were always complained about. Packet foods were preferred as their origins were clear. ‘Foreign foods’ were responded to with disgust- the moment of opening a Tupperware full of my father’s left over minestrone was always anxiety fuelled. Many girls wouldn’t eat in front of boys. The mouth in society is presented as a focus of male sexual gratification and in eating, this focus is overwritten with the female need to gratify her own body, no longer available for the pleasure of others.

It is about becoming as odourless and hygienic as the image woman. She never has bad breath or food in her teeth. Excretion is contained in eating and so eating is a direct transgression of hygiene rules. By refusing food she suspends the relationship between bodily needs and her existence. She suspends the relationship between her humanity and her beauty and so begins to exist as purely a beautiful object for nothing external is needed to sustain her existence. By rejecting her own appetite, she craves to be consumed in the endless eyes of spectators.