Blog
Women like to eat
A woman eating is not inherently shocking. Nor intrinsically amazing, repulsive, exciting, unseemly, or even noteworthy. Yet the following statements or situations indicate otherwise.
A woman orders dessert. Her girlfriend is encouraging, “Go ahead, you deserve it.”
A woman who’s eating alone or with others in a restaurant leaves food on her plate.
Women friends say to a server about the desserts they’re all contemplating, “We don’t need this, but . . .”
A woman offers, “This is sinful,” as she and a girlfriend eye the sweets on display which will soon be on their table.
A man watching a woman eat her dessert with gusto and exclamations of delight interjects, “Sounds orgasmic!”
I imagine that many of you women have experienced or witnessed such occurrences—I have—whose underlying theme is appetite. Pleasure, reward, offense, and constraint circulate within that cultural and social motif that inscribes its mores into our personal lives. No matter if beauty media doctrine deems us large or slender, the incidents I’ve listed embed themselves within us, soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-body.
Appetite provides self-knowledge. What are we really hungry for? In our families, with our life partners, from our yoga or life drawing class, when we drink our coffee in the morning alone or our tea with a new lover? What do we really want and need for our own nourishment?
I like to eat. 
That’s evident from the images I’m showing of my props and of me in performances. Eating is a pleasure, and I’m in a state of celebration and delight. The display of pleasure, and especially a woman’s pleasure, motivated my initial enjoyment of desserts in performance. Cakes especially represent pleasure and parties. Huge cakes represent huge pleasure. A mound of heart-shaped cookies is an invitation—help yourself to some love. An ecstatic spectacle of festivity and abundance—I share the desserts with an audience—is my intention, and only after a number of performances eating ice cream, cake, or truffles, did I think seriously about the audacious show of appetite, a woman’s appetite.
Orgasmic eating. Believe me, orgasm with a man I love who loves me far exceeds the pleasure of eating chocolate cake. “Sounds orgasmic!” conveys an observer’s arousal in response to a woman’s ecstasy over taste, scent, and texture. Our culture so associates food, and especially dessert, with tremendous pleasure, that a woman who publicly exceeds the feminine performance of inhibited appetite stands out as a spectacle of pleasure and a sensual provocation.
Sinful eating. One definition of sin is missing the mark. What or whose mark? The mark, designated by culture, of feminine delicacy and limitation of appetite. Perhaps a woman leaves food on her plate because she’s satiated. As likely, she leaves it unconsciously as a socially acceptable and enforced performance of her femininity. Ironic: restraint is the appropriate theater of a woman’s appetite.
Deserved eating. Must a woman earn a plate of fried chicken or a hot fudge sundae? Be worthy—which you are because you’re thin? Or tonight’s an occasion that’s special, so a treat, a short-lived pleasure, is your reward for turning 12 or 50 or becoming a Full Professor? Pleasure can be a constant, a ground and groundedness for soul-and-mind-inseparable-from-body.
I know it in my gut. A common expression. I feel the bellyache, the belly laugh. I feel the gripping or distention, the satisfied fullness, the easy digestion of food, the processing of emotion. I feel whether you like me or not. I know that people deprecate themselves with the phrase jelly belly or admire themselves with abs of steel. Written in our guts are words that touch, teach, and manipulate us, words with which we love and hate ourselves. The language is profound, a scripture of sins against societal convention, a scripture of satisfactions. How unaware we can be of how we soothe and scar ourselves.
O intestines, unwind from the rigors of dietary rectitude.
O solar plexus, shine like the sun itself!
Fear darkens radiance. Fear creates a stingy self. The stingier we are with ourselves, the more we monitor others’ generosity with themselves. People’s monitoring of women’s appetites—too fat, too loud, too sexy, too smart—is a projection of those people’s fears.
Food gives us women smiles and strength, from childhood through maturity. Food makes us the goddesses we are born to be.
nourishment and pleasure should always go together!
…and what PLEASURE to read “as dessert” this evening! (Too filled up from the roast chicken and eggplant pasta that Torry, Sofi and I feast on this evening.) Lately I’ve been replaying a really sad thing that I read someone being told lately: “You need to embrace hunger.”
We all need to embrace pleasure and HEALTH! Yes, indeed, Jill…nourishment and pleasure…
I went to S.F. recently and dined with a group of friends at a California cuisine restaurant, where the portions are small and primarily about pairings and presentation. I ordered lobster bisque as a starter and the nicoise salad as the main dish, we all ordered appetizers and entrees. As soon as we were finished with the main course my companions started to announce loudly how full they were, “stuffed” and “over capacity”. As a group of larger bodied adults, that was probably the societally correct thing to do even though I wasn’t really full, as we had not eaten anything all morning. It seemed as if they were saying they were full and stuffed due to the price of the food. I should have just eaten the money- perhaps then I too would have been over capacity.
Then the dessert tray came around, everyone ordered dessert – even though they were just talking about how stuffed they were. It was a bit awkward for me because I could have easily eaten a second entree. Not so full. Not so stuffed. I felt pressure to say that I was though, because if a fat girl doesn’t say she’s stuffed when everyone else is then there is surely a problem.
I ordered a delicious hunk of Oregon blue cheese for dessert and resisted the urge to comply with the group and announce how “stuffed” I was.
People make food complicated instead of just enjoying and savoring it. I like to eat.
By the way, the second picture in this post is beautiful!