Q&A with Susie Orbach, author of “Bodies”

Author and activist Susie Orbach shares some quick thoughts on the beauty debate.

The Writer’s Life: Thirty one years after the publication of Fat is A Feminist Issue, you released Bodies. Whilst Fifi dealt with women’s eating problems, Bodies explores the effect that the pharmaceutical industries and the media are having on our body image. What originally influenced you to write about our relationship with food and the media’s obsession with the female form? Is the pressure to conform to a generic body ideal something you have been a victim of yourself?

Susie Orbach: Mmm. When I first started thinking about this all those years back, I wouldn’t have had the words to describe what it was I was a victim of. I simply followed what I thought it meant to be a grown up woman – being caught up with dieting and body size. I did not think there was a political dimension to it or that the fact that I used to start a diet on a Monday was part of a whole social phenomenon. By today’s standards my eating then would be considered very normal. That shows how far we have come from eating in response to hunger.

WL: How would you describe the difference in what is considered the beautiful body aesthetic today, or the desire to obtain it, compared to what it was at the time of writing and publishing your first book, Fifi?

SO: The beauty ideal has become democratized today so that we are all encouraged to see beauty as absolutely essential to who we are and what we might want to do. When I wrote Fifi, it was a preoccupation that lasted a few years and did not affect every single woman. It started later. In my school maybe one in 20 girls were interested in fashion, make up, and style – and that was from age 14. Now girls as young as six up until women in old age homes are fretting about their appearance. It would be hard to take a junior high school or high school class and not notice body criticism as rife. As the idea of beauty for everyone has spread, so that ideal has narrowed and the look – at present, long thin straight hair, big boobs – has become intensified. A third point is that we seem to be exporting beauty terror around the world so that we are losing variety in what constitutes beauty and replacing it with the current western notion.

WL: The diet industry and this business of body modification appears to have grown drastically since the publication of Fifi, over thirty years ago. The over the counter diet pill, Alli, and popularity of cosmetic surgery are examples of this. Where can you see these industries heading over the next thirty years and what can we do about it?

SO: Yes. We really have to take them on. They are part of the problem often rather than part of the solution. The research shows that people gain weight after dieting, especially repetitive dieting. I say we need to insist they publish their failure rate (97%). They need to carry a warning and probably in some case prosecuted for false advertising.

WL: How do the people involved in the diet industry and those members of the media who treat eating disorders as a badge of honour, almost, react to your views?

SO: Not sure!

WL: Will fat always be a feminist issue?

SO: There will always be a way that looking through the lens of gender inequality – whether that is around femininities or masculinities – we will find interesting things to observe, understand, and theorize!

- Laura Cude

Susie Orbach is the co-founder of the Women’s Therapy Centre in London and New York. A former Guardian (UK) columnist, she was visiting professor for ten years at the London School of Economics and is the convener of www.any-body.org. She is a consultant and co-originator of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. The author of a number of books, including On Eating, The Impossibility of Sex, and the bestseller Fat is a Feminist Issue, she lectures extensively worldwide.