Food/Porn

It starts when boys watch the way you eat. They like the way you lick your lips, the way you suck the powder of your snacks off your fingertips. When you eat something sweet and squeeze your eyes shut, they stop and stare. It’s unnerving for all of you.

As you get older and understand what this is, briefly you are flattered. You can be enticing merely by sucking an oyster from a shell, biting down on a berry. You get very popular as a dinner date. But soon, you become irritated. Overwhelmed, yes, but also bored. It’s kind of a cliché, you know? Any time you put something in your mouth you’re someone’s slut, when sometimes a girl just wants to eat some fucking ice cream.

Sometime in your thirties you start hiding to eat. Not literally, not like a spy sitting behind a bush, but you’ve become very uncomfortable eating in public. If you can’t be alone at work, you don’t eat lunch. Whenever someone retires, you sit in a corner, pull a napkin over your lips to take two bites of a brownie, and carry it around to prove you aren’t dieting.

Because that’s becoming an issue, the resentment from women who think you’re on a diet you refuse to share. It’s the first such issue in — maybe ever. You’ve never had a weight problem before, not since the mild amount of baby fat your mother fussed about dropped away in your preteens.

Of all your problems, food was something you didn’t have to think about. A missed meal here and there when you worked late, some cheesecake and cocktails at a girlfriend’s on the weekend. It all evened out, the number on the scales staying the same for a solid decade after college. Other people had disordered eating, yours was just a bit cluttered.

In fact, you worried so little about it you stopped weighing yourself. So it’s hard to tell how suddenly the problem came on: slowly, you think, over years. But now it seems to be speeding up.

You remember the day your pants felt a little loose. Then, maybe a year after that, those pants were falling down. You’d gotten out your oldest, most wishfully skinny clothes, and been surprised that they fit after all. By the next year not only were they all that fit, you’d had to buy new clothes.

By the time the problem has become noticeable to you, it has started to really alarm you. Perhaps you tried to worry about it before but it was drowned out by other anxieties. The new clothes are Size 0 and that sounds ominous, like after this there’s nowhere further to go.

You decide: screw it, you’re going to start eating more fast food, and if you have to bolt it down in your car, so be it. You start losing shirts to spilled tacos and slider sauce. You learn to keep a spare outfit in the backseat.

Even the paper sacks full of grease are somehow not putting weight back on you. At this point, though, the problem is still… mostly not a problem. People think you are on a diet and exercising and have an enormous amount of self-discipline.

You know this is not true and worry you are sick with something, even though the doctors check for everything obvious. They assure you that your metabolism is perfect, and you are in wonderful — no, admirable— health. A woman’s waistline, they tell you, is a reliable indicator of other issues.

So you thank people for noticing, even as the comments get more barbed. You can’t tell if the women are looking at you with envy, pity, or disgust, which flavor of bitter judgment it is they’ve made about you. You get used to them disliking you, though this too is a cliché that grates on you. But the men… them you find intolerable.

You’ve seen that look before, and you like it now even less. You could slip through a banister, are swayed by a stiff breeze. You’re barely more substantial than a water cracker, and they think you’re fucking delicious.

You start counting your calories in a notebook. If calories input are greater than calories burned, you are scientifically guaranteed to gain weight. You calculate your activity needs (none, now, you are too tired), take the base of 2000 calories, and add 500 as a margin of error. You add another 500 every week this fails to work.

You think about nothing but food now. Calories, fat, protein, complex carbohydrates. This has become your job, to get enough in your body to keep it your body. The last time you weighed yourself the number of pounds on the scale was a shockingly low two-digit number, but you have been eating more than enough to increase that mass. You must be.

You gave up on eating healthy weeks ago, panicking at the meager number a salad added to your total. You subsist on sausages, butter, sugary syrups. You have grown accustomed to a constant feeling of nausea and disgust. You take vitamins as an apology to yourself.

There is no need to keep checking the scale. All you need to do is eat, even if the food feels like styrofoam in your mouth, even if it strains your shrunken stomach. You have dreams about chewing, chewing and swallowing, and wake up covered in sweat. But you know that if you keep eating, the next weigh-in will show improvement.

It does not show improvement. You go to the health clinic, thinking today will be the day that you are declared unwell, that they will hook you to tubes of glucose. Your hand is trembling, not from the cold (though you feel cold all the time) but from the lack of energy. Your fingers are like sticks of sucked-down candy.

The nurse behind the counter smiles beautifully at you, and you are grateful, thinking she must be exceptionally kind; no one has smiled at you that way in months. “Oh hello!” she says. “What a pretty girl you are!” She is lovely herself, glowing with health, and looks around your age.

You meet her again at the scales where you weigh in. The number is lower. You wonder how long your organs, your brain and heart, can go on functioning. You look at the nurse expectantly, biting your lip.

She does not seem alarmed by what she sees on the blood pressure cuff, which you take as a good sign. She had to fetch the child’s cuff to fit your arm; less encouraging. She frowns at you, but perplexed, not angry. “Why are you here today?”

You lift your shirt to show her what used to be a softly rounded belly, then the flatness of abs, and has since sunk into something concave. Cavernous. “I have a weight problem.”

The sweet nurse gasps. “No, you are not fat! You look amazing! So, so good!”

You shake your head and point to the scale. “I’m medically underweight?”

“Oh?” the nurse says vaguely. “Are you?” You can see your reflection in the plastic anatomical chart hanging on the wall behind her. There is not much difference, your figure not only starkly defined but almost two-dimensional. “Well, keep up the good work!” She doesn’t see your face crumple; she’s hurrying away to help someone else.

The doctor, a man, asks if you’re a model. When you say you aren’t, he offers to make some calls to find an agent. His cousin knows some people.

You grasp the spare planes of your face, which resemble a skull from most angles. “I don’t even look human!” you scream. “I hate this, I can’t bear it!”

The doctor agrees, “That’s what’s so profoundly appealing. You don’t look like anything. Like you shouldn’t exist.” He diagnoses you as a work of art, a thing of beauty that belongs to all mankind. Your career, metaphorically but still destructively, explodes.

It’s impossible to tell, really — if your fans love your body so much because you hate it, or if they love it despite that, because it’s you. Eating, not eating, it all looks good on you, baby.

When the doctor says art, what he really means is you’ve got It, that power they talk about like it’s magic, when they want and hate it too much to name it outright. What they mean is, looking at you makes their dicks stand to attention. You have the physiological mind control of stealing blood from a guy’s brain. Taking something you didn’t ask for is still stealing.

Any of the unwanted could tell you how lucky you are. They'd curse you for thinking of it as a curse. If you asked it, these men would give you their money, their attention, their compulsively grasping hands. They have tried to give it, unasked. It is fair trade to give yourself: it costs you nothing but a pound of flesh. It is only inevitable that what is wanted should be consumed.

Any woman would die to be you.

Your corpse is the most elegant thing anyone has ever seen, they agree, and in ads for champagne with glasses whose legs are as thin as yours, its proportions are breathtaking.