“By the time I was thirteen, I had divorced my body,” she says. “I was sociopathic in my cruelty toward this one [animal]. When she disobeyed me-in her hunger, in her clumsiness-I was punitive and withholding. I scrutinised and criticised and denigrated her ceaselessly, even in dreams. Not before or since have I felt such animosity toward another being.” She loathed her hands, sought to make herself smaller, to erase herself, to be less wanting. 1
I have learned that I can take shape. In a pure body, polluted by readiness for the first sex, in a body that mimics those seductive ones with things to grab, or in a cold body, one with nothing to hold onto, but a hole in the stomach.
Im speaking of the need to have something to hold onto, to prove that you exist, that you have control over your growing up.
When a girl realises that she's becoming a woman, she realises the inevitable fact that she will lose the genderless status of the pre-girl. There's nothing she can do about it. I hypothesise that starving is an attempt to not only stop womanhood from setting in too quickly, too early, but also to feel as if you have a semblance of say in your own life.
