Two Women on the Shore (1898) | Edvard Munch

Holy Appetites

The first thing girls are taught about God is that a woman ate and man fell. That her appetite doomed us. We’re told that a woman’s desire, her want for anything, is apocalyptic. 

But I had never felt more holy than when I was hungry.

Self-denial is sanctified when you’re a girl. It feels religious to refuse the cake, like prayer to put down the fork and say, “No, thank you. I’m full.” 

***

The same day I wrote in my diary “I’m getting baptized on Sunday,” I also recorded, for the first time, how much I weighed. I hadn’t even started high school yet, and a few lines down from the announcement of my pending salvation, I wrote that I wanted to “eat good and lose weight.” 

It was 1998, a year that saw the fervent, fevered rise of purity culture. A year when high schools and public parks around the country hosted purity festivals and purity balls where teenage girls accepted lollipops and little rings as part of public pledges of chastity to their fathers, taking vows to remain virgins until marriage.

It was also a time when teen magazines offered “15 ways to get him to want you bad,” while revealing “what guys really think of fast girls.” You could flip through the pages of YM and Seventeen and find out how to “bikini-proof your pig-outs,” and read harrowing personal essays about “what it’s like to be the fat girl.”

It was 1998, too, when twenty-four year old Monica Lewinsky was both fat-shamed and slut-shamed for her role in a consensual affair with President Bill Clinton. We watched as the media condemned and caricatured her as a kind of modern day, pop-political Eve—too hungry, too sexual—all of her appetites unforgivable sins cast against American Christian values. 

A woman ate, and man fell.

I remember being plunged into the baptismal pool that sweaty, summer Sunday, trying to feel God, promising to be good. I remember the rainbow light from the stained glass above me shattering across the sanctuary. I remember the sloshing pool, how my body felt huge displacing all that water as the preacher shoved me under. How afterward, to celebrate, my parents took me out to eat.

***

Before she was a saint, Saint Catherine was a girl. Her name was Caterina, and she was born in Siena around 1347.

Around the age of six, Caterina saw a vision of Christ hovering above the Dominican church in her neighborhood as she walked home. This vision changed the course of Caterina’s life. By seven, she’d taken a vow of chastity, eternal purity, promising her young body to God.

Caterina also grew up watching her beloved older sister, Bonaventura, refuse food until she eventually starved herself to death. 

Caterina was about 15 when her sister died, and her parents, in search of a husband for Caterina, tried to arrange a marriage between the future saint and her widowed brother-in-law. Instead of agreeing to their demands, Caterina cut off her hair down to the root and stopped eating, starving and disfiguring herself not only as a way to defy her parents, but to demonstrate her unshakeable will and piety, her body’s fevered devotion to Christ.

Caterina subsisted for many years on water, bread, and raw vegetables before eventually refusing food and water altogether, consuming only the Eucharist as sustenance. After swallowing even the smallest amount of food, Caterina would gag herself, shoving an olive or fennel branch down her throat to induce a purge. She also punished her body for other sinful impulses by piercing her breasts with nails. 

By thirty-three, Caterina had wasted away, dead from complications of starvation.

It’s said that Caterina miraculously received the stigmata, the wounds of Christ, that she was exalted and deified shortly after she died. The Catholic Church canonized her in 1461, declaring her Catherine of Siena, patron saint of Rome, her experience of “suffering through starvation” transforming her into a model of goodness and girlhood that would influence other teenage girls on their quests to become holy. 

Saint Catherine practiced what some historians now refer to as anorexia mirabilis—a “miraculously inspired loss of appetite.”

Anorexia mirabilis, or holy anorexia—a term coined by historical scholar Rudolph M. Bell—was primarily a medieval Catholic affliction. Predominantly affecting teenage girls, holy anorexia was characterized by punishing asceticism and abstention not only from food, but from sex, too, in the name of Christ. It was an ascension beyond the body, a display of power and control for girls who otherwise had no power at all.

“Holy anorexia involves a need to establish a sense of oneself, a contest of wills, a quest for autonomy,” Bell writes in his seminal book on the subject, noting that “appetite and sexual drive are related but distinct parts of a constellation of bodily urges that the holy anorexic seeks to tame and, ultimately, to obliterate.”

For holy starving girls like Saint Catherine, wrote Bell, “to obliterate every human feeling of pain, fatigue, sexual desire, and hunger was to be the master of oneself.”

British writer Hilary Mantel echoed this 20 years ago in an essay for The Guardian. 

“The anorexic, holy or otherwise, makes her own laws.”

***

The first CDs I bought with my own money were Steady On by Point of Grace, an all-female Christian pop trio, and Britney Spears’s …Baby One More Time. 

Roughly twelve years old and newly baptized, on Sunday mornings I would listen to Point of Grace sing about virtue and the second coming on the way to Bible school, then sit in our church’s basement and read Genesis. 

The Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” And the woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”

I read the stories of disobedient women like Lot’s wife, with her pillar of salt, and I read Proverbs. 

Such is the way of an adulterous woman; she eateth, and wipeth her mouth, and saith, I have done no wickedness.

And then I would go home, lay on the floor of my bedroom and listen to Spears’s tinkling, yearning, pop star croon, her loneliness killing her, a confession that she still believed.  

I’d seen magazine photos of Spears in her sexy, Catholic-inspired pleated skirt taped to the inside of boys’ lockers at school, her picture hung against the metal like a holy card. I’d glimpsed the boys gawking at her body with worshipful, hungry gazes, a body that was taut, and tan, and completely different from my own.   

I didn’t quite understand yet what those boys were worshipping, but seeing them supplicated before her meant there was a kind of power in looking like Spears, in maybe offering something you weren’t supposed to give away. I began to feel it, a want for that kind of power, and a curiosity about how to get it.

It didn’t take long to figure out that power like that was dangerous for a girl and that it required sacrifice at the level of the body.  

Matthew 5:6: Blessed are the hungry. 

***

Saint Catherine may be the most well-known and researched of the holy anorexics, or “fasting girls,” but she wasn’t the only medieval girl to practice divinely inspired self-abnegation. 

As a teenager, Wilgefortis of Portugal, a folkloric saint whose name means “courageous virgin,” was promised by her father to a pagan Moorish king. Wilgefortis defied her father’s wishes by taking a vow of chastity. As part of her revolt against the arranged marriage, she also prayed to God that he would make her ugly, and she began starving herself. As punishment for her defiance, her father sentenced her to death by crucifixion.

Columba of Reiti, inspired by the short life of Catherine of Siena, took a vow of chastity to avoid being partnered off by her father in an arranged marriage. Like Catherine, Columba is said to have seen a vision of Christ surrounded by saints, a vision that compelled her to devote her life to God. Like Catherine, Columba’s protest against her forced marriage included holy anorexia, which she would eventually succumb to at the age of thirty-four. Columba also engaged in acts of religious masochism to quell her lust, wearing a coarse hairshirt and sleeping nightly on a bed of sharp thorns. She was revered as a holy mystic, a symbol of aspirational piety. The Catholic Church beatified her when she died.   

It’s hard to imagine now, girls weaponizing their beauty and their bodies—mutilating, punishing, starving themselves to death—as something to be celebrated, immortalized, and worshiped. 

But it’s also not that hard. 

***

As a very little girl, my dad often forced us to stay at the kitchen table until our plates were scraped clean. He’d hover and glare. I’d gag down meat, peas, piles of spaghetti, eager to earn both his praise and his permission to get up and leave. 

As I got older, there were still rules about how much of my dinner I had to finish before I could be dismissed. To my father, any food left on the plate was an arrogant display of ingratitude for how hard he worked to put it on the table. I swallowed my food and my fury with every bite he watched me take. 

By the time I entered high school in the early 2000s, I was writing feverishly in my diaries about self-imposed elimination diets and starvation rituals. I wrote about eating hot dogs and pepperoni, how I viciously punished myself afterwards with crunches and fasts. 

The summer between my freshman and sophomore years, while I prepared for a June beauty pageant, I wrote in my diary that I needed to “shed some pounds and inches,” so I severely restricted my food and vowed that summer to drink only water and milk.

Spears had since been banished to the back of my CD rack, but culturally, she was still ubiquitous—on television being hounded in interviews about the size of her body and the state of her virginity, panting and sweating against the heavy-handed back beat of “I’m a Slave 4 U.” I saw her on stage at the MTV VMAs in a lily white wedding gown, kissing Madonna as she sang “Like a Virgin,” on the cover of Entertainment Weekly, dressed again in white, hands clasped in prayer behind the cover line, “Britney Spears, Nobody’s Angel.” 

I’d outgrown my curiosity about Spears’s pop tart sexuality by this time, despite being so indelibly shaped by it. I was angrier now, hungrier, and listening devotedly to women like Fiona Apple instead. Apple was moody and wraith-like, perpetually pouting, relentlessly crooning about the miseries of being a young woman. 

I related to how raw Apple was, how disaffected. Her feelings sounded big like mine, burned like mine. And not only did I want to ache like her, with that kind of sadness that felt almost sensual, but like my pre-teen fascination with Spears, I also longed to look like her—collarbones jutting out like cliffs, hip bones sharp as a cleaved edge, shoulder blades as pronounced as angel wings. Like Apple, I wanted the physical appearance of my body to serve as a manifestation of the inward discipline I was desperately trying to cultivate—a hunger I was determined to overcome. 

When Apple was twelve, a man followed her home from school and sexually assaulted her outside the door of her mother’s apartment. She spoke about this reluctantly in interviews, and about her subsequent struggle with disordered eating, how she would refuse certain foods or only eat foods that were a specific color.

“That was the only way for me to take control of my life,” she told Rolling Stone in 1998. “For me, it wasn’t about getting thin, it was about getting rid of the bait that was attached to my body. A lot of it came from the self-loathing that came from being raped at the point of developing my voluptuousness.”

Columba of Reiti haunts this story. 

In Holy Anorexia, Bell recounts young Columba’s attempted rape by a group of local men. 

“They began to rip off her clothes,” he writes, “stopping only momentarily when they heard what they took to be the jingling of coins in her pocket, but that turned out to be the noise of her crucifix hitting her flagellum as the attackers jostled her about. Still they tore away her vestments, stripping Columba down to the iron belt three fingers wide with which she punished her naked hips, and then to her hairshirt with two studded iron chains strapped around her neck and across her breasts.”

Seeing her body bound by instruments both punishing and protective, “the two young rapists ran off,” writes Bell, “while the older man fell to his knees and asked for prayer…”

In the video for her hit single “Criminal,” a gaunt, 18-year-old Apple spends most of the song supplicated on her knees, crawling on the floor or draped across the lap of a man whose face we can’t see. She looks through the camera at the viewer and begs for absolution–wanting, she aches, to suffer for her sins. 

To atone for her sins, Saint Catherine regularly and violently punished herself. She slept with a hard wooden board boring into her spine and often bound her hips with a chain so tightly that it welted her skin. 

“Three times a day she flagellated herself with an iron chain,” Bell writes, “once for her sins, again for the living, and then for the dead…Each beating lasted for one-and-a-half hours until blood ran from her shoulders to her feet.”

I felt hunger in a new way the first time I consensually offered my own body to a boy. It was an appetite I allowed myself to satisfy, a craving I succumbed to willingly. But afterwards, I became a vegetarian and stopped eating sugar. Atonement. Indulging one hunger meant punishing another. Devouring demanded abstention.

***

By the time I’d reached my late teens and early 20s, I’d given up on relying on strength of will to stop myself from eating. Instead, like so many other girls at the time, I began eating Adderall and Vyvanse to annihilate my appetite. 

The pills were an answered prayer taken like a sacrament two or three times a day until all the want in me was completely hollowed out. Each trip to the bathroom scale felt like a confession, each pound lost, an ascension. 

This was still the early 2000s, when pop stars like the wholesome, virginal Jessica Simpson were ruthlessly fat-shamed in the press for weighing more than 100 pounds. When Spears’s formerly worshipped figure was now fodder for fat-shaming tabloids. When an entire pro-anorexia trend called “thinspo” blossomed on Tumblr, deifying skeletal girls who looked ill as the pinnacle of glamour. 

Journalist Hadley Freeman, who was hospitalized multiple times for her own struggles with disordered eating, is referring to this period of time when she writes in her book Good Girls: A Story and Study of Anorexia that “there has never been a more perfect expression of that feminine desire for self-erasure than ‘size zero.’”

***

It is important to note the distinctions between holy anorexia as Bell describes it, and the modern-day diagnosis of anorexia nervosa—between the spiritual asceticism of saints like Catherine and the willful starvation practiced by girls who suffer from its modern manifestation.

For girls like Catherine and Columba, abstaining from food was a religious concern, one in which their souls were at stake. For teenage girls diagnosed with anorexia nervosa—the most deadly mental illness—the pathological concern is with the body. But the two conditions share many mechanisms. And if you understand the medieval occupation with holiness as parallel to our modern-day pop cultural obsession with thinness, as William Davis proposes in the epilogue of Holy Anorexia, there’s hardly any difference at all.  

During Catherine’s adolescence, during Columba’s, “women were presented with specific models of holiness toward which they could aspire,” Davis writes. “Similarly, in contemporary western culture, thinness is constantly extolled as the feminine ideal.” 

Girls profiled in the 2022 Jezebel piece, “A Sin to Eat: The Untold Story of Anorexia as Religion,” by Emma Madden, saw their disordered eating as both a spiritual and visceral practice, an avenue through which they could feel wholesome and clean.

“I want to be skinny so I can feel like an ethereal angel,” says a girl Madden identifies as Amelia. “If I can make it through the day without binging, then I can be pure and good. It’s almost like my own religion.”

“This devotion to skinniness isn’t unique to [Amelia’s] generation,” Madden reminds us. “There exists a near-ancient relationship between spirituality, religion, and disordered eating. Amelia’s world fits into a remarkably linear history—from Eve’s biting of the apple to the very first online forums—through which the spiritual and religious have commingled with the desire to be eminently thin.”

To be clear, I was never officially diagnosed with anorexia as a teenager. But that is not because I didn’t have it.

In part, it’s because we could not afford the type of psychological intervention that would’ve produced such a diagnosis. But primarily, it’s because when a teenage girl wants to disappear herself, when she starts to eat less or goes on a restrictive diet, when she stands in front of a mirror and pinches her thighs until they welt and bruise, and viscously compares herself to pop stars on TV, it isn’t seen as deviant until it’s nearly too late. 

In fact, it’s often seen as the opposite, as ubiquitous as first crushes and first kisses, an inevitable part of the project of girlhood. 

***

It’s difficult to reconcile the disordered eating of my adolescence with the grown woman I am now—a woman who identifies as a feminist, who better understands the dark and varied machinations of religion and patriarchy, who sees how those punishing ideas of purity and femininity serve to further their aims. 

At the time, however, my refusal to eat, to strictly control what I consumed in defiance of the adults around me, felt subversive. When men rewarded me for my thinness with their approval and attention, I felt powerful. When my father could not force me to finish my meal, it felt like a triumph. Taking a pill that allowed me to go whole days without eating—even though it caused my hair to fall out and my skin to bruise—made me feel like a god. 

Freeman gets at this complicated friction in Good Girls when she writes, “the effects of [anorexia] are antifeminist, in that it reduces women to a helpless, self-destructive, childlike state. But its intent is often inadvertently feminist, because it is a rejection of all this nonsense…We don’t want to be pleasing, we don’t want to have to say yes all the time…Maybe those self-denying medieval girls weren’t saints; they just didn’t want to get married at 10 and starved themselves into a convent instead. They rejected the life laid out for them. They said no.”

I am still not free of that old longing. I can still hear the shadowy hum, that crystalline feeling of a want transcended, of a hunger refused. Even today, knowing all that I know, instead of feeling satisfied after a good meal, I struggle with the notion that, like Apple, I’ve been a bad, bad girl. 

The difference now is that I’ve learned that true salvation doesn’t come from denying my want, but honoring it. That true transgression is not turning away from all of my body’s hungers, all of its delicious desires, but shamelessly indulging them.

We still cast women out of the garden for refusing to follow the rules, for eating, taking, consuming when they are hungry. But today, I eat the apple anyway and feel in the bite something like absolution. Something like grace. 

---

BETH WARD is an award-winning journalist, editor, and arts critic writing about books and art, bodies and place, feminism and folklore. She holds an MFA in narrative nonfiction from the University of Georgia. She focuses primarily on women’s histories and women’s stories. Her features, essays, interviews, and criticism appear widely in publications including Pleiades: Literature in Context, Oxford American, Hyperallergic, The Rumpus, Iron Horse Literary Review, NPR, BUST, Bitter Southerner, and elsewhere. She is a regular contributor to UK-based Cunning Folk magazine and currently serves as Reviews Editor for Pleiades.

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