by Ben Spatz
Sometimes, when I don't get a lot of sleep, I wake up with an empty ill feeling in my stomach. I love this feeling. I put on loose clothing and sip coffee in the back of a classroom, and my skin feels dry and smooth. I am surrounded by a grey wall, like my glasses when the lenses are blurred with rain. "I feel sick but I'm pretty" (Alanis Morissette).
It is natural to associate health with beauty. The funky thing that's going on in this complex trope of "sick but pretty" is that sickness rather than health is associated with beauty. But it's not just any kind of sickness. It would never include vomiting, a stuffy nose, real pain, or any such things. Those things are ugly and we all know it. A pretty sickness involves a light headache or a light fever or a light stomach ache. The essential trait of this sickness is not malfunction or pain but weakness. Weakness is the key. And as for the beauty, it's not just any kind of beauty, it's "prettiness." Being pretty is not the same thing as being sexy, attractive, or fly.
We are looking at the noble integrity of the martyr, transformed and altered by corporate America in order to sell things. We are looking at the anorexic image of the ideal woman (and sometimes man, cf Leonardo di Caprio). It's not just that we like people to be so skinny that in fact they must be sick. It's actually the sickness we enjoy. There is something about the humble suffering that we like. I like it when I wake up feeling that way. It makes me feel skinny (not "slender"), which I rarely feel.
When I wake up feeling that way, the very idea of food disgusts me. I don't think this is an effect of the cultural trope, I think it has to do with having a sick stomach. But certainly it has been co-opted by the cultural trope: I definitely have a positive feeling about the image of someone being disgusted by food. Do you?
My friend says he has no such feeling. He likes the idea of a person who is hungry but has the willpower not to eat, but in the same way he likes the idea of a person who is not hungry having the willpower to eat anyway. As for a person who is not hungry and therefore doesn't eat--he says this image is not sexy for him. Can this really be true of him? Has he really avoided this dangerous archetype where I have not? It's nice to think so...