Yeah, I know that we're all supposed to feel really bad for anorexics. After all, they're just vulnerable innocents thumbing through Vogue, clicking past the Daily Burn, when suddenly corporate capitalism—with its slimy strategies of exploiting never-fulfillable consumer desire—forces them to starve themselves to incapacity or death. Now hear this: If you're going to kill or thoroughly disable yourself because your ass is bigger than Kate Moss's or your arms are flabbier than Naomi Campbell's, you are a moron no more deserving of social pity than snowmobilers who drive drunk into trees.

What is it about anorexics that makes them so irreproachable? Is it the "puppy principle" —the way anorexics have cuddly-fuzzy hair and (relative to their body size, anyway) really big eyes? Yeah, yeah, I know that anorexics see a world gone wrong and pitifully strive to control the only thing they can, their bodies. But I can think of a lot of other freaks who misguidedly seek to manipulate their pitifully small worlds, too—child abusers, alcoholics, Marv Albert. At least we're allowed to get angry at these guys, while the only allowable response towards anorexics is pity.

There are plenty of good reasons to be pissed at anorexics, but the reason they offend me so much is purely historical. Self-starvation was, in the early part of this century, perhaps the most effective means of bringing about social change available to women. The first suffragists (not "suffragettes," which was a pejorative term), for example, found fasting to be the heart-string-tugging last straw that finally got the rest of America to take their desire for the vote seriously—even though women finally got the vote only after many more years of struggle. But women, try starving yourself today and you'll simply be written off as another victim of the Victoria's Secret catalog.

This past summer you might have seen some articles ballyhooing the 150th anniversary of the "Declaration of Sentiments," the 1848 manifesto which demanded full political and property rights for women. However, unlike, say, the Declaration of Independence, which was almost immediately effective, the goals set forth in the Declaration of Sentiments weren't attained for 70 years. By the early years of the 20th century, women had wasted half a century rallying, writing letters, and signing petitions for the right to vote. The sight of suffragist protests in front of the White House, for example, had become so taken-for-granted that they were featured in tourist guidebooks.

The Feds' response to the suffragists' peaceful protests was to imprison these women, keeping them out of the public eye for lengthy sentences. To combat this campaign of "silence through sentence," Wallace Dunlop, one of the many oft-imprisoned women on the front lines of the movement, decided that the suffragists must begin starving themselves. As Annie Kenney explained in her 1924 memoir, Memories of a Militant, "In 1909 Wallace Dunlop went to prison and defied the long sentences that were being given by adopting the hunger strike. 'Release or Death' was her motto. From that day, July 5th, 1909, the hunger strike was the greatest weapon we possessed against the Government..." Before long, thanks to threats of widespread hunger strikes among imprisoned suffragists, their sentences grew shorter—they'd won their first battle.

Hannah Mitchell, another suffragist jailbird, wrote in her posthumously published book The Hard Way Up (1956) that "20 years of peaceful propaganda had not produced such an effect, nor had 50 years of patient pleading which had gone before." Why was self-starvation so politically effective? Because it supplied a scenario of inherent drama for the newspapers ("Day 10 with nothing but water!" "Day 12!"), casting the government in the role of active tormentor; and because, as a non-violent protest, it de-fanged the suffragists' opponents' claims that women seeking (or given) political rights were unfeminine. Most importantly, however, self-starvation proved to the world that the suffragists were serious enough about their cause to die for it.

Of course, every form of protest has a built-in brutal response: Passive resisters at sit-ins get the firehose turned on them; starving suffragists in both the U.S. and England were force-fed. In a manner so phallic that it would be ironic were it not so horrible, imprisoned suffragists who refused to eat were handed over to gangs of doctors and wardens, who forced feeding-tubes down the hunger-strikers' throats. In England this forced feeding was done by prying open the jaws—often with steel forceps, damaging teeth and jawbones—and inserting a tube. In the United States rubber hoses were forced through women's noses and into their stomachs. This process often resulted in rupture of the alimentary canal or stomach, killing the suffragists.

In 1914 Djuna Barnes, a star columnist for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle before she became a novelist, decided to endure a forced-feeding for herself, in order to write an article that "offered sensations sufficiently poignant to compel comprehension of certain of the day's phenomena." As she described it:

It was the most concentrated moment of my life. [...] All life's problems had now been reduced to one simple act—to swallow or to choke. It seemed years that I lay there watching the pitcher as it rose in the hand of the doctor and hung; devilish, inhuman menace. In it was the liquid food I was to have. It was milk, but I could not tell what it was, for all things are alike when they reach the stomach by a rubber tube... Unsuspected nerves thrilled pain tidings that racked the area of my face and bosom. They seared along my spine. They set my heart at catapultic plunging. [...] Still, the liquid trickled irresistibly down the tubing into my throat; and every drop seemed a quart, and every quart slid over and down into space. I had lapsed into a physical mechanism without power to oppose or resent the outrage to my will. [...] There it is—the outraged will. If I, playacting, felt my being burning with revolt at this brutal usurpation of my own functions, how they who actually suffered the ordeal in its acutest horror must have flamed at the violation of the sanctuaries of their spirits.