Badriyah AlMissbah
The enormity of my desire disgusts me. I’ve stopped eating red meat because the thought of a mother cow searching for its calf while it’s digesting in my stomach makes me want to regurgitate every flower and petal that lay deep inside me. I stuffed my mouth with prose and poetry and now I sit here; my clothes falling off my bones, not knowing how to cook properly, but, when it comes down to it, none of this matters, because I feel like the Virgin Mary. Empty, holy, and worthy. The pretty girls with sauce dripping down their chins and stained cherry-red cheeks gawk at me. Mouths wide open and eyes rolled in hedonistic sin. They told me hunger is a journey and every few years I remember that I have a birthmark near my ear caused by my mom not eating a coconut cupcake when she was craving it during her pregnancy.
Voyeuristic girlhood turns into the surveillance of womanhood, with the media pushing the narrative of skinny girls shaped like an hourglass to products being pushed out every few minutes. The commodification of the female body and the female experience is nothing new. Girls with dishwater blue eyes and skin kissed by the orange soda sun appearing everywhere in the media, one is expected to fall down a rabbit hole of despair. A hypersexualized East Asian woman shoving food down her throat, she’s bound to stuff her fingers down her throat to get it out after. A somewhat private and vulnerable position turned into a perverse fantasy for some. These women act as a vessel, a fantasy, a pathway for the need to consume and consume and consume. Seeing skinny girls with perfect bodies and perfect faces fuel the fantasy while on the other hand seeing a bigger-bodied girl evokes feelings of “disgust” with comments comparing them to eating like pigs. Even the gods couldn’t escape their hunger and gluttony, Saturn ate his sons, he chewed and chewed the same bodies he created.
What might have started in Korea as an innocent thing has turned into a twisted fantasy overtaken by the male gaze. What started as a way for people to deal with loneliness and eating turned into binge eating, purging, and repeating. The pleasures women partake in are quickly taken and turned into something different, something one might call nasty, all because of men’s ever-growing appetite to consume and consume everything and anything that has women. Hunger is a journey that screams our urgency to reclaim our autonomy and to consume what was once consuming us.
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Badriya is a 16 year old from little old Kuwait! She’s a Pisces and a hardcore feminist. She loves writing essays and her favorite genre of books is women going insane. She’s been feeding nine stray cats for almost three years now and is planning on becoming a geneticist.
Diamond Gazette 