ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that many anorexics can be understood as particularly entitled girls and women engaged in a desperate attempt to ward off oppressive impositions of heterosexual femininity. In demonstrating the psychic and social parallels between women's anorexia and men's bigorexia, it shows that female anorexia can be more fruitfully read neither as an obsession with getting men's sexual attention, the striving for heterosexual femininity gone fanatical, nor an unentitled abstinence from "sexuality". While feminists have thus far argued that women are trained, anorexics even more than the others, to value the slender ideal, the chapter have argued that anorexics retreat from it. Surviving anorexics finally notice the irony that they are controlled by their desire to control, and surviving bodybuilders ultimately admit that they never achieved the happiness and security they thought their pursuit would bring them.
