Mick Hartley

It's Susie Orbach day today in the Times. Her latest book gets a glowing review: "a smart and rich compendium of what is going on within and without our bodies today, its pages informed by Orbach's decades of clinical practice and research". Then a lengthy interview in the magazine by Janice Turner is followed by an equally lengthy extract from the new book. From the interview:

Such was the revolutionary vigour of Fat Is a Feminist Issue when it was published 30 years ago, that for a moment the screwed-up relationship between women and food looked like it could be resolved. In Susie Orbach’s urgent, crusading prose, all was illuminated: diets don’t work because they lead only to bingeing; we eat compulsively to try to soothe inner hurts or we get fat as a subconscious rebellion, to opt out of how society insists we look and behave.

It became an instant classic, a student bookshelf staple, and Orbach’s theories entered the mainstream in a thousand self-help bibles. Yet today women and food are more embattled than ever. Obesity and food disorders – which stem, Orbach believes, from one root cause, the perversion of our natural appetites – are epidemic, while female body-loathing now begins in primary school, extending even into the old folks’ home.

When the supposed cure is applied, yet things continue to get worse at an increasing pace, what do you do? If you're Susie Orbach you simply redouble your efforts. What was it Karl Kraus said? – "psychoanalysis is the disease whose cure it purports to be." Is it possible that the endless stream of "self-help bibles" are part of the problem, not part of the solution?

No tough questioning here though. Janice is in awe:

I sense she regards the journalistic interview as a shallow, shabby facsimile of what happens in her consulting rooms. Only when I blurt something personal do her brown eyes turn on me with infinite warmth and concern and I contain my urge to tell her all.

Later on:

Orbach, at 62, is a minxy dresser, bird-like yet bosomy frame in a tight black twin-set with high-heeled boots and scarlet talons.

Something we obviously needed to know, in the context of an interview with a woman supposedly battling against the tyranny of the feminine image.

And:

In Bodies, one of her few personal asides is when visiting a conference in São Paulo, Orbach realises every other female shrink of a certain age is heavily face-lifted. “A man, a perfectly lovely psychoanalyst, said [of another older woman], ‘Look at her! What’s wrong with her, why doesn’t she have surgery?’”

This surely says more about psychoanalysts than about society in general. It's inevitable, I suppose, that it would be a man she'd quote making such crass remarks. Most men, outside of psychoanalytic circles, would have a little more awareness of how offensive such remarks sound. Other women though? Well….

Later in the magazine we have the usual fashion spreads, with rake-thin models. There's a lengthy piece about top women newsreaders, "high-achieving women", as they're called - Fiona Bruce, Katie Derham, the usual suspects – and their wardrobes, favourite shops, key pieces (they mean items of clothing apparently), wardrobe malfunctions ("Wearing the same Giorgio Armani jacket as Anna Ford in a double-header") and off-air style ("Gold mock-croc Converse and Earnest Sewn jeans with a vintage Nicole Farhi jacket"). All of them are, of course, immaculately svelte. These are the parts of the magazine that men – most men, anyway – will just skip over. They're written by women, targeted at women, read by women.