"At the 1983 meetings of the New York Center for the Study of Anorexia and Bulimia, Steven Levenkron charged feminism with sacrificing the care of “helpless, chaotic, and floundering” children in the interests of a “rational” political agenda. Is he right? Does maintaining a continuity between eating disorders and “normal” female behavior entail a denial of the fact that anorexia and bulimia are extreme and debilitating disorders? I think not. The feminist perspective has never questioned the reality of the anoretic’s disorder or the severity of her suffering. Rather, what is at stake is the conception of the pathological as the indicator of a special “profile” (psychological or biological) that distinguishes the eating-disordered woman from the women who “escape” disorder. Feminist analysts see no firm boundary on one side of which a state of psychological comfort and stability may be said to exist. They see, rather, only varying degrees of disorder, some more “functional” than others, but all undermining women’s full potential. At one end of this continuum we find anorexia and bulimia, extremes which set into play physiological and psychological dynamics that lead the sufferer into addictive patterns and medical and emotional problems outside the “norms” of behavior and experience. But it is not only anoretics and bulimics whose lives are led into “disorder.” This is a culture in which rigorous dieting and exercise are being engaged in by more and younger girls all the time-girls as young as seven or eight, according to some studies. These little girls live in constant fear- a fear reinforced by the attitudes of the boys in their classes-of gaining a pound and thus ceasing to be “attractive.” They jog daily, count their calories obsessively, and risk serious vitamin deficiencies and delayed reproductive maturation. We may be producing a generation of young, privileged women with severely impaired menstrual, nutritional, and intellectual functioning."