The two figures at left and center are illustrations from fashion publications which show the average female figure in 1840 and in 1981. The notion of the ideal figure changed dramatically over this period from what we would today call "full figured" or portly to the curvaceous athletic figure in the middle. The figure at right is a rendering of an anorexia patient who shows very few signs of any physical gender other than the long hair. While anorexia occurs more frequently in women than in men, the condition in both genders is often associated with a mental and physical loss of sexual identity. Sufferers often see themselves as asexual, shunning all sexual contact and behavior. The self-imposed physical emaciation of anorexia fulfills that perception by removing as many physical traces of sexual identity from the body as possible through starvation alone.

Return to Involuntary Amorphology