Culture is a Cult
Mona Awad's "Rouge" shows us the way in which culture becomes a cult which we have to choose to escape for our own sanity.
Warning: This post contains themes of eating disorder behavior and online discourse around diet culture and eating disorders.
The words "Cult" and "Culture" both come from "colere," which is Latin for "to tend, guard, till, or cultivate." Culture is something into which we invest. We give it strength, power, and attention. A cult is a group that worships a focused idea, abandoning all else in the attainment of this idea. A cult is different from a religion, usually in that cults take a total investment of one's life in a way that is destructive to that person, and misleading. While religion can become obsessive, cults are so by necessity so.
In an article by the Guardian.co.uk someone asked this question. The answers, some glib, varied widely. One answer said darkly:
"WHEN it progresses from killing its members to killing non-members"
-David Lewin, Oxford
This take aside for the moment, let's turn to a more serious answer to the question which brings us back to the concerning connections between cults and culture.
"Cults, however, rely on secret or special knowledge which is revealed only to initiates by the cult's founder or his/her chosen representatives. Beliefs aren't normally published. Everything depends on a personal relationship between the founder and followers, who are required to separate themselves from the rest of the world."
-Laurie Smith, Carshalton, Surrey
This article from the Guardian brings up an interesting point: cults are all consuming because their membership is gatekept or limited to only those with secret insider knowledge. Culture, in many ways, functions in the same way.
Right now online there has been a marked increase in “skinny girl content” which I stay clear of, as someone prone to internalizing everything. Lots of people have commented on the return to an early 2000s diet culture mentality, and the total collapse of the body positivity movement.
This Youtube short entitled “Everything I Ate Today to Try and Slim Down, Rat Snack Edition,” is a snappy and concise example of this trend. Let’s quickly break down the aspects of this video, and how they relate to modern diet culture, before we zoom out our lens, and take a moment to absorb the larger ramifications and reverberations of this cultural moment.
In this video @WhitneyHolcombeWriter takes us through her day of nutrition. I have no comments on the specifics of what she eats. That is not any of my business. I do want instead to comment on a theme in this video that I have seen appear in other similar content, which is the theme of eating whatever you want, as long as you eat less. Whitney does not do this exact thing, she seems to eat healthy and balanced snacks throughout the day consisting of fruits, vegetables, fats, carbohydrates, and proteins. My concern with content like this is the message it sends off, you only need to eat a little bit, like an animal or a “rat.” I have heard advice from “thin-fluencers” along the lines of: “You can eat whatever you want, as long as you only take 2-3 bites off of your plate.”
That is an eating disorder.
