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Anna Rollins did all the right things. Growing up in a fundamentalist Christian household, she prayed, she kept herself pure — and she waged a quiet war with her own body and its hungers. As she writes in her new book Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up As a Good Girl, “ I was taught early that I was totally depraved, which meant everything I desired was bad too.”
While Rollins’s tale of her years of deprivation, bingeing, and compulsive exercising will likely resonate with anyone who has grown up in the prison of American diet culture, her nuanced exploration of the intersection of our collective obsession with women’s weight and the confines of purity culture was a bracing education for me. It’s all about, she writes, “keeping women small.”
“And not just physically small,” she told me during our recent conversation, “but keeping your focus narrow. It’s a lot of control of the self, but you’re controlling the self in order to not have as much impact in the world.”
Good girl Rollins learned early that one of the few ways women could speak from the pulpit was to talk about weight loss ministry. She would eat donuts while watching America’s Next Top Model, and then spit out her food. “I always stayed mostly within the realm of what a teen magazine would tell you was healthy,” she says now. “Because these behaviors were so normalized,” she says now, “it felt like, I don’t have a problem. This is just what good women are supposed to do. Maybe we’re not supposed to admit to the extent that we’re doing these things, but we’re all, I believed, doing it.”
Years later, “I spoke to a mental health counselor who worked with a lot of Southern Christian women,” she recalls, “and she made the observation that extreme dieting is a good girl’s drug of choice. It’s the one way you can rebel, but still receive praise.”
As the title of the book makes clear, though, Famished isn’t just about food. Rollins is also frank about her experience with vaginismus, a condition that makes sexual penetration painful. “ The numbers like one in four women who are in religious spaces, conservative spaces, they will struggle with sexual pain,” she says. It’s a sexual wellness problem — and a fertility one — often hiding in plain sight.
Despite her negative experiences, Rollins, now healthy and a mother of two, has found her way to a Christian faith today that resonates with her values. “ I think that period of questioning was really critical for me being able to stay with integrity,” she says. And she adds, "These toxic beliefs are not just in the church. It’s in the larger culture too.”
You can watch our conversation below, or if you prefer, listen to a gently edited version above or on your favorite podcast platform. Please do like and subscribe if you are so moved; it really all helps.
Show notes:
The book is called Famished: On Food, Sex, and Growing Up as a Good Girl and it’s really great.
Do subscribe to Anna’s Substack, On Writing and Publishing.
Here’s the fascinating New York Times story on atypical anorexia Anna references.
And the Self story on the high numbers of women who’ve experienced eating disorders. (RIP Self.)
Of course I’m not going to link to any weight loss ministries, but here’s a wild story from The Guardian about ‘pray yourself thin’ guru Gwen Shamblin.
The International OCD Foundation has some good information on the link between the disorder and religious scrupulosity.
Vaginismus is a serious women’s health issue. It disproportionately affects Christian women. We need to be shouting about this.
