The Semiotics of Stomach Issues

on myth-making and diet food

It seems that every social media microtrend claiming to capture the essence of young womanhood has a bleeding edge. The thousand permutations of “girl dinner,” the “hot girls have stomach issues” meme, the cottage cheese moment, the “fries and caesar salad and diet coke” trend. Little paper-cuts.

But we don’t see them like this — they’re protected by mythology. Little things like diet coke and tinned fish, cottage cheese and upset tummies are modern myths. They say something about us, something we can’t say ourselves because plain language isn’t enough.

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According to the semiotics developed by Ferdinand de Saussure, an object and its linguistic representation are connected as signified and signifier. This pairing is a sign. In Mythologies, Roland Barthes writes that when a sign itself is used as a signifier, we have a myth. Barthes argues that the new layer of meaning is added to elevate a sign to a myth for cultural, political, social and economic reasons.

For example, Barthes says red wine is a myth in French culture because its image has become laden with cultural connotations, connotations that happen to perpetuate an idea of society that adheres to the current ideologies of the ruling class. Barthes discusses how red wine is seen as blood-like and purifying thanks in part to its association with Holy Communion. He notes that little care is paid to the negative health effects of alcohol, that it is instead viewed as life-giving, both calming and invigorating, both warming and cooling depending on the weather. The meaning of red wine swirls far above the material realities of red wine.

American diet culture turns random crap like hearts of palm into hypermodern myths by layering on the potent signification of beauty. Of influence, of aspiration, of discipline and work, of health and wellness, of transformation. Even, unfortunately, of weakness. Thanks to society’s ideologies on health and beauty, cottage cheese became the body of christ to white millennial women thanks to its life-giving low-carb, high-protein-ness, thanks to its squeaky white aura of cleanliness.

Barthes also discusses the myth of professional wrestling. Unlike martial arts or boxing, the purpose of theatrical stunt fighting is not to discover who will win but to act out social notions of good and evil. The spectacle involves actors portraying stereotypes of human weakness who the audience wants to see suffer, and rule-breakers who the audience wants to see punished, in what Barthes calls a theatrical version of justice.

Social media platforms are now where we assemble to enact such spectacles. Have you ever felt like an influencer or TikToker is playing a character rather than “being themselves”? How maybe they don’t get bored of filming the same video and reading the same comments every day because it’s only play-acting. We’ve built little theaters for the dissemination of discourses on beauty and health, and food, fashion, decor, makeup and wellness products serve as props. These spectacles are both entertaining and instructive, the perfect vehicle for meaning-making in the age of consumption.

Have you ever felt like a killjoy for wishing people would stop using the word “girl”?Discourses on social media are generative, enabling static objects to summon ideas that are so talked about they become self-propagating ideologies in one day. They also generate mythologies around concepts such as girlhood and womanhood. These are both reductive and infinitely expoundable, like literary motifs that stay fresh on a page despite overuse, but can’t leave it. Like Barthes said of Greta Garbo and Audrey Hepburn in “Garbo’s Face,” as a language, perhaps womanhood’s singularity is of a conceptual order, girlhood’s of a substantial order. Womanhood’s face is an Idea, Girlhood’s an Event.

If we talk about this event constantly, maybe it’ll never end.

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In terms of all the media I eat in a day, the journal articles I interact with for my job feel the most grounded. The least theatrical. Sure, there are plenty of assumptions and conflicts of interest involved in biomedical research, but to my mind the work is generally unconcerned with pop-cultural signification. This is to say that studies published in peer-reviewed journals are the only “content” items about wellness, nutrition or eating that I don’t assume are actually about beauty.

I read about a study that found disordered eating behaviors (self-induced vomiting, laxative use, fasting and binge eating) and clinician-diagnosed eating disorders are associated with a significantly increased risk of irritable bowel syndrome. The research team, led by Keming Yang of the University of Pittsburgh, found the odds of developing IBS among young people with maladaptive eating patterns were 3.42 times as high as in those without.

Clinical guidelines do not currently recommend screening for eating disorders when evaluating a patient for a functional bowel disease like IBS, so a doctor may give a patient the usual shrug of “we don’t know what causes IBS” while the cause is bleeding out right in front of them. Doctors usually prescribe restrictive dietary interventions to IBS patients, and these could do much more harm than good in patients with a history of disordered eating.

We suffer in the way diet culture tells us to, in order to be the version of beautiful that it wants us to be. And then doc doesn’t bother to ask why when we show up with chronic pain, debilitating fatigue, GI symptoms that make us low-key want to die. We return to the internet with euphemisms on our tongues and fold ill-health into our identity because the most important thing we can be is hot anyway.

Diet culture integrates disorder into the order of beauty so that one can continue existing in service of the other. And mythologies allow the perpetuation of beauty standards to be couched in doubt: One can play dumb to the super-meaning of a diet myth and say “it’s not that deep, I just like olives” when someone accuses their “girl dinner” video of promoting disordered eating.

I am not claiming that everyone with IBS has an eating disorder or vice versa. I am suggesting that the potentially causative relationship between wanting to lose weight and IBS has at least an indirect bearing on the “hot girl with stomach issues” myth and other food-related, girl-related myths. Doctors are dismissive of weight control behaviors in young women, doctors are dismissive of bowel diseases in women, society is dismissive of young women in general, preferring us as girls, so here we are, accepting of our fate, dismissive of ourselves.

To make an object culturally significant, to grant users the aura of ~*~participating in cultural significance,~*~ is to make said object intrinsically valuable, even if said object is abdominal pain or yellow mustard. And to link suffering with feminine beauty is to imbue it with a kind of holiness, making it part of the sacred mortification of feminine bodily life rather than a mere accident or insult. Now this is a comfort that I am interested in perpetuating. Now diet culture isn’t just a capitalist scam and my IBS isn’t just a meaningless source of misery and embarrassment, it’s a culturally significant experience that adds value to my identity. It’s acceptable to discuss, in esoteric terms of course, on public forums.

It’s okay, it’s hot girl stuff, I’ll go gently and rage not.