cheat post as I’m going to a friends for tea (and vodka)…
Reflection on Critique
14th April 2011
Leigh Clarke
Mr Clarke responded to my presentation with a story; his mum went through a nasty divorce, lost her best friend and lost her job as a dinner lady all in the same year. She went on to get a new job in a hotel and became close friends with the manager. The manager had had a tough life but his mum and her built up a close relationship. One day the manager asked his mum to buy a pack of four white Andrex toilet tissue. His mum obliged. A few days later she made the same request and this continued for some time but there was never any trace of the tissue. Is mum was perplexed as the hotel regularly had deliveries of toilet tissue so she questioned why the need for the Andrex. After some time the manager confided that she had been eating the Andrex. She was very specific about how she would eat it. She would tear off a sheet, peel apart the two layers and eat them singly. She could get through a pack in a day. It was her way of dealing with stress in the same way a child would chew on a blanket. Some time later the manager had to go to hospital because of pains in her stomach and inside her was a huge ball of compacted paper and that was the last he heard from her.
Why did he tell me this story?
Some other toilet paper eaters
Kesha http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_kdTZK3-fcY
Crystal http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=48f_1177689142
Lance Miller http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB5hmbQAm0Q
Paper eating group http://www.experienceproject.com/stories/Have-Pica-Syndrome/898682
Pica http://discovermagazine.com/2008/mar/31-eating-paper-in-search-of-missing-nutrients
I am not eating paper. I am reading chewing and spitting it out, but despite this the idea of eating and digesting paper is what people associate with the process. It is important therefore that I take this into consideration. I have already looked briefly at eating and anxiety in my research and coincidently my sister is currently doing research on bulimia for her social studies degree. Eating is something we need to do yet eating disorders are becoming more common in the UK (Eating disorder charity beat [sic] has estimated that at least one million people in the UK are affected. The numbers involved have increased alarmingly over recent years. It can develop in boys, girls, men and women, regardless of background. As many as one woman in 20 will have some form of eating distress, the overwhelming majority of them aged 14 to 25 years old. One in a hundred women in the UK, between the ages of 15 and 30, experience anorexia. Girls as young as five are reported to be weight-conscious, and thinking about dieting. From Mind). Is it because I am a woman eating paper that it is seen as an eating disorder rather than William Pope.L’s work Eating The Wall Street Journal?
