Don't Starve, Slay!

Naomi Wolf in her book 'The Beauty Myth' writes about how one who is valued by the society is fed well and women have always had to eat differently from men: less and worse. In Morocco, if women are guests, “they will swear they have eaten already” or that they are not hungry. “Small girls soon learn to offer their share to visitors, to refuse meat and deny hunger.” A North African woman described assured her fellow diners that “she preferred bones to meat. British miners’ wives eat the grease-soaked bread left over after their husbands had eaten the meat; Italian and Jewish wives take the part of the bird no one else would want.

Men, on the other hand are exempt from facing scarcity which is shared out among women and children.

Wolf also writes how men cross-culturally, men receive hot meals, more protein, and the first helpings of a dish, while women eat the cooling leftovers. Women have been taught to go with less than they need since birth earlier due to the tradition passed down through an endless line of mothers; and now being carried forward by the public's obsession with female fat, making women feel guilty about their body fat.

From birth, girls have 10–15 percent more fat than boys. At puberty, male fat-to-muscle ratio decreases as the female ratio increases. The increased fat ratio in adolescent girls is the medium for sexual maturation and fertility. Fat regulates reproduction. Underweight women double their risk of low-birth-weight babies. Fat is not just fertility in women, but desire. Research shows that plumper women desire sex more often than thinner women. Wolf says that to ask women to become unnaturally thin is to ask them to relinquish their sexuality.

The more financially independent, in control of events, educated and sexually autonomous women become in the world, the more impoverished, out of control, foolish, and sexually insecure we are asked to feel in our bodies. And for women to have equal status in the community, it is imperative for them to eat the same food as men.

Don’t Starve. Slay! is a comic strip inspired by the essay 'Hunger' from Naomi Wolf's book 'The Beauty Myth'.