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139 CHAPTER 10 Cutting in the Classroom Paula, Ralph, Judy, Christine, and Cordelia “Suddenly[,] self-cutting, a clinical problem that evokes considerable anxiety, seems to be almost everywhere, bursting onto the cultural scene in very much the same way eating disorders exploded into our awareness twenty or thirty years ago. Both are hot topics now” (Farber xxiii). So states Sharon Klayman Farber in the introduction to her book When the Body Is the Target, published in 2000. Eating disorders have long been rampant among college students, as my colleagues Mary Valentis and Anne Devane report in their 1994 book Female Rage. “It’s no wonder that today’s little girls are aware of body image at age two and three, that by fourth grade 80 percent of them are on self-imposed diets, and at twelve most girls are into serious dieting. As college professors, we know that one out of eight of our female students is using laxatives or vomiting to control her weight” (77). There is a close relationship between eating disorders and self-mutilation, as Caroline Kettlewell suggests. “I learned, just a few years ago, that among self-mutilators, as many as sixty percent report a parallel history of eating disorders: a statistic that didn’t surprise me. From the outside, their shared theme might appear to be self-destruction, but from where I’ve stood, what they have in common is something altogether different. I subdued hunger, overcame the animal self’s blind instinct for self-preservation, in search of a perfect silence” (84). Despite this link between cutting and eating disorders, many more of my students have written about the latter than the former. Is this due to the “Dodge Viper” effect? With the exception of Maryann and Paige, whom I discuss in the next chapter, I could recall only two students who wrote about cutting, Christine and Cordelia. But once I read Patty’s master’s thesis and then reread Diaries to an English Professor, I was surprised to find that three others, Paula, Ralph, and Judy, also wrote long entries about cutting. Paula’s entry appeared in the chapter “Hunger Artists,” a study of eating disorders, and Ralph’s and Judy’s appeared in “Suicide 27460 part 02.indd 139 27460 part 02.indd 139 10/2/07 2:06:30 PM 10/2/07 2:06:30 PM 140 CHAPTER 10 Survivors.” The five undergraduates offer insights into why people cut themselves, how relatives and friends react to cutting, and how they feel about their self-disclosures. The writings confirm that people cut themselves mainly because they feel psychological relief and, secondarily, to receive attention from others. Paula: “Why Does This Kind of Pain Give Me Pleasure?” Paula, a junior, began to cut herself because of her unhappiness over her parents’ divorce and her desire to gain attention from her father and boyfriend: I wonder, is masochism uncommon? Not masochism in the context of deriving sexual pleasure from self-inflicted pain, but just plain old pleasure from experiencing pain one purposefully inflicts on oneself. I am a masochist. There is sometimes an ulterior motive for my masochistic tendencies—attention . It’s strange to admit this, but I have before, and probably will again, hurt myself to gain the attention of someone else. The first time I did it was when I was in high school, and I remember being angry at my dad for spending too much time with his wife, with whom I did not get along. It wasn’t so much the time he spent with her, it was the time he didn’t spend with me, and the fact that he was in some ways becoming very much like her and seemed to want to push me away. While I was at work one afternoon during a weekend I was visiting him, I picked up a single-edged razor blade and started slicing up the backs of my hands. Nothing worthy of stitches, but I did draw blood. My dad did eventually notice at some point during the weekend, and I shrugged it off as being bored over work. Funny, I don’t remember if I achieved the desired effect—more attention from my dad. I repeated this hand-slashing action a few times during high school and my first year of college, primarily as an attention getter from my parents. Sophomore year, I remember trying to cut myself with a plastic knife, which didn’t work too well...

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