Context - Eat Me

• The poem 'Eat Me' was written by Patience Agbabi
• Patience Agbabi (1965-present) is a contemporary British poet - She received her M.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Sussex and now lectures at the University of Wales in Cardiff
• 'Eat Me' focuses on male power over women's bodies - a major topic of discussion when this poem was first published in 2008, and for years before and since
• Patience Agbabi gestures at contemporary discussions of objectification and women's body image in general - Objectified by her partner, a "feeder" (that is, a person who fetishizes fat and forces their partners to get fatter), the speaker is also objectified by a wider world that demands that women be thin
• Both of these demands, the poem implies, are violent, reducing women to mere consumable bodies - The poem criticizes the very idea of women being forced to conform to any body standard
• These ideas have been important in feminist thought for a long time - Thinkers from Susie Orbach (with her 1978 'Fat is a Feminist Issue') to Sonya Renee Taylor (with her 2018 'The Body is Not an Apology') have argued that the objectification of women's bodies is all part of a deeper cultural sexism - a problem that people of all genders need to confront