According to one theory, compulsive eating among most women represents an unconscious rejection of the roles and behaviors traditionally perceived as "feminine" by our society. To examine this issue, 162 college women were surveyed with self-report measures assessing sex-related attributes, covert hostility, compulsive eating, and dieting. Results contradicted the theory: Though compulsive eaters tended to perceive themselves as relatively low in feminine qualities, they desired to be more, rather than less, feminine. In contrast, restrictive dieters perceived themselves as being relatively high in feminine traits. Demographic and experimental variables together accurately predicted 27% of the variance in the Compulsive Eatirig Scale, 17% of the variance in the Dieting Scale. Compulsive eating and dieting were each associated with the perception that mother had played a relatively traditional feminine role within the family. Need for Social Approval emerged as a variable of paramount importance, both in relation to compulsive eating and in relation to subjects' perceptions of sex-typed attributes. In toto, results suggested that compulsive eating may have been a response to feelings of inadequacy, and that dieting was inherent in "femininity,"as it was defined by young adults.
Disordered patterns of eating have consistently been associated with female populations. This has been true for serious syndromes, like anorexia nervosa (self-starvation) and bulimia (episodic binge-eating