FOR about a year, I did not eat meat or fish. My vegetarianism made eating on the University meal plan difficult, and I rarely ate the entrees offered in the cafeteria. I made my meals at the salad bar or cooked a cheese sandwich in the toaster oven. Meals were almost universally unsatisfying, and I was hungry a good deal of the time.

One evening, after making myself yet another salad with cottage cheese, I brought my food tray over to the soda machine. While I was getting a soda, a residential tutor sidled up to me.

"Is that all you're eating?" she asked. When I said yes, she squeezed my arm and smiled. "No wonder you're so little," she said in a congratulatory tone.

At that point, I weighed 95 pounds. I had been losing weight steadily since the beginning of the semester, and often did not feel well. Her approval did not temper my dissatisfaction with my diet.

About a week later, I had a French oral exam with a young woman professor. After I had translated some English sentences into the preterite, she told me I had done well, and then that I looked too thin.

"You've lost a lot of weight lately," she said in her thick accent. "You are getting too thin. I know girls like to diet, but you should not. You look unhealthy. There is no fat on your face," she said, stroking her own.

"You need to eat more," she said emphatically. I don't remember if I ate more that day, but I remember feeling skeletal. I wondered if people I passed on the campus walk were staring at me, thinking how emaciated I looked.

IATTEND a supposedly progressive university. On campus, there is supposed to be some awareness of women's issues and health concerns. But the students and faculty still seem ignorant of the melding of these two into female body image. Here there is no liberalism in the treatment of this subject. A lot of people think they can lay some claim on a woman's body because of her sex; a lot of people are wrong.

When a person tells a woman how she should look or how she should live, that person is exerting a form of ownership over the woman. Ownership necessarily involves objectification, and the last thing a modern American woman needs is to be objectified in her personal life. The media objectifies her enough all by itself.

If a woman is told, "You are too thin" or "You are too fat," she has been subjected her to an overwhelmingly external evaluation. Given the importance of a woman's body image in our society, the evaluation is more than presumptious and unnecessary. It is a value judgement.

I was lunching with some women friends shortly after I had given this subject some thought. We somehow got on the topic of a male friend's girlfriend. One of my friends said she did not understand the attraction the woman held.

"She's a bitch," she said.

"And she's no string bean, either," another friend of mine said meaningfully. Then they both laughed at that, and one of us cried, "Harsh." Unduly so, because, in a way, that was the cruelest kind of dismissal.

The cruelty to that woman was distinctly misogynist. People could dismiss her as a thing rather than treating her as a person because they had the societally approved venue of evaluating her worth by her body.

It is surprising that young women, who share many of the concerns and insecurities as the anorexic or bulimic, can be so catty on an issue as important as body image. But when animals are caged, they become vicious. And as women, we are caged in bodies not ours, monopolozied by the media, by our superiors, by our friends and families.