Advance praise for Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters
“These beautifully written, sensitive, and empathetic stories tell the heart-wrenching truth about the critical, harmful way women and girls regard themselves—with normalized self-hate. Martin gives voice to so many who are suffering, many whose self-hatred has insidiously become part of everyday conversation. She offers the reader deep insight based on extensive research and authentic interviews, and demands that we stop settling for self-hate. Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters will undoubtedly change lives.”
—Dr. Robin Stern, feminist psychoanalyst and author of The Gaslight Effect
“Martin presents an inspirational collection of research and stories about the problem young girls are tormented by in today’s society. No ethnic group is excluded from this epidemic. Perfect girls are not anorexic daughters. The desire to be thin is masking the true underlying problem—the desire to be loved and acknowledged. This book is an invaluable tool for all of us. A MUST-READ!”
—Laura E. Corio, MD, author of The Change Before the Change
“Through fast-paced stories and conclusions based on insightful, riveting details, Martin establishes that virtually every woman is confused about food and her body. Martin ‘outs’ the still-taboo parts of this issue. Brilliant, sensitive women aren’t running the world because they’ve been conned into hating their bodies, an ever-more-appalling waste of time, energy, and resources leading to obsessive unhappiness. This book will do much to help us explore the sexy, confusing, messy subject of why women (and increasingly, men) don’t love their own bodies and nourish them accordingly.”
—Karen Kisslinger, columnist, teacher (Woodhull Institute Faculty), nationally certified acupuncturist, healer, and mother of recovering EDer
“With a sharp analysis communicated through heartbreaking stories, Martin exposes how hard most women have it these days when it comes to being secure in their physical appearance. Martin delves into the psychological, emotional and social side effects of a generation gone perfect. Anyone who has ever felt that twinge of not being good enough, skinny enough, pretty enough for the world at large should sit down with this book and see how deep the rabbit hole goes. We can only begin to act on our own behalf once we see how comprehensive this social disorder is—Martin makes it clear that the time to act is now!”
—Adrienne Maree Brown, executive director, The Ruckus Society
“Courtney Martin’s book, Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, is a courageous, intelligent, warm, and insightful deconstruction of the complicated experience of becoming a woman for this generation. She tells a new story, from the inside looking out, at the ongoing issues that anyone tuned into the media or in relationship to a young woman sees but may not understand. Her relentlessly honest and exposing account of interviews, research, and personal experience reveals a daunting reality: the self-destructive ways women cope with the impossible pressures and expectations of a society obsessed with achievement and perfection. Anyone wanting to know the truth of how our vital, brilliant, talented young female generation is slowly being eroded, and also wants to travel the road to re-empowerment, must read this.”
—Ellen M. Boeder, M.A., L.P.C., primary therapist, The Eating Disorder Center of Denver
“For health professionals, Courtney Martin gives an indispensable guide into food behavior. Using compelling personal insights, she effortlessly conveys the tangle of nutritional health and disordered eating. Stories of dieting daughters and young women seeking their worth in weight are told with uncommon wit and wisdom. Tragicomic accounts of Martin’s college experience combine with sharp analysis that anyone can enjoy and employ, from dietitians and physicians dealing with full-blown eating disorders to parents and their children who face the impossible paradox of perfect girls and starving daughters.”
—Sharron Dalton, professor of nutrition and registered dietitian, New York University, and author of Our Overweight Children: What Parents, Schools, and Communities Can Do About the Fatness Epidemic
“It was inspiring, necessary, and revolutionary for me to read this book. Courtney E. Martin has written one of the most important, comprehensive looks into the malnourished souls of today’s girls and women. You owe it to yourself to read this book and give it to every daughter, mother, and woman you know.”
—Jessica Weiner, advice columnist and author of Life Doesn’t Begin 5 Pounds from Now
“Martin asks some deep questions, ones that are both obvious and suppressed: Is women’s obsession with weight and what we eat a major contributor to women’s lack of liberation as well as evidence of it? What would happen if our minds weren’t constantly focused on how many calories we took in and whether we were ‘being good’ and not eating too much? Pulling from an army of feminist thinkers (from poet Nicole Blackman to Anna Quindlen), she makes a significant—and desperately needed—move forward in the theorizing around body image and eating disorders.”
—Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, coauthors of Manifesta and Grassroots
FREE PRESS
A division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
Copyright © 2007 by Courtney E. Martin
All rights reserved,
including the right of reproduction
in whole or in part in any form.
FREE PRESS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Certain names and identifying characteristics of individuals
in this book have been changed.
Designed by Davina Mock
Manufactured in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-8796-8
ISBN-10: 0-7432-8796-7
eISBN-13: 978-1-4165-3969-8
For my momma,
Jere E. Martin,
whose body was my first home
and whose spirit continues to be my hearth.
You are the most powerful
human being I have ever known.
And for the brave women who share
their stories in this book.
You are my hope.
Contents
Preface
Introduction
1. Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters
2. From Good to Perfect: Feminism’s Unintended Legacy
3. The Male Mirror: Her Father’s Eyes
4. (Perfect) Girl Talk: Inside Today’s Teenagers’ Minds and Stomachs
5. Sex as a Cookie: Growing Up Hungry
6. The Revolution Still Will Not Be Televised: Pop, Hip-hop, Race, and the Media
7. What Men Want: The Truth About Attraction, Porn, and the Pursuit
8. All-or-Nothing Nation: Diets, Extreme Makeovers, and the Obesity Epidemic
9. Past the Dedication Is Disease: Athletic Obsession
10. The College Years: Body Obsession Boot Camp
11. The Real World Ain’t No MTV: How the Body Becomes the Punching Bag for Post-College Disappointment
12. Spiritual Hunger
13. Stepping Through the Looking Glass: Our New Stories
Resource Guide
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
Reader’s Guide
Preface
I have carried this book around inside of me for years. At age twenty-five, far from the glutto
ny of college and even further from the angst of adolescence, I suspected I might finally be rid of the gagging noises echoing in dorm bathrooms and the scrape of plates sliding against Formica tables. I thought I might be able to feign ignorance about the next wave of thirteen-year-old girls discovering the ritual language of self-hatred—fat, disgusting, weak, worthless.
But then my best friend—one of the few girls I had ever been close to who had not had an eating disorder—looked at me, eyes wet with tears, and admitted that she had been making herself throw up after meals. I felt the hope leak out of me, like air out of a punctured balloon.
Then my small-town cousin came to visit me in the big city, and as we wandered the echoing halls of the Met, she admitted that she felt, as I had in college, often on the edge of an eating disorder. I felt rage.
Over coffee and some history homework, a fourteen-year-old girl I mentor told me that her friends thought about nothing so much as their weight. I felt dread.
My students at Hunter College, working-class, first-generation American, ethnically diverse, shocked me by standing up in front of the class and admitting to struggling with undiagnosed eating disorders for years and watching their mothers take out loans for tummy tucks.
It wasn’t just my private world either. Though few talked about it, Terri Schiavo was suspected to have had a heart attack and gone into a coma as a result of her battle with bulimia. Lindsay Lohan and Nicole Richie shrank down to nothing in plain view. Anorexic fashion models in Uruguay and Brazil, both in their early twenties, died. On websites, girls from all over the country pledged their devotion to Ana (aka anorexia) and Mia (aka bulimia)—sharing starvation tips with anyone old enough to type in a URL.
Evidence was everywhere, yet people were not talking about the cultural causes or the larger implications. Few were expressing public outrage at the amount of time, energy, and emotion being displaced onto diets and disease. When I thought about starting the conversation, it scared me. I could already hear the critics in my own head: You are making vast generalizations. You are unprepared, untrained, unqualified. How can you tell other people’s stories for them? What about men with eating disorders? What about older women? Queer folks? What about the obesity epidemic?
But the critics could not speak louder than the voices of my best friend, my cousin, my mentee, my students. The risk of having critics, I realized, could be no greater than the risk of losing more young women—metaphorically or physically. And so I sat down at my computer and did the only thing I know how to do when I am in great pain and feeling powerless: I wrote.
In the process of writing and reading and talking and thinking, I have been compelled to make generalizations. I know no other way to talk about culture. I recognize that there are women, young and old, who feel great about their bodies and won’t connect with the mental and physical anguish I describe in this book. These lucky, rare women have sidestepped the cultural imperative to be perpetually unsatisfied with their form. I hope they will share their secrets of self-protection with the rest of us.
I am not an expert on eating disorders, nutrition, health, or psychology, but I do have expertise in quiet desperation. I can spot the light fuzz that covers an anorectic’s body, the mysterious disappearances that signal bulimia, the dull cast in the eyes of a teenage girl who feels bad for eating too many cookies, the real story behind the stress fractures sustained by an avid runner who can’t take it easy. In this book, I act as an observer, an outraged idealist, a storyteller, a bleeding heart, an eavesdropper, and an ordinary young woman.
A writer takes great responsibility when trying to speak for another—whether that other is a best friend or a whole generation of women. While some of the stories in this book are based on my memory of past events, I am also honored to have been trusted by many women whose interviews fill this book. I can only hope that I do their stories and their beauty justice. Most of them have asked for pseudonyms (signaled throughout the text by asterisks). In some cases, certain identifying characteristics have been changed. A few of them have bravely opted to use their real names. I not only welcome but implore other young women to add their voices to this conversation. I do not intend to be a voice in the wilderness; I intend to be instead the first note in a chorus.
So many are suffering from food and fitness obsessions—the victims are becoming younger and younger, older and older, male, gay, lesbian, and transgender. In order to explore even a fraction of this terrain with any clarity, I had to construct limits (however artificial), and so focus on the ways in which young, heterosexual women feel and fear. What they believe men find “hot” feeds their obsessions with food and fitness. A version of this dynamic exists also between lesbian women and between gay men, but I have not gathered the evidence necessary to address the ways in which it is undoubtedly different. This is intended to be not the definitive book on food and fitness obsession, but a beginning.
The obesity epidemic, which I explore in Chapter 8, is in truth the flip side of the same coin. Being underweight or overweight so often stems from the same roots: a society of extremes, struggles for control, learned behavior, self-hatred. I talk throughout this book about food and fitness obsessions as existing along a spectrum. Being on either end of the spectrum—totally obsessed or completely unengaged—is hazardous to your health. These extremes are crippling our society’s collective economic, intellectual, and even spiritual health.
perfect girls,
starving daughters
Introduction
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we usually find it is hitched to everything else in the universe.
—John Muir
Eating disorders affect more than 7 million American girls and women, and up to 70 million people worldwide. Ninety-one percent of women recently surveyed on a college campus reported dieting; 22 percent of them dieted “always” or “often.” In 1995, 34 percent of high school-age girls in the United States thought they were overweight. Today, 90 percent do. Over half the females between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five would prefer to be run over by a truck than be fat, and two-thirds surveyed would rather be mean or stupid. The single group of teenagers most likely to consider or attempt suicide is girls who worry that they are overweight. A survey of American parents found that one in ten would abort a child if they found out that he or she had a genetic tendency to be fat.
We live in a time when getting an eating disorder, or having an obsession over weight at the very least, is a rite of passage for girls. Terms such as saturated fat and aerobic workout roll off twelve-year-old tongues. One friend told me of a group of girls in her college dorm who set dates for group bingeing. They would fill a large serving bowl with their favorite forbidden foods—ice cream, bread, cookies—then eat them, and throw them up, in tandem. An eighteen-year-old girl I met during a summer enrichment program said her friend justifies not eating bread not because she is on Atkins—which would be embarrassingly clichéd—but because she “doesn’t like the taste of carbs.” A writer for a popular women’s magazine tells me that one of her interns chews on Styrofoam peanuts because doing so gives her the experience of consuming food without any of the calories. Another friend of a friend calls up the Tasti D-Lites throughout the island of Manhattan to find out where the best flavors are so she can hit them for her daily dinner of frozen yogurt. Many women, even those who consider themselves healthy, classify what they have eaten or how much they have exercised as a marker of their worth in the world.
It is not our kindness or courage that we count at the end of the day, it is our caloric intake.
I look at the driven, diverse, brilliant, courageous, and beautiful women around me and am devastated by how many struggle with these issues. At age twenty-five, I can honestly say that the majority of the young women I know have either full-blown eating disorders or screwed-up attitudes toward food and fitness. Jen wills herself to eat, even though she still craves the high of a hollow stomach. Bonita* abandons her homework to go th
e gym with her sisters, listening to their banter about fad diets all the way there. Susan* avoids making dates that include food so she won’t have to explain her rigid restrictions. Jane* wakes up in the middle of her liposuction surgery to the haunting sound of a sucking machine. This is the daily reality of the women in my immediate circle of friends. Even those who I thought might be safe from the powerful distraction of the scale turn out to be affected once I start asking. Big and beautiful Felice starved herself skinny, only to realize that life still wasn’t perfect. Gareth, my brave fat-activist best friend, admits to me that she too has stuck her finger down her throat when the guilt over what she ate was too much to bear.
Connect the dots, and you have a tangled, paralyzing web of obsession. Seemingly isolated cases—the gagging sound in the bathroom, the family-style bowl of pasta disappearing in the night, the meticulous food diary—seen together are evidence of a larger picture of pathology. My generation is expending its energy on the wrong things. We are holed up in our bedrooms doing Google searches on low-fat foods, churning away on stationary bikes in torturous spinning classes, and feeling guilty, inadequate, shameful, and out of control in the process. We thought we would save the rain forest and find a cure for AIDS. Instead we are doing research on the most accurate scales and the latest diet trends.
Professors, sociologists, and parents have called us apathetic, but really we are distracted. We don’t have time to think about the war in Iraq, because we can’t get past the war in our own minds: Should I be “bad” and have pizza, or should I be “good” and have a salad? We can’t look up and out because we are too busy looking down, scrutinizing our bodies in magnifying full-length mirrors. Delilah* planned her day around the bathrooms on campus that were least utilized so she could vomit in peace. Jen couldn’t carry the groceries into her first house because she was too thin and had no energy. Girls and women across America turn down invitations to go to the beach because they don’t want anyone to see them in their bathing suits.
Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body Page 1
