How did this happen? Is this okay with everybody else? What can we do about it?
For a long time, these questions nagged at me, but I kept silent, thinking it was just the young women I knew who were starving themselves. Those to whom I did try to reach out were often dismissive. A friend studying psychology said, “Eating disorders are very individual psychological diseases, Courtney. You can’t think of them as a social problem.”
She was only partially right. Recent research does indicate that eating disorders have significant genetic and biochemical components, but other research confirms that our culture is very much an influence.
I push further: “But what about the fact that eating disorders disproportionately affect women? And what about all the girls who don’t have diagnosable eating disorders but just obsess about every little thing they put in their mouths? That may not be a disease, but it definitely affects their lives in a significant way.”
“That’s America, Courtney. That’s normal.” With that, she took another sip of her Diet Coke.
One smart feminist to whom I talked about my concerns and ideas for this book told me, “It’s been done, Courtney. Try to think of something new.” I thanked her and shut my mouth, but inside I was screaming, But this is what I’m living with! This is what I wake up in the morning to, what I walk around all day resisting, what I go to bed sad and hopeless about! Doesn’t that matter to you?
During an alumni event at Barnard College, I spoke to one of the older women at my table about my impressions of an epidemic of disordered thinking about food and fitness, how it seemed to be taking over young women’s lives. “Oh, that’s nothing new, honey,” she responded. “That’s womanhood. Women have always obsessed. They always will.”
Many women have normalized food and fitness obsessions and collectively accept that “it is just part of being a woman” to count calories or feel guilty after every ice cream cone. We feel secretly pleased when we get sick because we know we will lose a few pounds. We eat healthy portions in social situations or out on dates, but when we are home, we feel relief that we can go back to our skimpy dinners without feeling observed—a nutrition bar, a small salad with a few crackers, a bowl of spinach and a piece of dry toast, a chicken breast plain and cold. “Everybody does it,” a friend tells me. “It’s just normal now.”
But does that mean it’s okay? Does that mean I should watch a generation of promising young women devote the better part of their intellects to scheduling visits to the gym and their next meal? Does it mean that we should just continue to watch it happen and chalk it up to individual psychology, something out of our control, no chance of prevention? Is this really what it means to be a woman?
I was raised by two feminists—my mom a clinical social worker and community activist, my dad a Buddhist bankruptcy lawyer—who told me that being a woman was about freedom of choice, a culture of care, a spirit of resilience and courage. My grandmother muscled her way through the premature death of her husband and learned to pay her own bills, make her own friends, travel her own path. When I rubbed her arthritic knuckles, I knew I was touching the hand of a soldier. From watching my mom move through the world, I concluded that being a woman meant spending time on the important things— community building, learning, teaching, loving, listening, birthing, caring for the dying. When my grandmother grew frail and out of it, it was my mother who dressed her, fought for her last wishes, cried without covering her face. Womanhood, they told me and showed me, was about something solid and beautiful right in the core—a vulnerable yet unbreakable center of strength and openness.
At the center of most of the young women I know today are black holes. Next to the brilliance, and the creativity, and the idealism is a bubbling, acid pit of guilt and shame and jealousy and restlessness and anxiety. It isn’t that they aren’t driven or brilliant or powerful or determined. To the contrary, most of the women I know between the ages of nine and twenty-nine (the age range I focus on in this book) are complete dynamos. In a recent study of thirteen hundred women, half of those with eating disorders described themselves as having been “obsessive perfectionists” as early as age eight. They dominate the classrooms, score higher on the MCATs and the LSATs than their older brothers, have exhausting social schedules, run marathons, devote time to volunteer work and artistic projects, and seek out mentors far more often than their boyfriends do. From the outside, these women look like they are just about to take over the world. But on the inside is a far less powerful picture.
Anna Quindlen, in her 2005 short book aptly titled Being Perfect, wrote: “Someday, sometime, you will be sitting somewhere. A berm overlooking a pond in Vermont. The lip of the Grand Canyon at sunset. A seat on the subway. And something bad will have happened: You will have lost someone you loved, or failed at something at which you badly wanted to succeed. And sitting there, you will fall into the center of yourself. You will look for some core to sustain you. And if you have been perfect all your life and have managed to meet all the expectations of your family, your friends, your community, your society, chances are excellent that there will be a black hole where that core ought to be.”
My friends and I, girls and young women across the nation (and even, I have learned, across the world), harbor black holes at the center of our beings. We, the perfect girls, try to fill these gaping holes with food, blue ribbons, sexual attention, trendy clothes, but no matter how hard we try, they remain. We have called this insatiable hunger by many different names—ambition, drive, pride—but in truth it is a fundamental distrust that we deserve to be on this earth in the shape we are in. A perfect girl must always be a starving daughter, because there is never enough—never enough accomplishment. Never enough control. Never enough perfection.
Our mothers had the luxury of aspiring to be “good,” but we have the ultimate goal of “effortless perfection.” This was the term that young women at Duke University used to describe “the expectation that one would be smart, accomplished, fit, beautiful, and popular, and that all this would happen without visible effort” in a series of discussions held in 2001 as part of their Women’s Initiative. This is not, of course, just a Duke thing. “Effortless perfection” has become the unattainable and anxiety-producing ideal for women across the country and across the world. We must not only be perfect—as in accomplished, brilliant, beautiful, witty—but also appear as if we achieve all this perfection through an easygoing, fun-loving approach. Perfect girls are powerfully afraid of seeming too uptight, rigid, or moralistic. We don’t just want to achieve; we also want to be cool.
The “perfect” part of this equation gets us in trouble with eating disorders, or obsessions with food and fitness. The Herculean effort to appear effortless keeps us silent or nonchalant about the pain we are in.
In truth, “effortless perfection” is a hell of a lot of work. Calories, workouts, pounds, new diet trends, feeling guilty, shameful, inadequate, out of control. Imagine—no, seriously, close your eyes and imagine—the time that you spend each day thinking about food, fitness, and the size and shape of your body:
• One minute debating whether to have a bagel and be “bad” or a protein shake and be “good”; two minutes chastising yourself for choosing the bagel; two minutes contemplating how fattening the cream cheese was
• Three minutes poking your face in the mirror, feeling bad about the dark circles under your eyes
• Four minutes reading that Lindsay Lohan lost a bunch of weight; another minute chastising yourself for being so vulnerable to the media; five minutes thinking about how crazy it is that women as smart as you spend so much of their days obsessing about food and fitness
• Two minutes contemplating whether to head for the salad bar at lunch or get the chicken sandwich you actually crave; one minute thinking how hungry you still are after your salad; three minutes milling around the snack bar wondering if you should get one more little thing
• Two minutes trying to figure out when you should go th
e gym
• One minute standing in front of the coffee counter, trying to figure out what drink is sweet enough that it tastes good but doesn’t contain a lot of hidden calories
• Ten minutes talking to your friend in the student union about how much crap you drank (i.e., keg beer) and ate (i.e., 2:00 A.M. pizza) over the weekend and how gross you’re feeling
• Five minutes lying on your bed contemplating whether to go to the gym or take a nap, which you really want to do; five minutes wondering if your body looks anything like that of the girl on the treadmill directly in front of you; two minutes hating her when you decide you are much rounder
• Three minutes debating with your roommate whether to go down to the cafeteria and risk major overeating or to go out for sushi and risk major overspending; five minutes wandering around the cafeteria trying to decide what to eat that sounds good but isn’t going to make you blow up; two minutes debating whether taking the top slice of bread off of your tuna sandwich makes you look lame
• One minute resisting the temptation to get frozen yogurt; one minute recounting everything you’ve eaten that day in order to justify to yourself that you haven’t been that “bad” and deserve it; five minutes arguing with your roommate about the actual calorie content of frozen yogurt, the nutritional value of soy, and the Atkins diet
• Five minutes talking shit about the really skinny girl getting a few pieces of lettuce and pouring balsamic vinegar over it
• One minute pledging to yourself that you won’t eat one more thing the rest of the night; two minutes thinking about how little willpower you have when you eat some gummy bears out of the care package your mom sent; three minutes trying to get other people to eat some with you
• Three minutes distracted from your poli sci reading while you think about how thin you want to be by the summertime; two minutes recounting, again, what you ate all day and chastising yourself for the bagel, the frozen yogurt, and the gummy bears while trying to fall asleep; one minute planning what you will eat and when you will exercise tomorrow
Sound familiar? So many women spend at least this much time— about a hundred minutes a day—scrutinizing instead of loving their bodies. That’s one hundred minutes a day they could spend admiring the impressive curve of their shoulders, the width of their hips, the way their hair falls to one side, the baffling work of their organs and muscles. That’s one hundred minutes they could spend celebrating their creativity, curiosity, dedication, and openness. That’s one hundred minutes they could spend reading an amazing book, feeling grateful for family and friends, memorizing a poem, considering concepts of God, or taking action against global warming.
Many women waste even more time on their bodies. If the average woman spends about an hour a day contemplating her size, her calorie intake, and her exercise regimen starting at the age of twelve and she lives for eighty-five years, she will have lost over three years of her life. Three years! Most women I know get irritated if they spend more than five minutes waiting for a bus or talking to an uninteresting guy at a bar. Three years of inefficiency, powerlessness, and sheer waste should make us furious!
Yet many of the women I have spoken to over the years seem resigned to their fate of caring too much about the shapes of their bodies, despite realizing that it is a shallow pursuit. Most of them shrug when I ask the hard question: What can we do to close the gap between what we know—that body obsession is a waste of time and spirit—and how we actually lead our lives and think about ourselves? One of my mom’s wild and wonderful friends told me, “When you’re my age, you don’t give a shit about what other people think. You can eat whatever you want, wear whatever you want. Courtney, you can be whoever you want.”
“But I don’t want to wait until I’m fifty to feel that way,” I told her. And many women fifty and older still don’t feel that way.
I turned to books in hope of finding some answers. Many older women don’t understand the depth of my generation’s despair. In fact, many older women (mothers, teachers, coaches, bosses) give younger women positive feedback for their obsessive dedication to thinness or their imbalanced, insatiable drive for perfection. I certainly perceived that most of my mentors were thrilled that I felt compelled to write faster, stay longer, and sacrifice balance in pursuit of achievement. An otherwise brilliant boss once said to me, “Oh, you’re skinny, you don’t have to worry.” Does this mean, I wondered, that if I wasn’t “skinny,” I would have to worry? What exactly should I be worrying about?
Much has been written by many insightful, brave women about media and body image, food and emotions, perfectionism and eating disorders, the complexity of family and identity. In Unbearable Weight, Susan Bordo takes an academic but authentic stab at drawing parallels between the body and the culture. Kim Chernin dives into the depths of our psyches and discovers that our relationships with food reflect our relationships with our mothers and our femaleness in general. Geneen Roth, author of Feeding the Hungry Heart, reveals ways for women to become self-aware and embrace pleasure. The late Caroline Knapp’s anorexia memoir, Appetites, pushes women to consider the almost universal female struggle with “hunger.” Naomi Wolf rails against the system that grants beauty a greater value than intelligence in the influential Beauty Myth, written when she was twenty-five. The psychologist Marion Woodman quotes Shakespeare, Jung, and Donne in her books on the deadly imbalance of the feminine and masculine in modern culture and writes: “To move toward perfection is to move out of life.” Marya Hornbacher’s eloquent memoir, Wasted, is proof of Woodman’s claim—a terrifying true story of one young woman’s plunge into oblivion.
To all of these courageous writers, I am deeply indebted. This book is my own answer to the unsettling feeling I was left with even after experiencing their wisdom. I didn’t want to read psychological theory or history on eating disorders and obsessions. I felt uninspired by the fashion-magazines-are-rotting-your-mind theory, for which the filmmaker Jean Kilbourne is the pied piper in Killing Us Softly and Slim Hopes. Painting the mass media and advertising as the ultimate, deliberate evil is too simplified and unconvincing on a personal level. I’m smart. So are my friends. We were familiar with marketing and media literacy from a young age, hip to the fact that Barbie, supermodels, and the beauty industry were dangerous for our psyches.
We need a new analysis about the ways in which pop culture and the Internet age are covertly shaping our ideas about beauty and femaleness. Given all of our media training, how do fads and fasting celebrities still manage to weasel their ways into our brains and influence our ideas about our own bodies? How can we still engage with pop culture in fun and ironic ways, and even reclaim it, without being brainwashed by it?
I wanted to read a book that tried to answer these questions—a book that traced girls back to their beginnings and looked for the vulnerable moments, the tipping points. I wanted to read a book in which I could see my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood in other women’s stories. I wanted a book that communicated the complexity and danger involved in growing up a girl now, right now, a book that told the truth about my generation’s tumultuous love affair with perfectionism and showed why it is not all good.
I wanted to read Harriet the Spy-like observations of mothers and fathers and how they influence attitudes toward beauty and success. I wanted a clear picture of the tightrope on which every adolescent girl precariously balances—that feeling of never wanting to be too sexual or too prudish, too forward or too timid, too fun or too rigid. I wanted to read descriptions of the thick and sultry beat of hip-hop as it seeped out of her first boyfriend’s car, a music that would initially seduce and ultimately silence her. I wanted my generation to confirm our collective disappointment with the contemporary parade of bimbo pop stars. I wanted to read raw, honest answers to the question: What do guys really want? I wanted to read something that untangled our all-or-nothing nation’s incredibly messy knot of spin about fat, health, and willpower. I wanted to put into words the s
oaring sisterhood of team sports and also find admissions to the often dangerous level of dedication. I wanted to read the real truth about college—the lurking around the salad bar, the cosmetics kits full of laxatives—and the feeling of floating nowhere that came afterward. I wanted a call to action.
But I didn’t find that book. I found memoirs about anorexia and bulimia, painful accounts of weight obsessions taken to the extreme. I found psychological and spiritual polemics, women my mom’s age spouting hard-earned wisdom about the sacredness of the body and the goddess within. I found histories of eating disorders that revealed that problems are not new but are showing up in different, more pernicious forms. I found self-help books with bright, flashy covers whose celebrity authors exhorted us to “take back your life.”
So at age twenty-five, I figured—why not me? Why don’t I write down what I want to know—what I know others are longing to know—so that the next time a girl in Colorado Springs or Corvallis or Hartford goes searching her sister’s shelf for something that makes sense of the world, she finds a story that reminds her of her own. That makes her pain real. That makes all of our pain real.
I want this book to move us all—the prom queens and the hip-hop heads, the volleyball stars and the newspaper editors, the investment bankers and the social workers—to admit that we are sick. Because on some level, in some way, we are sick. And we are also really, truly sick of being sick.
In this book, I extricate myself from the rat race for thinness, stand still and look around, describe the textbook-case eating disorders that surround me as well as the supposedly healthy girls who spend their days writing in food diaries and feeling bad about themselves. I suggest that maybe things can be different, that maybe food obsession isn’t a necessary part of being a woman.
This book is filled with stories of my friends and my friends’ friends, and sometimes even my friends’ friends’ friends. For several years, I have sat in coffee shops and bars and taken long road trips to talk with these girls and women. I have read revealing, brave e-mails and letters from women all over the country—Hara from Jersey, Elizabeth from Southern California, and Lorie from Portland, Maine.
Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body Page 2
