What I first thought was an American problem turns out to be insidious almost anywhere that food is not scarce and MTV appears; Tatijiana from Germany, Hiromi from Japan, and Anna Rose from London told me how weight obsession plays out in their home countries. Recent research confirms that more than forty countries report eating disorders, including seemingly unlikely locales such as Nigeria, India, South Africa, and Mexico.
Japan’s “culture of cute” (kawaii bunka) encourages rampant eating disorders; a 2001 National Nutrition Survey reported a 100 percent increase in the rate of underweight Japanese women since 1990. A 2003 study of high school girls in Hong Kong found that though only 4.80 percent of them were overweight, 85.16 percent wanted to weigh less. Another in an all-female kibbutz in northern Israel found that 85 percent of adolescent girls were dissatisfied with their figures, 63 percent were considering a diet, and 60 percent were afraid of “losing control over their weight.” Almost a quarter of girls from the United Arab Emirates, according to a recent study there, are unhealthily preoccupied with food and fitness. The Independent, a London paper, recently reported that more than 1 million people in Britain now suffer from eating disorders. An unprecedented law passed in Buenos Aires requires retailers to carry sizes above the U.S. equivalent of a size six after the government recognized that healthy women in this eating disorder-infested country couldn’t even find clothing to fit them.
I have spent hours on the phone with women as young as eleven and as old as eighty, mulling over this undeniable problem and possible solutions. Many of their stories echo one another despite biographical differences.
Many conversations I have had recently with women my age and younger start out centered on “a friend.” You know who you should really talk to, they tell me, is my high school best friend, Olivia. She was really screwed up about food. Or I mean I’m not totally happy with my body, but I would never starve myself. Unlike my cousin— now, that’s who you should really interview if you want an intense story. If I stick with it long enough and explain that I am actually interested in talking to women with a range of perspectives, the pronouns shift—she becomes I. Sometimes this shift happens unconsciously: Yeah, she got into really bad cycles with fasting and exercising excessively. It’s like you try to eat right and avoid bad foods, and then I feel guilty when I cheat and I’ll go the gym and work out a lot to try to make it right again. I rewind, listen again, and wonder at the seamlessness of the transition.
I have mined my own childhood for the defining moments when I learned that my body was a currency and my ability to control, confine, and cultivate it one of my most difficult charges as a girl. I have used my story as a backdrop throughout the book, a benchmark to understand what is peculiar to my middle-class suburban white background, and what speaks to a larger truth about growing up a girl in the dusk of the twentieth and the dawn of the twenty-first centuries. I realized, as I gathered the vulnerable, emotional stories, that I would have to be just as open and revealing as the women I interviewed.
Some of the experts I respect most, the ones who seem most attuned to the lives girls are actually leading rather than stuck to old theories or misleading statistics, heard about my project and said, “Finally. Finally, your generation is finding its own voice.” These psychologists and nutritionists care more about healing people than about being right. They are expert at sitting with someone else in pain, being quiet, telling their own stories if it helps. They informed my thinking greatly.
In swimsuit dressing rooms, Girls Inc. summer camps, conventions for eating disorder specialists, third-wave feminist work groups, Overeaters Anonymous meetings, and high school dances, I have taken furious notes on the ways in which women’s ideas about their own bodies dictate their behavior. At the recent wedding of a childhood best friend, I went into the bathroom and heard the distinct sounds of a girl making herself throw up. When I told my boyfriend, he joked that he was surprised I didn’t crawl up the side of the stall next to her, peer over, and ask, “Do you want to be in a book?”
Girls understand their own bodies and their power in the world through a strange and complicated mix of influences—television, radio, magazines, movies, health class, their mothers, their fathers, their siblings, their boyfriends, their genetics, the Olympics, porn, the prom, et cetera. Television reflects this culture, from I Want a Famous Face on MTV to the constant references to size and shape on talk shows and sitcoms. And women’s magazines, with rare exception, are notorious incubators of the worst of our fears and phobias. As Pink so pointedly satirized in her 2006 “Stupid Girls” video, the vacuous lyrics and political personas featured in Top 40 fare are rife with messages about the preeminent importance of women’s bodies with little mention of their minds.
Further, a variety of experts—including psychologists, spiritual advisers, self-help gurus, and Girl Scout leaders—profess to have the answer to girls’ problems. But the true authority on a young woman’s battle with her own body is the woman herself.
I have listened to the stories of the girls I met and asked them personal, necessary questions, trying to understand the larger implications of their suffering. Sometimes I have tried to understand the importance of the things they cannot see or say. Their stories paint an authentic, sometimes unexpectedly funny, sometimes painful, often powerful, and ultimately hopeful picture of what it is like to grow up in this body-preoccupied time.
I believe in the possibility of a world where a girl doesn’t learn how to count calories at the same age she learns algebra. I believe that my generation can raise our daughters to believe they can be anything but that they do not have to be perfect at everything. There is room to believe that you, the reader, can see yourself in some of the stories contained within this book and find some kind of peace in that recognition.
I set out asking: How did we become so obsessed with perfection, so preoccupied with food and fitness, and what can we do to reclaim our time and our energy? Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters is my attempt to answer, one story at a time.
1. Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters
There is a girl, right now, staring in a mirror in Des Moines, scrutinizing her widening hips. There is a girl, right now, spinning like a hamster on speed in a gym on the fifth floor of a building in Boston, promising herself dinner if she goes two more miles. There is a girl, right now, trying to wedge herself into a dress two sizes too small in a Savannah shopping mall, chastising herself for being so lazy and fat. There is a girl, right now, in a London bathroom, trying not to get any vomit on her aunt’s toilet seat. There is a girl, right now, in Berlin, cutting a cube of cheese and an apple into barely visible pieces to eat for her dinner.
Our bodies are the places where our drive for perfection gets played out. Food is all around us, as are meals and the pressure that goes with them. Well-intentioned after-school specials teach us, from a very young age, how to purge our snacks. We are inundated with information about “good” and “bad” foods, the most effective workout regimens, the latest technological advancements in plastic surgery. We demand flawlessness in our appearance—the outer manifestation of our inner dictators.
To some degree, this makes sense. People in general like to look at a pretty face—which means they also like to be friends with a pretty face, do business with a pretty face, and marry a pretty face. Attractive people are desired and coddled in our society; they have an easier time getting jobs, finding boyfriends and girlfriends, getting parts in music videos, simply getting the average waiter’s attention. Even smart girls must be beautiful, even athletes must be feminine. Corporate CEOs, public intellectuals, and even accountants must be thin. Lorie, an eighteen-year-old from Portland, Maine, wrote, “Everyone wants to be skinny, because in life the skinny one gets the guy, the job, the love.” A ten-year-old girl I interviewed in Santa Fe, New Mexico, broke it down for me even further: “It is better to be pretty, which means thin and mean, than to be ugly, which means fat and nice. That’s just how it is.”
The cruel irony is that although we become totally obsessed with the daily measures of how “good” or “bad” we are (refused dessert = good; didn’t have time to go to the gym = bad), there is no finish line. This weight preoccupation will never lead us anywhere. It is a maniacal maze that always spits you out at the same point it sucked you up: wanting. We keep chasing after perfection as if it is an achievable goal, when really it is the most grand and painful of all mirages.
Beauty is the first impression of total success. Social psychologists call this the halo effect: We see one aspect of a person—such as her nice hair—and assume a host of other things about her—that she is wealthy, effective, and powerful. Looking good indicates control, dedication, grace. If you are beautiful, we learn, you are probably rich, lucky, and loved. You are probably sought after, seen, envied. You probably have ample opportunities for dates and promotions. Our generation does not generally equate beauty with stupidity the way our parents or grandparents sometimes did. Beautiful, to us, has come in savvy packages—Tyra Banks creating her own empire, Candace Bushnell writing her way into four-hundred-dollar Manolo Blahniks.
If you are beautiful, we have concluded, you can construct the perfect life—even if you are not brilliant, well educated, or courageous— because the world will offer itself up to you. By contrast, if you are overweight—even if you are brilliant, dynamic, funny, and dedicated— you have no chance at the perfect life. Thinness and beauty are the prerequisites for perfection, which to my generation appears to be the only road to happiness.
From a very young age, we see weight as something in our control. If we account for every calorie that we consume, if we plan our fitness schedule carefully and follow through, if we are exacting about our beauty regimen—designer makeup, trendy clothes—then, we conclude, we will be happy. And we can be beautiful if we are just committed enough—no matter our genetics, our bank account, or our personality—as we have learned from advertising and the American Dream ethos. This logic leads us to believe that, if we are unhappy, it is because of our weight and, in turn, our lack of willpower. We are our own roadblocks on this road to twenty-first-century female perfection and happiness.
The Jungian psychologist Marion Woodman has our number:
In an effort to be mature and independent ... a woman tries to be more and more perfect because the only way she can alleviate her dependence on that judgmental voice is to be perfect enough to shut it up. Thus the opposites meet in a terrifying contradiction. As she runs as fast as she can for independence via perfection, she runs into her own starving self, totally dependent and crying out for food.
Was I just your average temperamental, overcommitted teenage girl in the middle of America? On some level, yes. I grew up in a middle-class household with a lawyer daddy, a homemaker/community volunteer/ consulting therapist mommy, and a Nordic-looking, overprotective older brother (captain of the tennis, lacrosse, and basketball teams and math genius). I rode my bike around the neighborhood, sold lemonade on the corner, and sneaked out of the house at midnight to toilet-paper big Victorian houses. The first time I told my boyfriend, who is from Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, that I used to get to middle school by carpool, he scoffed: “I thought those only existed in television sitcoms. Oh my God, you really do come from the Beaver Cleaver family!”
Colorado Springs, Colorado, was suburbia to the nth degree, home of strip malls, chain restaurant heaven, and Focus on the Family. Normal doesn’t begin to describe how homogenous my hometown was.
Perfect Girls
But as in any American town with picket fences this white, something dark lurked underneath. Like American Beauty’s psychopathic real estate agent, the mothers I knew were often grinding their teeth and trying to outdo one another in landscaping and SUVs. The fathers— mostly doctors and lawyers—were socially accepted workaholics who attended big games and graduations still in their suits. The sons were out on the field 24/7, dreaming of Big Ten schools. And the girls . . . were perfect.
Yet these perfect girls still feel we could always lose five more pounds. We get into good colleges but are angry if we don’t get into every college we applied to. We are the captains of the basketball teams, the soccer stars, the swimming state champs with boxes full of blue ribbons. We win scholarships galore, science fairs and knowledge bowls, spelling bees and mock trial debates. We are the girls with anxiety disorders, filled appointment books, five-year plans.
We take ourselves very, very seriously. We are the peacemakers, the do-gooders, the givers, the savers. We are on time, overly prepared, well read, and witty, intellectually curious, always moving.
We are living contradictions. We are socially conscious, multiculti, and anticorporate, but we still shop at Gap and Banana Republic. We listen to hip-hop, indie rock, and country on our iPods. We are the girls in hooker boots, wife beaters, and big earrings. We make documentary films, knit sweaters, and DJ. We are “social smokers,” secretly happy that the cigarettes might speed up our metabolisms, hoping they won’t kill us in the process.
We pride ourselves on getting as little sleep as possible and thrive on self-deprivation. We drink coffee, a lot of it. We are on birth control, Prozac, and multivitamins. We do strip aerobics, hot yoga, go five more minutes than the limit on any exercise machine at the gym.
We are relentless, judgmental with ourselves, and forgiving to others. We never want to be as passive-aggressive as our mothers, never want to marry men as uninspired as our fathers. We carry the old world of guilt—center of families, keeper of relationships, caretaker of friends—with the new world of control/ambition—rich, independent, powerful. We are the daughters of feminists who said “You can be anything” and we heard “You have to be everything.”
We must get A’s. We must make money. We must save the world. We must be thin. We must be unflappable. We must be beautiful. We are the anorectics, the bulimics, the overexercisers, the overeaters. We must be perfect. We must make it look effortless.
We grow hungrier and hungrier with no clue what we are hungry for. The holes inside of us grow bigger and bigger.
This quintessentially female brand of perfectionism goes on all over America, not just in suburban enclaves but in big cities, mountain towns, trailer parks. And perfect girls abound in Vancouver, Rio, Tokyo, and Sydney. Their compulsion to achieve constantly, to perform endlessly, to demand absolute perfection in every aspect of life is part of a larger, undeniable trend in the women of my generation all over the world.
I satisfied my hunch that this was the case by consulting more than twenty-five experts in the fields of food, fitness, and psychology, interviewing twice as many girls and young women about their personal experiences (sometimes multiple times), and conducting focus groups with girls on the topic across the country. When I sent out an informal survey via e-mail to all the women I knew and asked them to forward it on to all the women they knew, I got more than one hundred echoing responses in my in-box. Here are just a few:
I am DEFINITELY a perfectionist. To the extreme. Everything I do has to be perfect—whether it be school, gymnastics, working out etc. I do not allow myself to be the slightest bit lazy. I think if I heard someone call me lazy, I would cry!
—Kristine, Tucson, AZ, 22
Perfectionists were rampant at my all-women’s high school, as were eating disorders. I think I can remember two women in my class who really didn’t have body issues and I always admired them. I never had an eating disorder, but I definitely didn’t get away without disordered ideas about food.
—Tara, Beirut, Lebanon, 27
I have always been and always will be a perfectionist in almost everything I do. It creates a struggle within me to truly define or determine when I will b
e good enough.
—Melissa, McKinney, TX, 21
I do not consider myself a perfectionist, but others describe me that way. There is always room for self-improvement with my body, no matter how thin I am.
—Kelly, Denver, CO, 28
People who know me call me an overachiever. I am hard on myself. My body fits into this mentality because I’m tall, long, lean, but that is the result of strict diet and lots of exercise.
—Kathleen, Jersey City, NJ, 28
I am quite a perfectionist. If I put on weight, I would be very upset. I would see it as a sign of failure on my part to control myself.
—Michelle, Dublin, Ireland, 24
Our bodies, our needs, our cravings, our sadness, our weakness, our stillness inevitably become our own worst enemies. It is the starving daughter within who must be shut down, muted, ignored . . . eventually killed off.
Starving Daughters
A starving daughter lies at the center of each perfect girl. The face we show to the world is one of beauty, maturity, determination, strength, willpower, and ultimately, accomplishment. But beneath the façade is a daughter—starving for attention and recognition, starving to justify her own existence.
The starving daughter within annoys us, slows us down, embarrasses us. She is the one who doubts our ability to handle a full-time job and full-time school. She gets scared, lonely, homesick. She drinks too much, cries too loud, is nostalgic and sappy. When neglected, she seeks comfort in cookies, coffee ice cream, warm bread—transgressions that make the perfect girl in us angry.
Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body Page 3
