The 1980s brought on the era of fitness and food obsession: Jazzercise, fad diets, consumerism, and extravagance. Eating disorders were still not diagnosed at the level they are today, but they became a familiar phenomenon, less a sound than an image: another Christie Brinkley ad, skinny blondes in rock videos, Mommy & Me workout tapes. Brumberg asserts that the biggest changes in our collective consciousness have been the increased tolerance for thinness and ambivalence about excessive exercise: “In the nineteenth century a woman running through public parks in spandex would be locked up.” Today, of course, she is lauded.
Catherine Steiner-Adair, a specialist in eating disorder treatment and prevention at Harvard Medical School (and, as she adorably puts it in her e-mails, “the real world”), argued as early as 1986 that perfectionism was correlated with eating-disordered behavior. The “superwoman,” she wrote, often has a “vision of autonomy and independence that excludes connection to others and a reflective relationship with oneself.” In other words, we are so keyed in to achievement, over and above attachment, that we have a hard time being in relationships with others and are not conscious about our own bodies’ needs. Steiner-Adair is now developing prevention models with great success, which she documents in her latest book, Full of Ourselves: A Wellness Program to Advance Girl Power, Health, and Leadership.
Dr. Janell Lynn Mensinger, a young researcher and a survivor of anorexia herself, has carried the torch of Steiner-Adair’s work by developing a “superwoman scale” aimed to prove statistically that perfectionism, coupled with pathological independence, often leads to eating disorders. Though the results of her initial study were inconclusive, she writes, “We are forced to question whether the concept of the Superwoman as being doubly burdened has essentially become outdated for adolescents coming of age in the twenty-first century.” I would say Superwoman is not outdated as much as eclipsed—we are perfect girls before we even have the chance to become “superwomen.”
So no, eating disorders are nothing new. But yes, the extreme form that they have taken on is very much new and characteristic of our time. Today you don’t have a small percentage of white, upper-class women starving themselves; you have a generation of girls obsessed with the shape of their bodies, the number of calories they consume, and their fitness regimens. I challenge you to find a female between the ages of nine and twenty-nine who doesn’t think about these issues more than she would like to, who doesn’t feel racked by guilt and unsatisfied with her body a lot of the time.
Eating disorders no longer discriminate. Research suggests they now affect poor women and women of color in nearly equal numbers. For example, Dr. Ruth Striegel-Moore, chairwoman of psychology at Wesleyan University, found that young black women were as likely as white women to report binge eating in a 2003 study. Two Latina women in the Intro to Women’s Studies course at Hunter College that I teach stood in front of the class and confessed to having eating disorders. One, a working-class woman, the first in her family to go to college, admitted to making herself throw up multiple times a week so she can look more like her aunt, who has had liposuction.
Ours is a time of dramatic addictions. Besides textbook anorexia and bulimia, excessive exercising, plastic surgery addiction, and laxative abuse have also grown common. The “starving disease” is no longer whispered about behind closed doors but is sensationalized by media coverage of celebrities openly wasting away. Diet and fitness information is everywhere; messages of wellness and authentic health are nowhere. Fad diet headlines can be found on just about every issue of every magazine aimed at a female demographic. At home, women are surrounded by the latest cookbooks and health guides; they print new recipes off the Internet, but food is an indulgence they won’t let themselves have in real life. Reality shows promote our dissatisfaction with ourselves and our lives: Extreme makeovers of houses, children’s behavior, marriages, and careers are big business. We are conditioned to believe that everything is within our grasp, that the only thing between us and perfection is, well, us.
Yes, eating disorders have a long history, but what was once a strange and rare disease has become a modern and dire epidemic. Girls today grow up with the knowledge that part of their inheritance is a more gender-equal world but a sicker and more unhealthy one as well. They are trained early in the typical female language of guilt and shame at the dinner table: “Oh, I really shouldn’t.” They watch the women around them obsess and judge and despair. They hear them vomit and lament and deny. They sense their mothers’ dissatisfaction and self-hate and become younger versions of them, the perfect girls and the starving daughters of a broken culture.
The Brain Drain
The 7 million American women and girls currently suffering from diagnosed eating disorders are just the tip of the iceberg. A quantity of evidence shows that women in their twenties are increasingly vulnerable to out-and-out anorexia or bulimia. Beneath that evidence lie more women who are harder to diagnose but who show evidence of widespread shame, guilt, self-hate, obsession, and deprivation. This borderline behavior is what I am most committed to talking about in this book. I want you to see it for what it is—not a normal part of being a girl, not an acceptable way of moving through the world, but a destructive pathology that is stripping us of our potential. Obsessing over every little thing we put in our mouths may not lead to death or some of the other tangible side effects of diagnosable eating disorders (osteoporosis, infertility, depression), though it does take away our ability to control our own thoughts, our inalienable right to feel good about ourselves regardless of the size of our thighs. It takes away our time, our pleasure, our energy, our vision, our joy.
We are not our bodies. Our souls are not our stomachs. Our brains are not our butts. A lot of women have lost track of the truth that how we feel about our bodies does not have to be indicative of how we feel about ourselves. My friend’s therapist recently asked her, “So how are you?” She answered, “Oh, I’m okay, feeling kind of fat this week.”
“No, but how are you?” he asked again.
“What do you mean?” she questioned. “I just answered that.”
“No, how are you?” he asked for a third time.
“I’m okay, I told you,” she spat back, frustrated with what appeared to be a weird psychological game.
“You realize that you are not your body?” he finally explained. “You realize that your body is only one aspect of who you are?”
“Yeah, of course I . . .” She was stunned speechless.
This exchange was a revelation to me. I could feel completely fat and out of shape and gluttonous but say to myself, Man, I feel bad about my body right now, but I feel great about my career and my relationships and my talents and my intellect and my ...and my...and my... Almost every girl I know lives as if how she feels about her body is representative of how she feels about everything else. It doesn’t matter how successful or in love or at peace she is in the rest of her life, if she feels overweight, she is unhappy.
You don’t need to have a diagnosable eating disorder to be powerfully affected by these issues. If you spend precious time and energy worrying about your weight instead of your soul, you have been cheated. If you waste your sharp intellect on comparing and contrasting diet fads instead of on the state of the world, we are all cheated. Brumberg has identified body preoccupation as a dangerous “brain drain” on our society. We are the most highly educated generation of young women ever. We now outnumber men in law schools, are creeping toward the 50 percent mark in medical schools, and receive more Ph.D.’s than any generation of women scholars before us. Some of this, no doubt, is thanks to our perfect-girl mentality—the work of achieving is never done. But what is the point of all this learning if we don’t use it to its full potential to make the world a better place? Some of us already have the yet-to-be-solved conundrum of how to raise kids and have a fulfilling career ahead of us. Why would we add to that mix the full-time job of worrying about our weight?
Even if you don’t
feel like you have a disease, the quality of your life is diminished if you think about food and fitness obsessively. That, in turn, diminishes the quality of all of our lives.
2. From Good to Perfect: Feminism’s Unintended Legacy
I had no doubt that if they could have, my mother and her sisters and my grandmother would have left their skins draped like pantyhose over their unsatisfactory furniture and floated up above us all: the men who never failed to oppress them; the children who’d ruined their beautiful bodies; and the boxy little houses fit to bursting with the leftover smells of their cooking and the smoke from their cigarettes, curling up and hanging just above our heads like ambition.
—Lorene Cary, Black Ice
The frizzy-haired feminist Carol Gilligan stands in front of a packed hotel conference room of therapists, psychologists, nutritionists, dietitians, social workers, and nurses, the peacekeepers on the front line of women’s war on their own bodies. She is giving the keynote address at the national conference of the Renfrew Center, one of the leading eating disorder clinics in the nation. I’m trying to catch a glimpse of the women (and a few token men) who dedicate their lives to healing women like me and my friends.
In her soothing voice, Gilligan reminds us of her 1982 feminist sensation, In a Different Voice, in which she first asserted that Erik Erikson’s model of human development—that kids become grown-ups when they assert independence—works for only half of the population. Girls, she argued, face the impossible choice of retaining their authentic voices and being socially shunned or becoming “good-girl” ventriloquists and retaining their connections to family and friends. In her observation, almost all choose the latter.
She reviews this argument for the nodding, scribbling therapists packed hip to hip in the Marriott ballroom. Nowadays, as a professor at NYU, she urges her students to create “psychological maps” for themselves in order to understand how their voices have developed in their private (puberty, divorce, depression) and political (shoulder pads, the Internet, war) lives. Gilligan asks each of us in the audience to draw on a piece of paper a river—“the river of your life”—with the date and place of our birth at the mouth. At the end of the river, we write the current date, November 11, 2005. “Now take your hovercraft back,” she says, “to when you were eight or nine. Where were you? What were you doing? How did you feel?”
I close my eyes, trying to block out the sounds of shuffling papers and shifting bodies.
I am reaching into a pile of chiffon scarves in Ms. Barbara’s Monday-evening ballet class. She is standing near me, at the stereo, putting on Pachelbel’s Canon. I love her. She is small and made of bones and muscles, jet-black hair, little wisps of which try to escape her pink headband when she spins fast and straight across the wood-floored studio. She has tiny feet that point into perfect arches.
At the end of every class, she announces, “And now we go to Pikes Peak Center,” with that slow gravitas adults use to signal that they are capable of pretending too. Pikes Peak Center is the biggest and most prestigious theater in Colorado Springs, admittedly not the arts and culture capital of the world. But all of us, the round-bellied, flat-footed, side-ponytailed little girls of the class, don’t know this yet. We scurry to the mirror, slide down it, and plop our tiny butts in a line to watch. Then she chooses one of us to begin. Today it is me. I pick the blue scarf, hurry to the middle of the room, throw my hands in the air, and look down to the right—a dramatic beginning pose surely borrowed from secret viewings of my mom’s Flashdance video.
I had thirty long seconds to dance to my heart’s content for the audience of thousands that I imagined sat before me, on the edges of their seats to see what my skilled and beautiful body would do next. I turned at will, maybe threw in a teetering arabesque or a clunky leap— eight-year-old stream of consciousness in motion. I thought I was beautiful, invincible, unstoppable. In those moments, I felt huge—not fat huge, but profound huge.
Gilligan brings us back. A therapist near me puts down her pen and picks up her knitting. Another covertly checks her BlackBerry. This eight-year-old girl, Gilligan explains, gets slowly buried beneath the pressure of being female in a society that is ambivalent about everything female. The round-bellied, dancing little girl becomes a sucking-in, gossiping, teenage “good girl.”
As I listen to Gilligan describe some of the fabulous eight-year-olds she has interviewed who devolve into miserable “good girls” by thirteen, something keeps catching in my brain. This term, good girl, doesn’t fit. It doesn’t resonate. “Good girls” are polite, traditional, asexual, cute, cheerful, obedient. They are concerned with pleasing their parents, not challenging them. They want to be voted sweetest senior in the yearbook, not most likely to be president. The term makes me think of the faded photograph of my mom’s sophomore prom—her beehive uncomfortably tall and her dress too tight and not at all her style, clearly picked out and forced on her by my grandmother. She wore it, as a “good girl” should. Her effort to cast off this good-girl identity was the primary project of her twenties.
I, by contrast, would never let my mother dictate my dress (though, looking back at some of my choices, I see I should have). By four years old, I insisted on dressing myself, and some of my creations were hideous—leg warmers, jeans, tutus, crimped hair, torn tights, and American Ballet Theater sweatshirt . . . all at once. I stole lacy home-coming bras from JCPenney, taking piles of them into the dressing room with my best friends and layering them under our clothes. I did any dirty trick necessary to get a rebound under the basket. At house parties, the most popular girls were not good girls but the ones who drank the most, cheated on tests to get better grades, stepped on toes to get boyfriends, defied their parents’ wishes and applied to colleges in faraway big cities, such as New York and Los Angeles.
My generation did not strive for goodness or politeness, blindly ascribe to our parents’ values, or muffle our opposition to their rules. In stark contrast, most of us were brazenly vocal, sometimes antagonistic. We were “perfect girls,” composing our picture of the perfect female life—well educated, daring, unsentimental, and of course, thin. But Gilligan—as do many of the feminists who follow her—uses good girl and perfect girl synonymously.
At first I thought it was a matter of semantics, something I shouldn’t make a fuss about. But the more I read it and heard it, the more I realized that the issue behind the semantics is exactly what needs to be fussed over. We are not our mothers, not “good girls.” We are “perfect girls,” obsessed with appearing ideal. We aren’t worried about doing things “right.” We are worried about doing things “impeccably.”
We are the unintended side effects of feminism, the products of unfinished business (work-family balance, equal parenting, comprehensive sex education). We are the inheritors of an often unspoken legacy of body hatred and the manifest undiagnosed anxiety, depression, and eating disorders of our mothers. We interpret our parents’ contradictions (gourmet cooks who don’t eat their own creations; feminists who diet in secret; CEOs who cower at home; gender-conscious fathers who leave the housework to their wives). We are the children of the now-faster eighties and the anything-is-possible nineties, the daughters of visionary superwomen with buried bitterness. We are the perfect girls and the starving daughters.
Good to Perfect
My mom was raised to be “good.” Period.
Jere Elizabeth was born on March 27, 1949, in Omaha, Nebraska, to a tight-lipped Episcopalian schoolteacher—my grandmother—and a jolly, big-bellied traveling salesman—my grandfather. In their house, my mother and her little sister were allowed one piece of fruit each as a snack after school, nothing more, while their brother, Scott, could eat as he pleased. Boys and girls got different portions of their always homemade meat-and-potatoes dinners as well. Scott was expected to be physical, smart, and insatiable. Jere and Janice were to be polite, agreeable, quiet, and thin—all, of which, it turned out, my mother was not.
A voracious reader and talker
, a lover of everything dirty and outdoors, she had potentially fatal asthma but would sneak out of the house and into the neighbor’s field, where they had a horse perfect for secret riding. Eventually her asthma got so bad that the whole family up and moved to Colorado, where the air was thinner and more forgiving to her stubborn little lungs. She grew into a verbose, voluptuous young woman, despite my grandmother’s attempts to keep her quiet and small. By sixth grade she was five foot ten, irascible, and perpetually at odds with my grandmother.
My mother pretty much fit the bill for the 1950s all-American girl—middle-class, from the middle of the country, from a nuclear family. Something brilliant and sometimes angry—a sense that she was essentially not “good” (i.e., polite, timid, asexual)—lurked within her, and many women of her generation identify with it. They felt that it was worthwhile and perhaps even revolutionary to be not good, but were unable to express that feeling for fear of judgment, reprisal, ostracization.
When my mom went off to college at a nearby state school, she registered as a home economics major in a last-ditch attempt to be the quintessential “good girl” her mother so hungered for. When my mom first told me her major, I was incredulous. Home ec? Mom melted the burners making tea; she left the sugar out of her Nana’s Famous Chocolate Cake and had to throw away the whole thing. The closest moment she had to a craft phase was when she started spray-painting Halloween pumpkins in fluorescent colors and attaching plastic jewels to them “just to be different”; to my horror as a fourteen-year-old, they stayed on our porch until they rotted into soft lumps of glittering plastic and seed. My mom as a home ec major is all the evidence I need that the repressed culture of the 1950s and early ’60s made women (and men) totally insane. Despite her being Mensa-brilliant, my mom’s biggest dream in her early college years was to become a secretary because she had heard that girls who got their work done fast enough were welcome to read for the remainder of the day. She could imagine nothing better. Her world, like her aspirations, was small.
Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body Page 5
