How much of our obsession with food and fitness, our daily evaluation of our bodies, even our textbook eating disorders is an unconscious expression of our loyalty to or rejection of our mothers? We speak with our bodies as well.
To reject the pressure to be thin is to reject our mothers’ lifelong efforts. On the one hand, to extricate yourself from the culture of dieting and overexercise is to miss out on a huge part of female bonding— the dieting promises exchanged between mother and daughter, sisters, friends; the self-disparaging watercooler talk about that holiday weight; the chats at the gym. On the other hand, some girls starve themselves expressly to avoid growing into adult female bodies and inheriting their mothers’ lives. Some girls overeat and get fat to wound their weight-conscious mothers. Some girls become sports-obsessed, in part, to drive home the point that they will not be dainty and domestic like their powerless moms.
We see that our mothers cannot love their own bodies, and this translates, albeit unintentionally, to a lesson about femaleness, about form, about our own futures. Marion Woodman writes: “Because our mothers could not love themselves as complete feminine beings, they could not love us as feminine beings. So our fear is archetypal, monstrous. We have a tremendous sense of something within being shut off, abandoned.”
All daughters say to all mothers—sometimes in words, more often with our own bodies as a substitute for words—I came from you, your body was my first home, and you didn’t suspect I sensed how you felt about it? Your genes imprinted themselves indelibly on the moment of my birth, creating an equation for what I would look like when I emerged. It was you. Even if I have Dad’s knock-knees or Grandpa’s curly hair, it is you that I become.
My grandmother died two years ago. She shrank into a fraction of her former size, all wrinkles and bones, and stopped breathing. It was a long, drawn-out dying—she was diagnosed with a rare disease that virtually turned her lungs to stone. My mom took care of her every step of the way, made sense of her nonsensical requests, negotiated her do-not-resuscitate order with the doctors, held her hand, watched the breath leak out of her one last time. The memorial service was beautiful; a giant-winged bird flew great arcs behind the picture window at the altar of her church in the mountains.
In the months that followed my grandmother’s death, my mother herself started shrinking. The funeral was in February, and by August, when I came home for a visit, my mom was svelte. Where there had been a generous, ample lap, there were now taut muscles. Where there had been tricep wings—the “evils” of old age—there were now strong arms. Her upper chest, always one of the most beautiful parts of her, was even more striking—tan and freckled, the skin stretched across her collarbones like a drumhead. She wasn’t too thin, but she was the smallest I had ever seen her. She looked young. She looked, truth be told, more like me—her twenty-two-year-old daughter.
On one of our ritual walks in the park, I questioned her about it: “Mom, did you set out to lose all this weight? Have you been exercising a ton? Have you been eating enough?”
She gave me a “don’t mother me, girl” look and replied, “Honestly, Courtney, nothing changed. I am walking with my friends in the park, eating generally healthy stuff, taking my vitamins—the usual.”
“So what happened? I mean, I don’t get it,” I countered, incredulous. I had spent too much time around too many closet dieters and overexercisers in college to swallow her claim.
“I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. I think Mom’s death had something to do with it, but I can’t explain it in any rational way. There was some emotional block that disappeared, I guess—one of those strange, inexplicable phenomena.”
Let me clarify that my mother did exercise and eat a little differently. It was unconscious, for sure, but her relationship to food and fitness shifted in small, barely noticeable ways. Yet at the heart of it, what really happened is that she became less hungry. My grandmother bicycled into that eternal light with a basket full of judgment, rules, and rigidity. She left my mom a clock with singing birds at each hour on the hour, an emerald ring, some Maya Angelou books, but the most precious gift she gave her was release. The day my grandmother died, a part of my mom died too—the part that still believed there would never be enough, that she could never do enough, that she was fundamentally never going to be enough.
My charge as her daughter, I know, is to convince myself of the same thing without such great loss.
Unfinished Business
By high school, almost every one of my girlfriends in our picture-perfect suburb was falling apart. It was basically your after-school-special potpourri: abusive relationships, rape, teen pregnancy, bourgeoning alcoholism, drug dealing, gun-carrying boyfriends, car accidents, verbally abusive mothers, and yes, eating disorders galore. After four years of enduring this roller coaster of teenage dysfunction, my big plan was to hightail it out of Colorado Springs as fast and as far as I possibly could—essentially to escape the drama (I thought I was holding it all together—that, of course, was my drama).
When I stepped onto the Barnard campus, I breathed a sigh of relief. Now I could get down to the business of becoming brilliant, unaffected, and beautiful. Now I could take my pledge of perfection to a new level, free from the distraction of high school drama. I could read the great books, gallivant in the great clubs and bars, develop the perfect body undisturbed by teenage petty concerns like . . .
But wait, was that gagging in the dorm bathroom? Was that really all my friend was going to eat for dinner? Was that girl down the hall going to the gym for the second time in one day? Was the short story with the starving heroine that another student submitted in my writing workshop really a cry for help?
The collection of addictions and compensating behaviors that I had chalked up to teenage angst were actually permanent conditions of womanhood. Damn. Now I would have to read The Second Sex and The Feminine Mystique. I could hear my mom’s voice in my head, sweetly cooing, “I told you so.”
Okay, so I’m a feminist. I had to be. When I figured out that some of the smartest women I knew were also starving themselves, sticking their fingers down their throats, spending the majority of their time on a treadmill and the majority of their brainpower hating themselves, I had no choice. In a time of incessant question marks, it seemed the only answer.
I attempted to find a feminism of my own. Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards’s Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future showed that feminism didn’t have to include formless jumpers and Birkenstocks but could be sexy, lighthearted, brilliant. I went to see them speak and was immediately heartened by Jennifer’s vintage skirt and fishnet stockings and Amy’s laid-back laugh and informal style.
My feminist generation is the “third wave” (the first having been the suffragists in their petticoats, the second having been the hippies in their aviator glasses). I imagine a huge ocean wave rolling in with an army of young women with trendy, layered haircuts and vintage glasses riding surfboards expertly to shore. BUST and Bitch magazines, the Third Wave Foundation, and feminist bookstores such as Bluestockings on the Lower East Side of New York are the cultural hallmarks of my generation.
I felt, finally, a part of something, but I wasn’t just looking for a community. I want answers. I am looking for third-wave feminism to be a plank that I can smack down over the abyss between my intellect—bodies come in all shapes and sizes, I don’t have to be good at everything, there is time—and my behavior—eating neurotically, wanting more all the time, immediately. I don’t want to grow bitter, frustrated, and even sick as a result of a superwoman lifestyle.
Second-wave feminism accomplished sweeping, grand social change. Despite this life-altering transformation, neither our mothers nor we can eat without feeling guilty. We still can’t seem to eradicate the idea that a woman must be physically perfect, in addition to being liberated, brilliant, funny, stylish, and capable—all effortlessly. We still can’t be authentically sexual—only raunchy like our brothers or asexual
like our mothers. We still don’t appear to be adept at creating egalitarian families where men are not just “picking up the slack” or “helping out” but are in all ways sharing the responsibilities. We still haven’t created institutions that support these kinds of families. We still don’t have a spiritual or political orientation that emphasizes presence instead of speed, joy instead of accomplishment, the beauty of aberration instead of perfection. We still can’t look in mirrors without a wave of self-recrimination and anxiety.
Our mothers bravely threw out the need for us girls to be “good.” They also modeled some dangerous lessons through their actions. We watched “good girls” turned superwomen accomplish themselves into frenzies, deny their glaring contradictions, and hold firm to dangerous delusions—it will all get done, he can’t help it, you can never be too thin or too rich. But they also gave us paradigm-shifting wisdom: The personal is the political. We younger women need to find answers to our most crucial questions by facing up to and rewriting the seemingly intractable myths with which we have grown up—that girls have to be perfect, effortlessly beautiful, accomplished. In our hearts we need to get to the truth that tells us, with each slow and steady beat, that speed and skinniness are not the ultimate joys of a life well lived.
Somehow the women of my generation learned to chase perfection and feel perpetually unsatisfied. Our first teachers were, of course, our mothers. But our second teachers are often mistakenly left out of this story: They are our fathers—often absent, usually joyful, and always powerful.
3. The Male Mirror: Her Father’s Eyes
Weight preoccupation and the sources of young girls’ shame about their bodies are usually blamed on mothers because of the powerful role that most mothers play in their children’s lives. In the majority of stories young women have told me, their mothers’ influence is apparent. Sometimes their mothers are beacons of unconditional love, natural beauty, fierce protection. Sometimes their mothers are well intentioned but unhealthy themselves. Sometimes their mothers are downright cruel. Mothers are never—or at least not in a single story I have heard—neutral.
Fathers, by contrast, are largely under the radar in the ongoing conversation about young women and eating disorders. Their influence on the way their daughters think about beauty and their bodies is often overlooked in the never-ending push and pull between daughters and mothers. Through their absence or presence, fathers teach us about relationships, attractiveness, and love. They are our first experience of being seen by a man—their fear, avoidance, or protection of our bodies (or our mothers’) affect how we see ourselves and our relationships with men.
Our fathers’ lives are often free from the restrictions and complications that our mothers have endured. Fathers cook family meals on holidays. They tend to say no with far less guilt. They swing by Wendy’s without commenting on the calorie count of a Frosty. Fathers often become their daughters’ only models of shirking responsibility, for better or worse.
My relationship with my mother veers from one extreme emotion to another; I can cry huge tears at the drop of a hat just thinking about how amazing and generous she is, but I can also feel like screaming into a pillow. I can feel myself reenacting some of her frustrating behaviors in unconscious ways. When I ask my boyfriend to repeat a funny story for one of our friends, he needs only to raise one eyebrow to remind me that I am doing exactly what I hate coming from my mom. My relationship with my mom is all frustration and profound admiration.
By contrast, the relationship I have with my dad is more playful irritation and unwavering respect. He is sweetly absentminded, easily impressed by my mom’s cooking and my bad poetry, a history and geography buff who can supply Civil War battle dates or capital cities of foreign countries on cue. Very successful in his field, he is well respected and generally consistent and chill at home. There is more emotionally complex “stuff” going on underneath, but most of the time he shares that with my mom, not me, and his signature one-line e-mails, if not about taxes or flights, are almost always heartfelt praise: “I am so proud of you. I love you so much.” He resigned from the prestigious men-only social club in my hometown when I was just eleven years old because, as he wrote in his resignation letter, “I cannot, in good conscience, belong to a club that my son can someday join, but my daughter will be barred from.” I remember feeling ten feet tall when I read it.
But my intimacy with my father most often dwells in the heat of political discussions, the celebration of public successes, the safety of having a dad who I know will always take care of me when I need him. My adult friendship with my mother is an intense jungle hike, punctuated by unparalleled views and requiring great endurance, but friendship with my dad is now and has always been a stroll in the park.
To some extent, I chalk this up to our shared nature—concrete, reflective, sensitive, easily overwhelmed. I am grateful for the steadiness of our bond, relieved by the simplicity. But I know we have to keep striving to maintain a connection that includes some of the messy stuff. I have to ask my dad’s advice after fights with my boyfriend. He has to reveal his fears about retirement. This is the stuff that keeps us honest and real.
Too many daughters and fathers settle for relationships with shallow intimacy. We stick to what’s safe—the sweet little girl and invincible father routine, the intellectual debates that sidestep emotional messes. When it comes to the teeming underbelly of girls’ lives at thirteen or seventeen, or even twenty-three—sex, insecurity, cellulite—we naturally turn to our mothers. Girls’ issues with their bodies are about so much more than plumbing and primping. I think we need to have candid conversations with our fathers as well as our mothers about them. We need our dads’ perspectives, since they are free from some of the hang-ups our moms carry around about their own weight, which could be a source of healing.
This happens, though it is rare. One fifteen-year-old from Detroit, Michigan, described an interaction with her father, a divorcé: “He had just been on a date with this new woman and he was telling me about her. I noticed that the way he described her started with how smart and funny she was, and ended with the fact that he thought she was really beautiful—but ‘not in a conventional way.’ Even though my dad was talking about another woman, that stuck with me as something I could think about myself.” Sometimes an indirect communication, in which Dad isn’t made uncomfortable talking about his daughter’s looks, can have a lasting impact.
But at other times, being up front is critical. Dana,* a twenty-one-year-old from Savannah, Georgia, recounts that when she was at her thinnest in high school, her dad invited her to the movies. Waiting for the show with a big bucket of popcorn and a giant soda, she remembers that he casually interjected: “Honey, you seem really thin. I won’t worry about you if you honestly tell me that you’re feeling okay about yourself.” Dana remembers being pleasantly surprised. “Thanks, Dad.”
“I’m not complimenting you. I think you look great with a little more meat on your bones,” he responded, in classic Dad terminology. “But you know I’m here if you want to talk about it.” Though Dana didn’t take him up on the offer, she remembered it. When she got home that night, she took off her shirt and looked in the mirror. Her collarbones, previously a source of pride, jutted in a way that now struck her as unattractive. “It was as if I could see myself through his eyes,” she remembers. She would continue to struggle with yo-yo dieting through college, but she never transgressed into eating-disordered behavior. She says, “It was like my dad’s words had built a border keeping me from getting really bad.”
Fathers send messages about power, beauty, and pleasure to daughters. My father’s life was a template of maleness; his success in the world was calculated in dollars and cents, unlike my mom’s, and his familial attentiveness seen as a bonus prize, not a given. Friends’ mothers would frequently comment on how extraordinary it was that my father came to all of my basketball games or showed up at an academic awards ceremony, with no similar mention of my mother, wh
o was also always there.
My father’s power was straightforward and universally understood, my mother’s deep and unquantifiable. My dad told me once, on our sunny porch over omelets—his specialty—that he thought Sophia Loren was the most beautiful movie star. I did not ask, “Do I look like her, Daddy? Will I look like her?” But I filed it away as research in a lifelong search to understand the male definition of beauty.
Many fathers’ messages are communicated in code: a derogatory term flung at a fat woman on the street, a subtle side comment and a pinch of Mom’s waist, the suburban superhero Lester Burnham ogling his daughter’s best friend in American Beauty. One of my friends in high school read her parents’ marriage—its absence of sensuality and excess of bitterness—like the coffee grounds left in the bottom of a cup, a harbinger of things to come if she was not careful. Another friend saw her dad trampled by her teeth-clenching, controlling mother and learned that femaleness was about passive aggression and maleness about escape. One friend’s father grabbed a brownie out of her hand at her brother’s high school graduation party and threw it in the trash without a word. One of my students told me, “Daddy wasn’t a big, direct influence on me, really,” then paused, head tilted to the side, and added, “But I did find him watching South American beauty pageants on Telemundo all the time. Seeing that while I was growing up did make me think that men liked certain kinds of bodies.”
These subliminal messages cause a lot of pain. Dads may be men of few words, but their lives speak loud and clear.
Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body Page 8
