A month after she graduated from Duke, Delilah had relocated to Chicago. Her friends surprised her for her birthday. She remembers, “We had this beautiful meal out in the city; we were all dressed up and everything. Then I went to the bathroom and started throwing up.” Her voice shifts here, taking on the tone she uses when disciplining the first-graders she now teaches on Chicago’s South Side. “I looked at myself in the mirror and said, ‘You have to be kidding me. You have all of these wonderful friends. They flew in from all over the country. Get out of the bathroom, now.’”
She hasn’t purged since.
Delilah continues to try to create a relationship with her father, whom she describes as “a total drunk.” On a recent visit, she recounted for him some of the things he had said to her, and he broke down in tears. “I don’t remember,” he kept repeating. “I don’t remember.”
But his tears didn’t endear him to her. On the contrary, Delilah explains, “My father is especially unforgivable because he had been with my mother when she was hospitalized. He has lost everything. He has no excuse not to try to get better.”
Recently he said something to Delilah’s younger sister, just sixteen, about “getting big,” and Delilah immediately called and in her tersest, scariest tone told him, “You ever say that to her again and I’ll fucking kill you.”
“I meant it,” she tells me.
She breathes deeply and concludes with dignified finality: “I’m twenty-two, and I’ve got my shit together. I can support myself. My father is forty-six, and he lives in a house with practically no furniture on a cemetery with his alcoholic brother. The IRS is after him. His liver’s got to be shot to hell. He’s going to die soon.”
She pauses, then continues in a gentler voice: “I love him, but I hate him. I just wish he would apologize.”
Daddy’s Little Clone
Delilah has the insight to see that her dad’s life holds no promise, but many young women are under the impression that following their fathers’ paths is the only way to go.
Kay,* a teenager from Atlanta, tells me in a whisper: “My mom works full-time, comes home, makes dinner, does laundry or whatever needs to be done for the family, talks to my grandmother on the phone, solves her friends’ problems, helps me with a paper or something, then collapses. My dad works full-time, comes home, and hangs out.” Tilting her head and raising her eyebrows, she playfully asks, “Come on, which would you choose?”
Jane,* a twenty-five-year-old from a Connecticut family, describes a wealthier retro version: “In my family there were two choices. One was to be like my mom—stay at home and clean, be cozy, that kind of thing. The other was to be like my dad, who is adventurous and active. It was very clear that my dad’s thing was better. I got this perfectionist drive from trying to travel his path instead of my mom’s.”
The retro-homemaker role can induce loneliness and listlessness; the supermom role induces stress. Either path is less inviting than girls’ fathers’. One might also argue that a traditional father’s path is less rewarding than the mother’s connection with her children, but that’s hard to see at sixteen or even twenty-six. What is crystal-clear is the supermom-induced exhaustion of a hardworking mother and the fake-smile desperation of a stay-at-home mom. Thinking our vision is 20/20, we daughters prefer the inviting mix of seriousness and playfulness that our fathers have the luxury of generating.
Just as our mothers’ bodies predict our adult forms, our parents’ lives serve as holograms for our futures. When your father shouted “You be anything, do anything you want” as he ran out the door, he left more than your overworked mother behind. He left an echoing contradiction rather than a ringing endorsement. To fill that void, many girls empty their bellies, thinking that doing so will free them up to follow an easier, less encumbered path.
Naomi Wolf’s anorexia was an effort to reject her mother’s life. “The things we saw women doing for beauty looked crazy,” she writes. “I wanted to travel, but I saw that beauty led women in circles. My mother, a beautiful woman, got too little of the pleasures that I could understand. I saw that her beauty hurt her: teeth-gritting abstinence at celebration dinners, fury on the scale, angry rubdowns, self-accusing photographs posted over the refrigerator.” Wolf chose to starve the new curves out of her twelve-year-old body and, in so doing, avoid the narrowing of her world. “It was the only choice that really looked like one: By refusing to put on a woman’s body and receive a rating, I chose not to have all my future choices confined to small things.”
Wolf, like so many young women on the brink of the world, wanted to do “big things”—such as mentally bitch-slapping know-it-all boys in Ivy League classrooms, getting prestigious scholarships, and flying around the world, making lots of money. These are considered grand, in our society, while the “small things”—birth, death, heartache, nourishment, family, spirit, just to name a few—are classified as women’s overlooked good works. Taut and hidden bodies get to fly to exciting places, get to house incredible minds that think big-picture. Mothers are buried in details, usually immobile with so much responsibility, putting out fires all the time. Curvy and substantial bodies are relegated to the home and never-ending caretaking to be done.
For years, my mom encouraged me to read Marion Woodman, and for years, I brushed her off. My persistent mother explains, “She writes about archetypes”—oh, nope, not reading that one—“and the imbalance of feminine and masculine qualities”—oh, okay, reductionist—“and how this imbalance has led women to reject their bodies”—yeah, not going to happen. “Sounds interesting, Mom,” I would say and then turn back to my dog-eared book by some dead white philosopher.
But lo and behold, after all these years, I found myself sitting next to my mother in a packed conference hall in New York City listening to Marion Woodman. My mom had flown all the way from Colorado to visit me and attend this lecture.
Woodman spoke of her own near-fatal battle with anorexia. She talked about the radical power of simply seeing someone else, truly and nakedly, without judgment. By the end, I was a tearful mess and willingly produced an admission to my mother: “You told me so.” Woodman writes about perfectionism, about achievement, about bodies inhumanely cut off from souls. She also writes about the delusion that progress means accomplishments: “If we look at modern Athenas sprung from their fathers’ foreheads, we do not necessarily see liberated women.”
In other words, Athena—the Greek goddess of wisdom, efficiency, achievement, justice—is not a free and happy chick. She is, like so many of us who chase after our fathers’ dreams, disconnected from her own body, self-hating, frustrated, and anxious about what feels like the ultimate and incessant distraction from work: soul. The perfect girl is Athena, marching on, checking items off of her to-do list, making Dad proud with her grades and her vocabulary, without listening a lick to the starving daughter inside. We are so overwhelmed by the voices of our mothers that we try to tune them out entirely—listening only to the incessant drumbeat of the march of our fathers’ measured lives.
Jane Fonda, a big Woodman fan, wrote the following in her autobiography: “All my life I had been a father’s daughter, trapped in a Greek drama, like Athena, who sprang fully formed from the head of her father, Zeus—disciplined, driven. Starting in childhood, I learned that love was earned through perfection. In adolescence, my feelings of imperfection centered on my physical being, and I abandoned the poor, loyal body and took up residence in my head.” So while she was scissor-kicking those legs in the air, it was our mothers she was leading but her father she was channeling.
When we dwell only in our “dad’s mind,” we become alienated from the irrational and fantastic cravings of our “mother’s body.” We forget that the bleeding and the lusting and the swelling of adolescence and womanhood contain complex if painful wisdom. These two parts of ourselves—the rational striver and the intuitive wanderer—need not be so cleaved. Even when we neglect one, try to starve it or bury it, both are always the
re.
My generation of young women has repeatedly chosen the path of our fathers, the one we believed led to textbook achievement and less mess, but we are continually drawn across the field, to the winding path of our mothers. Woodman writes: “Often she is caught between two conflicting points of view: the rational, goal-oriented and just, versus the irrational, cyclic, relating. Her task is not to choose one or the other, but to hold the tension between them.” But we have no parental models for holding such tension. Too often, men are still afraid to cry in public, unable to stay home with their kids, and unwilling to talk to their daughters about their bodies; women are afraid to insist on equal parenting, admit that they are angry, or realize their deferred dreams. Their legacy of fear is our conflicted fate.
4. (Perfect) Girl Talk: Inside Today’s Teenagers’ Minds and Stomachs
Raya* is sitting at a crowded Starbucks on the Upper East Side. She sets aside the outline for her paper on imperialism in Africa when she sees me come in. At just fourteen, she is an intellectual. A July spent in France convinced her she wants to be a linguist. She is taking French, Italian, and Spanish simultaneously; composing an original score for the winter concert; and vying for editor in chief of her school’s newspaper—a quintessential perfect girl.
“Can I get you anything?” I ask. “A tea, a bagel?”
She laughs and replies, “I actually love bagels, but my friends think they are, like, the devil.” She pronounces devil slowly, emphasizing both syllables with equal drama, then goes on. “We basically have a pact to keep each other away from bagels . . . at any cost.”
The soap opera of female adolescence is an old show. In 1982 Carol Gilligan argued that young women coming of age are discounted because the language they speak is one of attachment rather than independence. Mary Pipher picked up the gauntlet and ran with it in her best seller Reviving Ophelia, in which she described teenage girls becoming “‘female impersonators’ who fit their whole selves into small, crowded spaces. Vibrant, confident girls become shy, doubting young women. Girls stop thinking, ‘Who am I? What do I want?’ and start thinking, ‘What must I do to please others?’”
My generation was raised by mothers who spoke Pipher-ese: “preadolescent authenticity,” “self-denial,” “emotional nourishment.” In fact, I recently discovered my mom’s old copy of Reviving Ophelia buried in the familiar bookshelves of my childhood home, and was amused to see all the anxious underlining and exclamation points throughout the yellowing text. I imagined her reading it feverishly when I returned home from summer camp right before eighth grade, my newly shaved legs cut by the cheap razor borrowed from a bunkmate.
The idea that girls standing at the edge of adolescence were in danger of falling into confusion, frustration, and depression spread like wildfire in the 1980s and ’90s—leading to the hipification of the Girl Scouts, the founding of New Moon magazine, and other “for girls, by girls” empowerment projects across America. Eating disorders were a quiet part of this danger. Pipher mentioned them briefly, Gilligan not at all. Both still clung to the outdated “good-girl” archetype.
Our understanding of the breadth and depth of teenage-girl hell has expanded now that researchers and writers, theorists and psychologists are riffing on that dangerous terrain covering the land mines of sexuality, the trashy trail of fashion magazines, the mountain of expectations. Numerous books have emerged on the vicious alchemy of girl culture, most notably the 2002 best seller Odd Girl Out by Rachel Simmons. Even comedians, such as the Saturday Night Live genius Tina Fey, have gotten into the mix with films like 2004’s Mean Girls, with a screenplay from another book about girl culture: Queen Bees and Wannabes by Rosalind Wiseman.
Despite this wealth of developmental literature and sidesplitting satire, being a girl doesn’t appear to have gotten any easier. My mom had thoroughly educated me on the complexity of female friendships, but when I heard Tania Bittington* vomit violently in the bathroom after a sleepover pizza binge in seventh grade, I really did not know what to make of it.
Tweens still seem to lock themselves in their rooms on their twelfth birthdays and basically stay in there until they hit eighteen. Girlfriends still communicate through a rapidly spoken foreign language made up of a string of the undying like and initialisms impenetrable by the average adult (FYI, IM = Instant Messenger, BFF = Best Friends Forever, BOGO = Buy One Get One). To investigate the secret social world of teenagers and how it influences the way girls feel about their bodies, I knocked on the proverbial bedroom door and slipped right in. Looking too young to buy a beer finally paid off for me.
Raya recruits her six best friends, all students at an elite private institution, to meet me for a dish session after school. The girls tumble into the office, giggling and yelling, a tangle of expensively shampooed hair and trendy clothes. They have come from dance rehearsals and volleyball practice, after-school study groups and frozen-yogurt binges. They practically smell like ninth grade. My stomach turns as I immediately remember what it was like to possess teenage hyper-awareness—to hear, see, smell, feel, even taste with superhuman intensity at all times.
One of them plops down on a leather chair. The girl has long, spindly legs and a flat stomach. Her ribbed white tank top pulls taut against her large breasts, covered only by a thin cotton hoodie. Her bright red curly hair is tangled in big silver hoop earrings. She wears designer jeans, a Tiffany bangle bracelet, dark eyeliner that stands out against her pale skin and its freckles. Her name-plate necklace, a style borrowed from another borough, reads “Kaya”.*
She reaches for a carrot from the snacks I’ve brought and preempts an answer to a question I haven’t yet asked, as if trying to impress the teacher: “Sometimes I think about what I ate the day before and I won’t eat anything the next day.” Then, turning to her friends, she adds, “You guys always yell at me for that, but, whatever.” Raya had, in fact, confided in me that Kaya often eats on alternative days, her own personal diet plan.
Ella,* a tall, scowling girl with long, straight auburn hair, reveals, “I have these weird tics. Like at the movies today I got popcorn . . . so I ran home.”
“I’m always thinking I’m going to start eating right on Monday. Or, like, now that it’s the end of the year, I think, I’m going to lose weight when school is out,” explains Rachel,* a girl with long dark hair and a pink velour hoodie over a pink tank top. The other girls immediately start clapping and shrieking—“Me too!”
Kaya laughs with her head back and yells, “We’re all on diets!”
Going into this meeting of the minds (or midriffs, from the looks of things), I knew that I was in for an experience of the wealthiest and perhaps most neurotic teenage girls in America. These girls knew a thing or two about dieting, fitness, and cosmetic surgery, and I wanted to understand how bad it had gotten. I wanted a sense of the resources that the most privileged girls in America were throwing at their “body projects.”
But I also wanted an insider’s view of the way girls on the other end of the economic spectrum are experiencing their bodies, girls who don’t have nutritionists or expensive health food, girls of color educated in public schools, girls who don’t have the luxury or the curse of mothers watching over their every move. Some experts would still have us believe that eating disorders are a white, wealthy problem only, and much of the research on adolescence and eating disorders is on girls with high-earning parents (in part because most of the research takes place in colleges). Girls who aren’t white or well-off are usually mentioned as part of the obesity epidemic. Maybe mostly white girls had eating disorders back in the 1980s and early ’90s, but the obsession with food and fitness has become an equal-opportunity destroyer.
Two thousand miles away from Manhattan, I walk into a renovated garage with big, ancient computers piled on top of hand-me-down desks, and a dozen Latina, Native American, and mixed-race teenage girls snuggled into weathered couches immediately fall silent. They are from the Girls Inc. Santa Fe summer program—a group o
f mostly low-income fourteen- and fifteen-year-old girls destined to spend the hot desert days learning about digital photography, swimming at the pool, braiding one another’s hair, making friendship bracelets, and, I later learn, analyzing the fat content of each and every lunch they are served.
The first to shatter any naïve hope that less money corresponds with less obsession is Gina,* a gorgeous fifteen-year-old Latina with dark eyeliner, a tank top with, of course, NEW YORK CITY emblazoned across the front in big red letters, and tight, flared jeans. After I explain what my book is about, she volunteers: “Practically every single one of my friends starves herself. I don’t do that, but I do check the calories in everything I put in my mouth.”
Lori,* another Latina teen, has a short, hip haircut and black cat’s-eye glasses. She adds: “I used to be bigger, but then I learned I had a thyroid problem and started taking medication. That helped me eat less. I’m a lot happier now. People are a lot nicer to me.”
Julie,* half black, half Latina, pulls her yellow tank top down so that it covers her belly button, starts playing with the two glittery bracelets on her arm, and adds: “Yeah, actually, me too. I used to be chubbier, but I stopped eating emotionally and started exercising more. I still don’t like how I look, but at least I’m not fat.” She is fourteen.
Mean Girls for Real
When the seven Manhattan girls have settled into the various couches and chairs around the room, I ask them to fill out a quick survey with their biographical information and answers to a few questions. After a search for pens and pencils “that don’t suck,” they begin to discuss the meaning of ethnic background. When they collectively decide that they are all Caucasians, with the exception of Rosa,* who is half Puerto Rican and has two moms, they write their answers in the slots. Rachel asks: “Can I abbreviate?”
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