Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body

by Courtney E. Martin

  Wild Horses

  As a little girl, Jen was madly in love with horses. She had miniatures all over her room, calendars, posters, stickers, T-shirts, and books all covered with the Arabians and mustangs she adored so much. When I would come over to her house, she would beg me to play horses with her. Though I preferred Barbies, I would sometimes humor her for a few minutes, pushing the plastic horses through the yellow and orange shag rug, “neighing” occasionally. Eventually I would try to slip a Barbie or two into the story line. “They have to have owners, Jen!” I would rationalize. “No they don’t,” she would stubbornly reply. “The best horses are the wild ones.”

  When she was old enough, Jen convinced her parents to get her some riding lessons so she could mount and ride the real things. Unfortunately, severe asthma left her coughing and wheezing for days after her weekly trail rides. The minute she stepped off the horse, any bare skin would be swollen and red in a giant hive. She resorted to steroid inhalers and wore layers of clothing even in the hot sun, but nothing kept her lungs from rebelling against her deepest love. She raged when her mom would suggest she stop riding, slamming her bedroom door so that the little horses perched all around her room shook on their tiny plastic legs.

  All the way through sixth grade, her uniform was a white Hanes T-shirt, a pair of jeans, and a little silver horse that dangled around her neck.

  But all that changed as soon as Jen hit thirteen. Seventh grade marked the moment when childhood faded away and adolescence came rushing in. As we drive through the farmland before the Wyoming border, grown-up Jen remembers. “Breasts were what changed things for me. I loved them, and I realized that everyone else loved them . . . that there was a real power there. I could tell that my new body scared my parents and excited the guys I had always been friends with.”

  Whereas Jen had once been a tomboy, notoriously muddy and fast on her bike, she now became a guys’ girl. She quoted Point Break and Dazed and Confused exhaustively, cursed expertly, and didn’t even blush when guys asked her sexual questions. Her uniform changed from those white T-shirts and her little horse pendant to skintight bodysuits (yeah, remember bodysuits?) and mall bangs. Jen purposefully wore her baggy jeans so low that boys could see where the bodysuit hugged her widening hips. It was a brazen invitation, a declaration that she had chosen to be a certain kind of girl and was not ashamed.

  I ask her about this as we head past a herd of bison and a few shaggy llamas. She doesn’t even need to think before responding: “I had hung out with guys enough to know the way they talked about girls, and I knew that you were either coy and pretty—like you were— or sexy and slutty. There was no in between. Since I was already feeling sexual and realizing the power of that, I chose the second. I remember deciding very early on that I was just going to disregard people’s judgment and do what I wanted to do.”

  And she did. At fourteen years old, Jen lost her virginity to her older, more experienced boyfriend. “I remember being so relieved,” Jen says in retrospect. “I really wanted to have sex before I turned fifteen.”

  Despite the free-love movement, Erica Jong, female condoms, and Foxy Brown, teenage girls still have only two choices: prude or slut, uptight or loose, worried or carefree, smart or fun, pretty or sexy, girlfriend material or a good hookup, respectable or adventurous. Adult women have a bit more gray area to play in, but when you are an adolescent, things are still painfully and artificially black and white.

  One teenager from Texas explained, “You can’t be too prudish or else you aren’t considered cool, but you can’t flaunt that you’ve been promiscuous either or else you’ll be considered a slut. You also need to be casually sexy, but not overtly so or you’ll be considered cheap. This, for me, results in a very complicated system of rules and systems with boys that disallows me from being genuine with anyone I decide to be close to in the sense of ‘dating’ them.”

  I was the prude, the innocent, the brain, the snob, the tease. Boys liked me, but usually out of a strange fascination with my moldy virginity, my stubbornly clinging fears of sex and its implications; pain and pregnancy were the two that most often raced through my brain when I heard the war stories of other girls having sex with older boys in the basement, blood on the couch, fog in their brains, awkward appendages, and the absence of pleasure. Our bodies really were battlegrounds. Pain, I understood early on from Judy Blume novels, was part of the territory. And at thirteen, I could still hear President Reagan’s voice, absent of emotion, full of blame, decrying teenage mothers. It seemed like my body had to be controlled. Pleasure was about the last thing on my mind.

  And it was all Jen could think about. She dressed like she was eighteen and talked like she was twenty-five. Like the horses she once rode, she was an untamable, fiery animal—constantly trying to break free. She went after trouble at top speed. She flirted mercilessly, talked big, and more often than not, followed through. She gravitated toward the bad boys—the strong and silent types with questionable pasts. She hooked up. She made out. She got off. She earned her reputation.

  This is where the bottom drops out of our so-called postfeminist scenario.

  Both my mother and Jen’s did all the right things—nonchalantly put books about menstruation on our bookshelves, told us that they were always there “to talk,” continued to check in intermittently to see if we had any new questions. Jen’s mom even told stories about her own wild days, when she had a motorcycle, a boyish short haircut, and a bad boy of her own (hard to believe coming from Mrs. Clark, the computer engineer with a passion for bird-watching). My mom described her own inadequate sex education for our mutual amusement over coffee ice cream and Designing Women reruns. She told me about a great gynecologist to whom I could go at any time with questions. She was genuinely open. Most radically, she pretended that one of the nonprofits she consulted with happened to give her a big bag of condoms—“Don’t know what else to do with these but throw ’em in the hall closet,” she hollered to no one in particular as she stuffed the brown paper sack in between the linens and the aspirin.

  In spite of our mothers’ best efforts to demystify sex, it had found a flashing neon home in our brains. None of the books, however candid and well intentioned, explained how to handle a body with so many powers and vulnerabilities. We didn’t feel compelled to discuss the complexity of social implications with our mothers. I certainly didn’t want to explore my fears about the mechanics or pain with my mom (again, pleasure wasn’t even on the radar).

  We had seen films of the sexually revolutionary seventies on television—beautiful girls with long, straight hair illuminated by a kind of foggy sunlight dancing in tiny tank tops and bell-bottom jeans to bad music. We had even seen pictures of our own parents, looking swollen and high, smiling the biggest, simplest smiles on earth in that foggy sunlight. We knew, in theory, that women were supposed to have the same ability as men to choose who, when, where, and how without incurring devastating labels. It was a lovely theory.

  But in 1995 hip-hop reigned, and boys in puffy jackets and jeans falling off their asses wanted to have sex with girls who knew what to do but hadn’t had a lot of experience. The captain of the team also wanted to have sex, but he wanted to have it with a sweet girl from a good family who hadn’t had sex with anyone before (despite his own history). On Monday morning in the echoing hallways of Palmer High School, your weekend’s adventures were fair game, and consequently, your reputation always hung perilously in the balance. I played the game—smiled coyly at the boys who thought of me as desirable and untouchable, kissed only in committed relationships, and then only with boys who pledged their undying love in notes left on my car and public declarations worked into party freestyles.

  Jen had a full-force sex drive by the time she hit seventh grade. She wanted to try everything, anything, with anyone. As she put it, “It was like uncharted territory for me. I got a thrill out of every new thing I tried.” While my uppity, intimidating thing worked for some guys, Jen’s free-spirit st
yle was hypnotizing. In Mr. Wolf’s biology class, the guys followed Jen with their eyes as she entered the room. Her exposed hips and spandex bodysuit changed everything.

  Jen laughs when I recall this memory on our road trip. “Do you know I actually talked to Josh a few weeks ago, and he still remembers those bodysuits? It was a power trip. I realized I could hook up with guys and play with them sexually. But I was also totally aware that afterwards they were going to lose respect for me, so it was a really tough duality. I adopted this mentality really young: Well, fuck it. I’m going to do whatever I want and not give a fuck what people think. Which is pretty much impossible at that age. I think that shame must have ended up somewhere inside of me, even if I thought it was a bullshit double standard.”

  Body as Currency

  Jen and I were good “North end” girls doing bad-girl things—drinking forties with our Hispanic boyfriends, quietly slipping into the house as the newspaper hit the porch, dressing up and going to the one underage club—the Metro—that was part of a strip mall and had shootings once a month or so.

  But we were also perfect girls. We both got nearly straight A’s, both took all of the AP classes that were offered at our big, underfunded public school, and were both on the newspaper staff. “Remember when you wrote that column with the lead line ‘I am a virgin’ in tenth grade and totally blew your boyfriend’s spot because he’d told everyone on the football team that you guys had sex?” Jen shrieks. How could I forget? His friends followed him around for days, laughing. I had only meant, in my righteous, fifteen-year-old way, to declare publicly that it was okay to be a prude (of course I was speaking to myself as much as to our readers).

  Jen and I had both figured out that the female body was currency. If withheld, it could have tremendous power over big-eyed boys with small-town dreams (cute girl, baseball scholarship, nice truck) or the ones from the east side of town whose parents smoked pot and didn’t care how late they got in. Withholding was my specialty.

  But Jen had figured out that by being one of the guys and advertising her undeniable sex drive, she garnered a different kind of respect. She wasn’t girlfriend material, per se, but she was “down.” She had special relationships with all kinds of guys, proselytized about the clitoris, shot the shit about porn, and unabashedly recounted her best and worst sexual experiences so they could avoid similar pitfalls. They adored her for this—a girl with a guy’s mouth, a big-breasted woman with a dude mentality.

  “I left high school feeling on top of the world,” Jen explained as we entered Laramie. “I saw myself as this well-liked free spirit who liked to have sex and did it on her own terms.”

  I had spent much of high school defending Jen to those who didn’t know her well, those who hadn’t benefited from her sage advice or potty mouth. “She’s not a slut. She’s sexually liberated. She says when, she says with who, she says how much,” I would explain to a guy at a party who made an offhand comment. But even as I was spouting off borrowed Hollywood rhetoric (Pretty Woman), I had my own doubts. There was something aching and self-destructive under Jen’s bravado, something desperate in her insatiable appetite for physical intimacy. I didn’t understand enough about the subtleties of sexuality to distinguish Jen’s authentic desire from her bad-girl, attention-seeking act. Problem was, Jen couldn’t either.

  Sex Ed 1-0-Nothing

  Poor excuses for sex ed curriculums unfold in cramped classrooms reeking of sweat and Taco Bell. An over-the-hill male gym teacher does a speed-reading of the section of the outdated health text on sexuality, quickly pointing out the gruesome sexually transmitted disease photos, and then looks down at his Big Gulp as he asks, “Any questions?” After three seconds, he moves the hell on.

  In the 2005 documentary The Education of Shelby Knox, a spirited teenager rallies her peers and tries to fight the sex ed policy in her town of Lubbock, Texas, to no avail. When teachers in her school are asked any question whatsoever about sexuality, they are mandated to respond: “The only way to ensure the prevention of pregnancy and STDs is abstinence.” Like broken pull-string dolls, they parrot the same reply over and over again.

  These are the tools that Jen and I and Shelby, that virtually every young, hormone-flooded kid in an American high school, are given to navigate the chaotic and confusing terrain of developing sexuality: a few rotting-beaver shots and a mandate. So what are we left with? Experimentation. That’s it.

  By 1990 the average girl lost her virginity by the age of fifteen. A teenage girl today is twice as likely as was her mother to have multiple sex partners by the age of eighteen. Eighty-four percent of college-educated single women agreed in a recent poll that “it is common these days for people my age to have sex just for fun and not expect any commitment beyond the encounter itself.” Another study found that 60 percent of high school juniors had sex with someone who was no more than a friend.

  Jen tried it and told the rest of us how painful, messy, enjoyable, frightening, exciting, and seductive we could be. No sex education class or admonition is going to prevent kids from exploring their own sexualities, a necessary and healthy part of getting older. But with something other than a thirty-minute speed-read from Coach, we could have made somewhat educated decisions about what to try when. Maybe we could have had a stronger sense of how to interpret our many growing hungers (for attention, for love, for sex). Maybe I could have indulged my quiet desires with a sense of self-determination, as opposed to feeling like I was “giving in.” Maybe Jen could have walked her talk, said “fuck it,” and actually internalized a sense of self-respect.

  Abstinence-only education (a $1 billion effort since 1996) is built around the unrealistic assumption that you can convince kids not to experiment by pretending there is nothing to be curious about. Studies by well-respected and politically neutral authorities have officially proven that this assumption is false.† And it takes only a look around to see how contradictory a teenager’s informal sex education is to the one that comes from the classroom. Ariel Levy of New York magazine writes in her book, Female Chauvinist Pigs: “What teens have to work with are two wildly divergent messages. They live in a candyland of sex . . . every magazine stand is a gumdrop castle of breasts, every reality show is a bootylicious Tootsie Roll tree. But at school, the line given to the majority of them about sex is just say no.”

  Jen’s and my adolescence illustrates the point. We were two wide-eyed teens embarking on the journey of female adolescence, of which sexual foreplay, if not sex, is an integral, exciting and terrifying part. On these matters, our mothers were cautiously open, our school was definitively closed, and every rap video, Hollywood movie, horny teenage boy, and rumor mill was haphazardly bombarding. We had no accurate information on variable sex drives or the mechanics of healthy sexual encounters (communication, condoms, clear boundaries). We had no models for authentic sensuality or embracing our bodies. Every form of mass media told us that sex was where we could fly or crash.

  We needed someone to illuminate and discuss the idea that human beings have infinitely different and complicated sexual desires and needs. We needed someone to explain that part of our teens and twenties would be devoted to the potentially delightful and difficult exploration to figure out ours. Sure, we needed to know about the danger and likelihood of STDs, and abstinence as a viable option, but we also needed to know about masturbation and foreplay and the wide variety of sexual practices.

  Studies show that the more dissatisfied a teenage girl is with her body, the less in control she feels in sexual relationships. Girls with body-image issues are less likely to use condoms, fearing “abandonment as a result of negotiating condom use.” We teens needed to practice communicating while experimenting. We needed to reflect on our own, personal definitions of trust, safety, and spirituality in relation to sex. We needed to know that our bodies were the sources of the sexual feelings we were experiencing, and that the feelings were okay. Then maybe our bodies would have seemed more okay too.

  By
not talking about sex, or its infinite variations and complexities, the educators in our lives only infused it with a more potent power. The neon flashing place in my brain shone brighter and more fluorescent: SEX! SEX! SEX! We were thinking about it anyway. The idea that if adults pretend sex doesn’t exist, teenagers won’t think or talk about—or, gasp, do it—is ludicrous. If I had known that my sheepish and still-developing desires were normal and that not all of sex led instantly down the path of lecherousness and pregnancy, I would have had a lot more fun and a lot less anxiety throughout my teen years. Likewise, if Jen had known that her potent and high-speed sex drive was not something to be ashamed of but something to be aware of and deliberate about, she may not have felt such a compulsion to live up to her reputation. Hell, maybe she wouldn’t even have had to contend with that reputation. If guys and girls alike learned about the wide variety of sexual drives, maybe neither would be so pigeonholed.

  But we all learned that sex was forbidden, exciting, one-dimensional, and dangerous. We learned that it could get you sick, grounded, pregnant, or sad. We learned that guys wanted it and girls shouldn’t. Most important, we learned that sex was the most powerful thing a girl possessed.

  Sex as Cookie

  I am grateful for the calming, unchanging Wyoming landscape out the window as Jen starts telling me the uncensored version of her college days. She went to the University of Colorado in Boulder, a school notorious for its rich out-of-state kids, loose sexual mores, and lots of drugs and alcohol to make it all easier. Students there don’t seem overwhelmingly motivated by school. Instead, they get excited about building waterslides from truck beds on the lawns of frat houses, burning couches in the streets, and doing sake bombs at sushi restaurants on their parents’ credit cards.