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

by Courtney E. Martin

  Jen, initially, felt she fit in just fine. She liked to party, and though she was basically middle-class, she managed to find lots of rich kids with unlimited bank accounts to support the lifestyle. She probably liked school more than the next kid—she immediately fell in love with sociology—but she managed to go out on most weeknights and still drag into class the next morning.

  But what first appeared to be a place practically designed for Jen’s hedonistic lifestyle quickly backfired. Jen was hooking up. A lot. She understood that this was part of the college scene, a built-in bonus of going to a big party school where she was no longer the only sexually charged, compulsive kid around. But what on the surface seemed simple and socially acceptable—casual hookups without emotional attachments—had unforeseen complications.

  Jen explains, “I was devastated in college because I really went thinking that guys loved me and I had no problem getting whoever I wanted, that I could hook up and still have a great relationship with them and earn their respect. It was completely opposite. The guys would change the second you hooked up with them and be convinced that you were obsessed with them.

  “I had all these ideas internalized—I’m just a free spirit, free-loving, like to sleep with people because I love it and I have fun with it. But in college, nobody knew that about me, so all of a sudden, I was just that dirty slut who must not have any self-respect.”

  Guys with whom Jen had hooked up on the weekend pretended they didn’t know her by Monday. Some of them told their friends all about their nights with her, insisting that now she wanted to date regardless of her actual lack of interest. Jen, and every girl like her who indulged in a one-night stand, became a stereotype—her three dimensional flesh the night before suddenly deflated to one dimension in the morning. It didn’t matter if Jen went into these hookups with a sense of feminist agency. She was in a time warp, an inherently sexist social scene. What started under the pretense of a modern flirtation— dancing to hip-hop at a packed house party, drinking Red Bull and vodka, smoking some weed out back—was reduced to an old-fashioned dichotomy as soon as it was over: conqueror and conquered, stud and slut, free agent and desperate girlfriend, boy and girl.

  In most colleges across America, a Jen is flailing at the center of this sexism. Some are better—the Ivy Leagues and the small liberal arts schools tend to dress up their misogyny in intellect; some are worse, particularly where the Saturday football game or the fraternity party that night are the be-all and end-all. Most play by a largely unspoken but quickly understood set of rules that allow guys to conquest to their hearts’ desires and elevate their reputations, and allow girls the opportunity to be conquered. There is a reason that college kids call making out, for those of you who were raised with drive-in movie theaters, “giving it up”—a girl is giving something up, and that mysterious “it” is her control over her identity.

  Lots of guys in college who hooked up with lots of girls were still known for other things: their premed rigidness, their interest in the Middle East conflict, their brilliant sarcasm. But the girls I knew who hooked up a lot became known mostly for that quality alone. A guy can be a “slut” and a sweetie, a jock, a dreamer, a joker. When a girl is labeled a “slut,” the rest of her identity seems to fall away. When that happens, her entire worth gets tied up in her ability to hook up with guys and, therefore, her ability to look beautiful, thin, and desirable, to be fun, to dance on the bar. She doesn’t have the opportunity to be taken seriously once she has garnered the “easy” label.

  These girls’ sexuality becomes their project. They cultivate it, sculpt their bodies into it, dress in order to show it off, master subtle and not-so-subtle flirtation, seek the right parties, spot the right men, go after them with the kind of ambition required for an A in organic chemistry. They seek this experience with a vengeance, going after the goal—an ultimately unsatisfying hookup with an unknown dude—as if their lives depend on it. In some ways, they become their own conquerors.

  Jen realized pretty quickly what was going on but felt powerless to disengage. She tells me, “I didn’t know how to turn off that feeling of wanting to hook up, and it became absolutely devastating to me.” She continued to find cute boys at parties, bring them home with high hopes that she could have a fun, painless hookup, and then be blind-sided by the hangover—a result not of too much alcohol but of too much faith. The guys didn’t respect her in the morning. In fact, they pretended not even to know her name.

  It was truly a case of her mind and her body at war. Her mind knew that things were not what they seemed, that if she hooked up with this guy tonight, tomorrow he would make her feel cheap. But her body, her potent sex drive, her deeper, inexplicable hunger for attention were always dragging her into situations regardless of the consequences. It was as if her mind were the warden, guarding the cell of her wild and out-of-control impulses. A few shots of tequila, Jen’s signature poison, and the warden went to sleep.

  Twin Hungers

  The compulsion to hook up soon joined forces with a compulsion to overeat—plunging Jen into oblivion. She says, “I started compulsive eating, because I was so frustrated and out of control and I hated my body. I didn’t love my body in high school, but it was kind of like playful power struggles. Completely manageable stuff. When I got to college, it was out of control, absolute hatred for my body.”

  Jen would start with one bowl of cereal and then justify having another and another and another until she was bloated, kneeling over the toilet, trying to make herself throw up to no avail.† She ate all of her roommates’ food, drank all their milk, and felt silently guilty. She explains, “It breaks my heart to think about how much I hated myself. I would yell at myself, call myself a fat bitch. I would be so, so mad after overeating. I would come home and compulsively eat and cry myself to sleep. I couldn’t control it.”

  Jen quiets down and taps the steering wheel distractedly. “There was so much to be sad about,” she says. Then she turns to me, takes her eyes off the endless road in front of us, and asks, “How do you let yourself feel that big of an emotion?” I think it is rhetorical until she answers herself a few moments later: “You don’t.”

  Sex and food became twin struggles in Jen’s life. Just as she was starting to understand that her desires for sexual pleasure and male attention were leading her into self-loathing, an insatiable hunger for carbs and sugar crept up on her. She craved not one-night stands but cookies, cereal, and ice cream bars. And the hunger was overwhelming. There weren’t enough frat boys or Fig Newtons to fill the hole inside her.

  In Eating, Drinking, Overthinking, the psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema writes at length about the kind of reaction Jen had to the chaos of the college scene. Food, alcohol, and depression, she argues, are “the toxic triangle” that often push women over the edge. She writes: “Whereas men tend to externalize stress—blaming other people for their negative feelings and difficult circumstances—women tend to internalize it, holding it in their bodies and minds.” Instead of relying on her sharp sociological mind to critique the double standard under which she was suffering, Jen internalized the pain and blamed herself.

  Sex and food are the two most loaded issues of our time, the Pandora’s box of our culture, universal and forbidden simultaneously. We even use the same language when it comes to both: temptation, pleasure, crave. Just as we are surrounded by advertisements for food that we “shouldn’t” eat, invited to indulge because we deserve it, we are told, in the next thirty-second spot, that we should get back to the gym if we want to work off some guilt and make ourselves worthy of a bikini this summer. Sexual images are all around us, and pornography is accessible at the touch of a button, but any teenage girl who wants to protect her reputation must exercise absolute restraint, wait for a committed relationship to explore her sexuality, and keep quiet about masturbation.

  How can anyone, under these conditions, be expected to know her true desires? How can anyone navigate the dangerous terrain of reputation a
nd expectation on the road toward her authentic sexuality? How can an eighteen-year-old woman excited about life emerge without hating the body that leads her into temptation?

  The Mind-Body Standoff

  One night the vicious cycle that Jen engaged in—go out and party, hook up, feel bad, overeat, feel even worse, rev up, and do it all over again—got her into a situation she couldn’t muster the strength to get out of.

  It started like any other kind of hookup—Jen thought he was cute, he thought she was sexy, she invited him back to her room, and he happily followed. But once they started hooking up, Jen realized that she had trouble on her hands: “I wanted to have sex with him, but I knew it wasn’t a good idea because he was going to be an asshole afterwards. I knew this guy, and he was a real jerk.” Her mind, in other words, saw the trap; her body wanted to step into it anyway.

  She remembers: “I just was so insecure that I kept saying no and he just didn’t listen. He just started having sex with me, and I was like, ‘No, no, no. Please don’t,’ but he didn’t listen ... so I just lay there.” Jen estimates that “he had sex” for about fifteen minutes.

  The entire time, she remembers, she just lay there feeling resigned. “I just thought, Oh, well, my body isn’t going to do anything about it.”

  Jen is quick to clarify: “He wasn’t a big guy; it’s not like I couldn’t have thrown him off me. I was so mad at myself for so long about that. I didn’t tell anyone about it, or think about it, or process it.”

  Months later, her compulsive sex and compulsive eating both raging out of control, Jen had a wake-up call in sociology class. As she listened to her professor, a woman she respected and identified with, talk about rape and its variable definitions, that night hit her like a ten-ton truck. I was raped, she sat in the packed lecture hall thinking. I was raped.

  She went home that afternoon and bawled for hours, finally feeling the depth of her sadness and anger over the ignored nos she had muttered that night. She cried for all the times she had been disappointed by guys, for all the times she had been disappointed by herself. She mourned the loss of her high school self—the one who could flirt and fuck with the knowledge that people understood her. She raged about the double standard, the injustice, the ignorance. Ultimately, she prayed for a healing. She prayed that her mind and her body might again be one.

  Now, years after the experience, Jen looks at it through a more nuanced lens: “After it first happened, I knew that I had a battle in my own head and I lost. I had done something that I didn’t want to do. All I knew was that I had fucked up.

  “When I sat in that class and called it rape, I thought he fucked up because he should have stopped. Now that I’m a few years out, I understand that we fucked up.

  “Neither of us had enough of a sense of ourselves to handle the adult situation we were in.” Jen moves from the personal to the political with ease: “That’s why I think sex education is so important. Not just ‘This is how you have babies’ but ‘This is the complicated shit that is going to come up because you’ve been socialized as a girl your whole life and you’ve been socialized as a boy your whole life and the things you’ve both been taught when you come together are going to fuck you both over.’ ”

  Here’s where that complete lack of sex education comes back to haunt us. We have never learned to communicate about sex, and the drunken throes of passion aren’t a great time to learn. Those same high school kids who suffered through the gym teachers’ five-minute muttering and the crotch-rot pictures are now free to run around with their exploding hormones and their miseducated minds on a college campus. When they come colliding into one another under the usual circumstances—alcohol, celebration, desperation—the damage is often done quickly and foggily. This common experience of being mixed up in a sexual encounter where the boundaries are unclear and the talk sloppy is at the center of so many date rapes on college campuses and the regret, self-hatred, and eating disorders that often follow.

  Despite the fact that Take Back the Night marches and rape crisis centers are standard on just about every campus, sexual encounters in college continue to be notoriously brief, unsatisfying, and sometimes even violating. In a study of six thousand students at thirty-two U.S. colleges, one in four women reported being victims of rape or attempted rape, and in another, 13 percent of college women indicated they had been forced to have sex in a dating situation. In a study of 477 male students, mostly freshmen and sophomores, 56 percent reported using “non-assaultive coercion”—i.e., threats, teasing, manipulation—to obtain sex.

  These numbers remain so high in part because we haven’t been able to revise the notion of “rape” in our minds—violent, straightforward, intentional, evil. In fact, it is a slippery slope from the “non-assaultive” stuff to the more serious violations. Much of the rape that goes on in the privacy of dorm rooms is initially mutual and playful and leads into something confusing and painful—a direct result of our lack of practice communicating about and understanding the complexities of sex.†

  Recovery from one of these encounters is often brutal and can be more painful than the rape itself. Women wade through a cesspool of self-doubt—they replay the event, or what they can remember of it, in their heads and blame themselves for not being more assertive. Eventually they find some anger buried deep inside and try to climb on it to get out of their self-hate. Sometimes they take self-defense classes and punch padded assailants until their grief goes quiet. Sometimes their own bodies become their punching bags.

  In a recent study, 80 percent of patients with eating disorders reported they had a history of abuse. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in clinical psychology to understand the relationship between sexual assault and eating disorders. When a girl like Jen endures rape, she feels as if her body betrayed her. When she cannot confront the real enemy of that betrayal, she focuses her energy on the most immediate substitute. By starving and/or purging, she finds a tangible way to seize control and punish. By bingeing, she feeds her pain and protects herself from other, future violations. She has a place to put that energy, a conduit for all that anger and sadness, a simple distraction from the confusing reality.

  Dr. Karen A. Duncan, an expert in sexual abuse recovery, has worked with almost thirteen hundred women—the majority of them exhibiting eating-disordered behaviors. She explains that female victims of sexual abuse often “blame their bodies for the sexual abuse. They say things like ‘If I didn’t have breasts, if I didn’t look like this, then things would have been different.’”

  Dr. Duncan remembers a thirty-two-year-old patient who had been sexually abused by both her father and a male cousin. She also came in with an eighteen-year history of eating disorders. Though weighing only 115 pounds (at five feet eight) at the time, she informed Dr. Duncan that she was scheduled to have a liposuction procedure the following week. It would be her fourth in a year. “She was self-injuring,” Dr. Duncan explains, “in order to feel in control of her own pain. And each time she caused herself that pain, it was, in a sense, a reenactment of the abuse she so long endured.”

  Freak

  Things didn’t get easier for Jen. In fact, they got much, much harder. When she came home after her first year, she told her parents that she felt in danger of getting an eating disorder. They made an appointment for her with one of the psychologists in the network for their health insurance, and Jen, relieved, went to her first session. She remembers, “This woman, who had known me for fifteen minutes, told me that she thought I had been molested as a kid. And all I could think was Here’s the fucking shame again. I’m telling you with my whole heart, I am a sexual person. I don’t know why, but I know that from the time I was really young, I’ve enjoyed sex. And she’s saying, ‘That’s not possible. No, you’ve been molested.’ That was horrible for me, another person, more reassurance that you’re not normal. You’re fucked up. There’s no way that you were born with those desires.” Despite great need, Jen has never been back to therapy.

  The hit
s kept coming. During her sophomore year, Jen noticed a suspicious red bump on her vagina. When she was diagnosed with HPV,† she wasn’t surprised. But she was crushed nonetheless: “I felt like I was being punished for being a slut. Everything that was central to my identity—the crazy sexual experiences, the spontaneity, the fun— I wasn’t allowed to do anymore. I thought my life was over.” Her body not only remained the enemy but became even more explosive, even more out of control and unworthy of love in Jen’s mind. Her binge eating increased. Her self-loathing grew so large she couldn’t contain it.

  She trusted one of her closest friends with her diagnosis, then quickly learned that this friend had shouted, while standing on a bar in a drunken rage: “My slut friend Jen has warts! She’s dirty!” Jen basically shut down. She remembers, “I felt like such a freak. I pretty much decided no more girlfriends.”

  That decision was immediately painful as Jen had to go through the medical process of having her warts removed alone. The clinic waiting room was filled with repentant boys with their heads down, waiting for their girlfriends to emerge; nervous mothers; big sisters; steadfast friends. But Jen cried through her entire procedure and then left the clinic alone, got in her car alone, drove home alone. Sat in her bedroom and wondered, alone, if she would ever feel okay again.

  For months Jen wallowed in this despondent, isolated space. She ate sporadically and compulsively, not consuming anything until late in the night and then gorging herself on ice cream and cookies. She didn’t phone anyone, go anywhere, or enjoy anything.