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

by Courtney E. Martin

  Benny Medina, talent agent, talked about Richie to Vanity Fair in June 2006: “I think she’s motivated to be scary-little. . . . There’s an aspirational look; the younger generation has become obsessed with thinness that pushes it to the point of concern. It’s a style. I personally think everyone in California has an eating disorder.”

  When today’s pop girls aren’t totally mute or quipping in dangerous contradictions, they are completely vacuous. An interview with Britney Spears is like listening to pink static. She giggles, blushes, coos, and every once in a great while, tries to take a stand—but it mostly sounds like a child throwing a tantrum. Paris Hilton’s only contribution is her favorite phrase: “That’s hot.”

  One refreshing exception is the American Idol runner-up Katharine McPhee, who admitted to People weekly in June 2006 that she struggled with bulimia for five years before seeking treatment right before her stint on the show. She admitted throwing up seven times a day at her worst, which she described as “putting a sledgehammer to your vocal cords.” After a three-month hospitalization, she claims to have made peace with her appetite. She now uses the “intuitive eating approach,” which entails—gasp!—actually paying attention to your authentic hungers and satisfying them rather than living by dogmatic rules about “good” and “bad” foods.

  It is rare that a star such as McPhee is so up-front about the ugliness of trying to be beautiful in our cookie-cutter culture. The majority of pop stars today are living, breathing, gyrating icon dolls or, as Pink brazenly calls them in her hilarious 2006 video, “Stupid Girls.” They have nothing to contribute outside the realms of fashion and conspicuous consumption. Most dolls come with accessories such as a yippy dog with a diamond collar worth more than a semester’s college tuition and a line of noxious perfume. Pull one of their strings and they will squeak vapid lyrics.

  In fact, one of the major sensations of 2004 was actually called the Pussycat Dolls by the Los Angeles choreographer and creator Robin Antin, whose dream was to make “everyone look like a real, living doll.”

  It wasn’t always this way. There was a time when female musicians were actually musicians, when they had a message beyond their midriffs, when their bodies were not their only claims to fame. Thirty years ago female singers were icons with personality: Janis Joplin, Aretha Franklin, the still-raging and amazing Bonnie Raitt. These women’s lives had not been molded for celebrity from birth with Disney mouse ears, talent scouts, and personal trainers. Janis Joplin, while certainly not a healthy role model, spoke her mind and lived the hell out of her short life. Aretha Franklin became the “Queen of Soul” after having two babies and a dream in Detroit in her teens. Bonnie Raitt left Harvard to ride the highways of the South with old blues musicians.

  Nancy Sinatra’s boots were made for walking. Gloria Gaynor knew she would survive. Fergie, from the Black Eyed Peas, just wants to tell you about her “humps.” Today’s pop stars’ bodies, not their songwriting or singing abilities (most appear to have none), make them famous.

  Today’s young pop icons don’t have to drop out of school to get famous because they don’t go in the first place. They are anti-intellectual and apolitical, asserting opinions on nothing besides the latest “in” Las Vegas clubs and designer shoes. They spend money, party, and starve. Their biggest statements are official announcements of breakups and engagements. Their reality shows, rather than revealing that there is more than meets the eye, confirm that we have seen all there is to see. These women are spoiled brats in undernourished bodies, unaware of the world outside of their Hummers and high-rise apartments.

  Media-Literacy Fatigue

  Most young people are hip to the fact that the news is often subjective, stardom is sometimes bought with cold, hard cash, and fashion spreads are Photoshopped to death. We barely batted an eye when Ashlee Simpson came up lip-synching. We know Julia Roberts has body doubles. We have seen airbrushing transform a textured face into a smooth polish on America’s Next Top Model.

  My generation grew up with a healthy dose of cynicism about most Hollywood stars, whose bodies must be groomed and toned and tightened and plucked into submission. We know that all of this takes a lot of time and money that most of us don’t have. We know that models actually look strange and giraffelike in person, that they couldn’t get prom dates because they were so tall and awkward. The concept of “media literacy” was born about the same time most of us were.

  But for all our twentieth-century savvy, we are still swooning, celebrity-entranced teenagers and twenty-somethings with subscriptions, sometimes justified entirely by the “Stars Are Just Like Us” section and hipster irony, to Us Weekly. Pop stars are part and parcel of American culture, and now that we are exporting MTV and the tabloids along with McDonald’s and Coke, part and parcel of everyone else’s culture too. Even if we intellectually think they are full of shit, pop stars still capture our collective imagination. We like to make fun of them. We like to critique their clothes and their dance moves. And unfortunately, yes, sometimes we still like to emulate them.

  It is not that a football stadium’s worth of fourteen-year-old girls saw Lindsay Lohan’s shrinking body on Access Hollywood and promptly decided to starve themselves, just as she did. We are not so directly affected or so hopelessly naïve. We have sat in high school and college classrooms and watched Jean Kilbourne’s series of feminist films about the tyranny of skinny images infiltrating our brains; Killing Us Softly, her first, was created the same year I was: 1979. We don’t buy the theory that mean male media executives have a vendetta against easily influenced teenage girls. The executive directors of most women’s magazines are women. Though there isn’t sexual equality in the leadership of most entertainment corporations, there are females in top positions at Sony, Universal, CBS, ABC, Paramount, Fox, and the most popular kid in school, MTV.

  We can be mercilessly critical of any and all fluff that is thrown our way, but we remain incapable of intelligently processing all these media messages all the time. The onslaught is paralyzing, the magnitude mind-numbing. And frankly, intellectualizing with every turn of the glossy page isn’t all that much fun either. Unlike our foremothers, we aren’t convinced that high heels are made in the devil’s workshop or that fashion can’t be fun and smart. We have media literacy fatigue.

  The sum total of all of these thin-is-in images does have an impact on the way we see our own bodies, not because we are impressionable or naïve but because we are human. It is exhausting to be constantly critiquing and filtering the contradictory media and advertising messaging through a media-literate lens. As one fourteen-year-old Manhattanite, who sounded and looked like she was twenty-four, told me: “Sure, Us Weekly asks ‘Is Lindsay too thin?’ on the cover, but inside they publish her entire diet—total mixed messages. If I’m feeling bad, I may not think outright, I’m going to be thin like her, but I do read the diet and take a mental note. I do feel jealous. That must translate into some behavior even if I’m not, like, totally aware of it.”

  These constant images have stretched the definition of what is “too thin.” We are accustomed to seeing collarbones jutting out of designer dresses, hips pressing against size-0 pants, tiny waists in cinched belts. These tiny bodies are normalized—the icon dolls that perfect girls play with when we grow out of Barbie. We reject the formless dresses and Chico’s-a-go-go of our mothers and explain away the thin figures on the runway as an unavoidable part of high fashion. Many of us believe that fashion’s fun, creative elements outweigh its skeletal models.

  These skinny, one-dimensional women march through our lives so incessantly that we barely notice their comings and goings. As media-literate as we are, they still affect the way we feel about our own bodies. I can feel the creep in my own casual consumption—my brother and I flip through a stolen copy of our landlord’s Us Weekly like two twelve-year-old boys hiding in a tree house with a father’s stolen Play-boy. “You mean Tom Cruise walks through doors, just like us?” we scream in mock shock. In t
he “Who Looks Hotter?” section, I start rooting for the “bigger” girls, convinced that if Kate Winslet looks better in that Versace dress, then I too have a chance of being attractive. Suddenly what began as an ironic, gut-busting media critique becomes a statement about my own self-worth.

  The result of all this unconscious exposure to tiny, toned bodies is a new ideal. We may brush aside women such as Lara Flynn Boyle or Calista Flockhart—too thin for us. But if these women are the extreme, the acceptable alternative is not much fleshier. We feel better admiring Maggie Gyllenhaal or Claire Danes, though both are very thin, because they do indie movies and wear hipper clothes—the politically correct waifs. We feel progressive when we compliment the bodies of curvier ladies such as Beyoncé and J. Lo, even if they too are airbrushed, dieted, and boot-camped into perfection.

  Many of the girls I interviewed talked about how the Kate Moss days were long gone. They didn’t want to be that thin, they told me, but they did want one of those “in” bodies that men lust after—big tits and a shapely ass, a flat stomach and a small waist, perfect skin, great hair. “Pop culture has definitely shaped the way I think about my body now,” nineteen-year-old Roxanne, a Filipina from New Jersey, explains. “Beautiful, I learned, means the right size breasts—pretty big but not too big; the right size waist—small; and the right size ass—kinda big but very fit.”

  Even if the shape is slightly bigger, there is still a “right size.” Even if the standard you ascribe to is a little fleshier, the strategic placement and toning of that flesh is a tall order. (There are even jeans made with “butt boosters” to enhance size and shape for those born with smaller or flatter asses.) It is still tied up in the everyday push and pull of willpower, the agony of constant comparisons, the effect of expectations according to ethnicity. The everyday margin for success is still very narrow, even if the models are a little wider.

  “Fat in the Right Places”

  Bonita,* a seventeen-year-old Dominican from the Bronx, leans over the table a little and lowers her voice as she tells me, “The reason I was going to the gym was to try to get a bigger butt. I did mad lunges for the longest time. Latinas are supposed to have asses, you know. I mean, that’s the stereotype.”

  When the size of her butt barely changed, Bonita was disappointed. “You’re supposed to be skinny but have the curves. You are supposed to have a butt and breasts but be thin all at the same time.” She leans back and rolls her eyes. “Crazy, right?”

  I met Bonita through a program for young leaders where I worked one summer and was immediately struck by her insight, her quiet power, her humility. She is strikingly beautiful—big, deep brown eyes and a small, taut body that looks like it could carry her through just about anything. She immediately caused some acute crushes among the male participants, though she seemed entirely unaware of her effect on them. We kept in touch after that summer—I would invite her to film screenings or book readings, and she would update me on her love life or her college search. When I told her about the subject of my book, she laughed—her signature response to discomfort—and said, “You know that’s not just a white-girl thing, right?”

  Eating disorders don’t discriminate, though white women are still the most likely to develop them. Women of color dance along the spectrum in the same neurotic and obsessive range as their white counterparts. When I began researching this book, I interviewed Tiffany, a powerhouse in a compact Chinese-American body who admitted that she was hoping to lose some weight before heading back to the London School of Economics. Felice, a statuesque Caribbean-American, laughed when I asked her if she had ever felt too preoccupied by food and fitness. I would be reading someone’s answer to my e-mail survey, noting all of the classic responses, and then stop short when I realized that the respondent was biracial or East Asian or Mexican-American. By the third month of this continuous surprise, the novelty wore off.

  Researchers confirm my anecdotal findings. In a study conducted in urban public schools in Minnesota of five thousand teenagers, it was found that Hispanic, Asian-American, and Native American girls tended to report similar or more concern with the size of their bodies and as much eating disorder-like behavior as their white peers, if not more.

  In her 2000 study, Dr. Ruth Striegel-Moore, professor and chairwoman of the psychology department at Wesleyan University, also found that black women were as likely as white women to binge and purge, and were more likely to fast and abuse laxatives or diuretics. Other studies she has conducted have supported her theory that women of color who are in close association with white culture, sometimes called “upwardly mobile,” are more often affected by eating disorders. Striegel-Moore told NPR: “What we think drives some of the binge eating is stress-related, and so if you’re talking about someone who is upwardly mobile or who is in a context where they’re, you know, a token person, they may experience a considerable amount of stress and that may, in part, contribute to their eating problem.”

  The numbers confirm that women of color commonly have eating disorders, but they are not getting much formal treatment. Striegel-Moore says these women are “unrecognized by the health-care system.” News stories on the issue rarely feature blacks, Latinas, or women of other minority groups, wrongly implying that eating disorders remain a disease of the white and wealthy. In a recent Florida State University study, researchers showed fictional diaries of a sixteen-year-old girl with weight preoccupation to 150 random people. When these people were told that the writer of the confessions was white, most said that she appeared to have an eating disorder. When they were told she was black, people didn’t see cause for alarm.

  If a woman of color seeks help, she will most likely be speaking with a white therapist, doctor, or nutritionist—not a comfortable situation for some young women who feel that their problems are better understood by someone who shares their culture.

  A twenty-one-year-old Puerto Rican woman, Stephanie,* bravely stood up in front of the women’s studies course I teach, despite the fact that she had not previously participated in class discussions, and told the class about her struggle with anorexia throughout high school. She ate so little each day that she developed acid reflux disease, forcing her to go to the hospital and admit to her mother that she wasn’t eating breakfast or lunch at school, as she had claimed for months. Stephanie started eating three meals a day again but did not get counseling; a year later, when she switched schools and felt the pressure to develop curves in the right places instead of feeling fat all over, she went back to her dangerous eating habits. This time she was worse. She remembered, “I had bad stomach pains, my chest hurt, I was short of breath, and I wanted to throw up. I thought I was going to die.

  “I feel that pop culture had a lot do with how I viewed my body,” she theorizes. “All I saw were these women with flawless, built, but skinny bodies. I started to believe that my body would only be okay if it looked like that too.” Though I respect her analysis, I don’t trust her past tense. She has never gotten counseling, a necessary part of any recovery from an eating disorder. Like many families unaccustomed to dealing with this kind of problem, Stephanie’s didn’t insist on it. They felt that their family was strong enough to be the support she needed. Maybe they’re right. But she is still so quiet in class, sits in the back, looks gaunt in the face. What if they’re wrong?

  Bonita, unlike Stephanie, focused on fitness on her road to the “fat in the right places” body. In addition to doing wall sits and squats, she was eating chopped-up celery with vinegar poured over it for dinner, a trick she learned from her cousin. In fact, all of the women in Bonita’s family are obsessed with their body size. Her older sister has a personal trainer. At the time of our first interview, despite the fact that money was tight, Bonita’s mother planned on getting a tummy tuck.

  “By the time I was eleven,” Bonita reflects, “I was worrying about my weight. When I went through puberty and gained a few pounds, I remember deciding not to eat any more bread because I’d heard my sister
s talking about that diet. I would say to myself, ‘You ate already, you’re not going to eat again for the rest of the day.’”

  When I hear Bonita talk like this, I get nervous. Is there something she’s not telling me? Does she, or did she, have a partial or full-blown eating disorder? “Do you ever not eat for a long time? Do you ever make yourself throw up?” I ask her, point-blank.

  “Naw,” she responds immediately, shaking her head. “Sometimes I feel disgusted and I want to throw up, but I’ve been told that you don’t do that. I’ve watched Oprah. I don’t know . . .” Her resolution fades and then she admits, “Honestly, I’ve tried, but it doesn’t feel right.” Bonita can’t name a female friend or family member who isn’t obsessed with her weight; she also can’t name one with an eating disorder.

  This vague wisdom that making herself throw up just “doesn’t feel right” is actually a profound protection—a layer of discomfort that separates Bonita from the full-blown hell so many other girls experience. Young women of color frequently expressed a point past which they wouldn’t go in their quest for the “fat in the right places” ideal. In part they may be resisting adopting behavior they know is associated with white girls; by refusing to go down that road, they stay loyal to their culture.