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

by Courtney E. Martin

  A few months after I had last seen Bonita, we met at a coffee shop and she started telling me about her latest adventure. She is writing spoken-word poetry and performing it in a café on the Lower East Side. She says, not a bit shy, that she thinks she might be pretty good. Her eyes seem even bigger than the last time we met, her future even brighter as she looks ahead to college.

  When we get around to talking about her family, she laughs and then sheepishly admits that her mom did get that tummy tuck, with some liposuction thrown in. “If that didn’t make me never want to get plastic surgery, I don’t know what would,” she reports. “The recovery was gross.”

  We try to narrow down Bonita’s prospective colleges, and I promise to write her a glowing recommendation. Right before she is about to leave, she leans in and this time doesn’t laugh at all. “The weird thing—about the tummy tuck, I mean—is that it made the scar on my mom’s belly disappear. That was the scar she got when she had me, ’cause I was a cesarean section. That just doesn’t feel right.”

  The Young Boy’s Club

  In the attic of my childhood home are rows and rows of records that my parents kept from their high school and college days: the Beatles, the Four Seasons, the Rolling Stones, all gathering dust. Every once in a while my dad will go up there and dig around for something, put it on the record player, and reminisce about what he was doing when he first heard a particular song. He puts on Herman’s Hermits and describes his first high school homecoming, how the girls stood on one side, straightening their itchy skirts and repinning stray hairs into their beehive hairdos, and the boys stood on the other, bragging about what they wanted but realistically wouldn’t do with their dates after the dance. Despite my dad’s silver hair and laugh lines, he looks young again, lit from the inside.

  I try to imagine myself at his age, digging around in the dusty CDs of my youth and uncovering my high school classics. I might put Common’s “I Used to Love H.E.R.” in the ancient CD player— surely everything will be completely digitized—and talk about the first time I heard it, sitting in my boyfriend’s white boat of a Cadillac in front of my house at fifteen years old. I might play some of the Roots’ early stuff or Black Star, reminisce about how frequently I saw them both perform at little clubs around New York my first year in college. I might put Snoop Dogg or Dr. Dre on and go even further back, to the days in junior high when we would find a parentless house and have our first house parties. The girls would sit on one side of the room giggling and looking up adoringly at their boyfriends, who stood in a self-conscious circle, freestyling (rapping unwritten lyrics spontaneously).

  Our greatest hope was to be woven into one of the rhymes.

  Hip-hop is the music of my generation, no doubt. It is the sound that, like the Beatles for my parents’ generation, or U2 for the one between us, makes us feel alive. It is the soundtrack of our adolescence, the background music of the most defining moments of our teenage lives. It is a reflection of our tepid political consciousness—the distrust we feel for traditional government, the nuanced way in which we approach race and class issues, our obsession with consumption. Hip-hop is what moves our bodies and defines our expression.

  Though it was born in the inner-city neighborhoods of the 1970s, it was not until the late eighties that hip-hop made its way to suburbia. For kids in the cities, especially those from working-class families, hip-hop was part of the diet as early as elementary school. My boyfriend remembers listening to Slick Rick’s “La-Di-Da-Di” and doing head spins on the living room floor with his brother and sister in Brooklyn circa 1985. For those of us raised farther inland, among sprawling, paler suburbs, hip-hop was generally a junior high-era epiphany. I can easily recall my brother’s obsession with the Beastie Boys circa 1993; he and his two best friends each claimed the persona of one of the members of the rap group and performed their songs at summer camp talent shows.

  I was in love with hip-hop at first sound. Though a writer myself, I never thought to join the cipher (the group of people standing in a circle and taking turns freestyling). My girlfriends and I did everything we could to identify ourselves as part of the hip-hop culture—we took photographs at hip-hop shows, dressed in baggy jeans and hoodies, dated boys who signaled our legitimacy. But we never, for a second, considered trying to write or perform our own raps. Looking back, I realize that we never thought of the music of our generation as our music. It was always borrowed, always impenetrable, always male.

  When my mom was moved by Joan Baez, she could have picked up a guitar and learned to create her own music. She could have agonized over the lyrics, expressed something truly her own, communicated it to the world (okay, maybe just a living room of stoned hippies). Girls of my generation couldn’t interact with the music that moved and defined us in the same way; we couldn’t add our voices to the raw and real mix that so appealed to our teenage angst and outrage. Instead, we dressed, danced, waited on the sidelines of house parties, cultivating an image of hip-hop rather than contributing to it.

  The almost complete absence of female MCs (masters of ceremonies, those who write and perform raps) from hip-hop music indicates that its boys’-club mentality goes far beyond its sexist lyrics or its pornographic video visuals. Women are not encouraged, nor are they inclined, to put their own voices into the mix. Instead, they learn early that their place, in either corporate rap or conscious hip-hop, to a lesser extent, is as silent partners.†

  Young women’s voicelessness is even more disturbing when you consider the nature of hip-hop. It is a music, a culture really, built on the idea of grassroots participation. It was intended to be an ongoing dialogue in which performers become audience and audience becomes performers. Drawing from far older African oral traditions, hip-hop is predicated on the idea of liberation through storytelling.

  But if you look at the average roster of MCs, it would appear that women have no stories to tell. Women griots offered their voices to the West African tradition that hip-hop echoes; but in the era of commercialized rap, most young women speak only with their bodies. Some exceptional women choose to break-dance, write graffiti, or DJ, but more often than not, these choices are greatly shaped by the safety of silence—none of these expressions requires the risk of speaking.

  When I first saw Mariana* walk into Elementary, an extracurricular hip-hop club at Columbia University, I was mesmerized by her. She seemed to weave in and out of the nerd rappers and big-bellied hip-hop drummers with ease, laughing with them, touching them lightly on the shoulders. She seemed to have none of the self-consciousness that I did about being white and privileged and totally entranced by hip-hop but unable to participate in any meaningful way.

  I would later learn that part of her confidence stemmed from the fact that she actually had figured out a way to be a part of the culture. At sixteen years old, she got a couple of turntables and started practicing DJing from her Austin home. By the time she got to college, she was adept at doing some of the difficult skills that real DJs must master: scratching, blending, and beat matching. She had the respect of the guys in that club, in part because she had done something that few girls would do.

  Mariana is now one of my best friends and continues to DJ in clubs throughout New York City and beyond. We sat down on a recent Friday night in her apartment and talked about her brave choice, her continuing frustrations, and the way her body is an often overlooked subtext of the larger story.

  Mariana remembers a time when she was unafraid to rap. Six years old, shoveling the snow with her big brother in New Jersey, freestyling to her heart’s content: “My mom used to read this book, Tales from the Arabian Nights, to us, and we would rhyme about Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Sinbad the Sailor, all the characters in that book.” The brother-sister duo even recorded a rap for their grandparents’ wedding anniversary. They wore out their Run-D.M.C. record, fought over the mix tape with “The Humpty Dance” on it. Mariana goes on: “It was such a natural thing to do—rhyme off the top of my head for fiv
e minutes. It was probably awful, but I never felt ashamed or embarrassed. I don’t understand why I never felt embarrassed when I was little and then, just a few years later ...”

  She trails off, stumped at the shape of her own history. Mariana’s story, though about a modern music, sounds like an old tale. Carol Gilligan’s idea about girls losing their authentic voices, along with their innocence, at adolescence fits eerily well here. “I turned twelve,” Mariana remembers, “and suddenly I just stopped being able to freestyle. My brother didn’t want to hang out with his little sister. I became a cheerleader. Everything was different.”

  How does a shoveling, rapping, carefree Mariana turn into a self-conscious perfect girl come junior high? Mariana doesn’t have an explanation she’s satisfied with, but she can’t help thinking it had something to do with her need to “look good”: “Girls feel we have to look good and perform well, not look silly or dumb. I think that’s part of the perfectionism—maintaining an image.” Rapping requires a modicum of playfulness, a sense of humor about oneself, the security to risk screwing up, and the resiliency to pick yourself up if it happens. Girls, especially thirteen-year-old insecure, self-conscious, type A girls, aren’t adept at any of the above. Expressing yourself in that way means being watched and evaluated, losing some control, being the center of attention. Mariana also reflects: “Rap involved posturing, competition, machismo. What twelve-year-old girl wants to risk being typecast as boyish or masculine? Instead, we want to conform, generally, and do things that won’t call negative attention to ourselves.”

  The culture of machismo was inextricable from the culture of rap in Mariana’s public junior high school: the Starter jackets that seemed to swallow up still-developing boys, the usually empty threats of violent revenge for stolen girlfriends, the gangsta-lean swaggers tried on like hand-me-down, ill-fitting coats. Mariana reflects: “I stopped rapping because it was no longer part of my culture. When I finally started going to parties, I would see a cipher, all guys, and I was intimidated. The girls were with the girls, looking cute and doing whatever. The guys were with the guys.” Looking cute is the innocent first phase of letting your body do the talking.

  What sounds innocuous in Mariana’s reminiscence is the crux of the hip-hop problem for women. The girls are looking cute. The guys are expressing themselves, developing a sense of spontaneous voice, practicing making mistakes and learning from them, generally being seen and heard. Looking cute means losing out.

  As Mariana got older, she didn’t find it any easier to join in the cipher, but she found other ways to be involved in hip-hop. Many hip-hop acts came through her new hometown, Austin, and Mariana was in the front row for most of their shows. She started taking note of the DJs; she liked the idea that they got to participate fully without putting themselves smack-dab in the center of attention. She explains: “[As a DJ,] you play other people’s music. If you are an MC, everyone is staring at you and listening to your music. [As a DJ,] you can fade into the background a little if you want to. DJing is a little more removed, a little safer.” She got some turntables and started practicing.

  Around the same time, Mariana was going through a lot in her relationships with boys and with her own body. She was full of an inextinguishable angst, fed by her attraction to fiery guys, risk takers, artists, druggies, wannabe thugs. Though on paper she was every parent’s dream—the perfect girl with nearly perfect grades, a place on the cross-country team and in student government—in real life she was testing all kinds of limits.

  While she was discovering DJing, she met her older boyfriend, Brad.* He cut and burned himself when he was overwhelmed or anxious, and Mariana started to as well. She remembers, “I was so confused, so tormented. When you are a teenager, you are just so affected by everything, so affected by the world. For a few months, anyway, cutting became my way of dealing with it.” During the week, Mariana was getting nearly perfect grades and running cross-country. On the weekends, she was sneaking into clubs and experimenting with ecstasy, cocaine, and mushrooms. Just before her sixteenth birthday, she took unlabeled drugs at a party and blacked out. When she came to, she realized that she had lost her virginity.

  In retrospect, Mariana realizes that her weekday self and her weekend self were not as different as they appeared. “In both cases, I felt like my body didn’t really matter, like I could beat it up in service of my larger goals—whether that was numbing my angst or getting the A. In fact, it was really in cross-country that I learned that ethos of working through the pain. I decided early on that I needed to ignore what I actually felt so that I could be this person I thought I wanted to be: the good DJ, the good student, the good runner.” One of the trademark perfect-girl talents is this ability to ignore and overcome the body’s weakness in pursuit of a goal. We quickly condition ourselves to tune out our own internal signals, our aches and pains, our hungers, and tune up our plans, our determination, our control. What works in the short term, however, eventually leads to burnout. Many of us, so expert at overcoming our own pain on the road to success, end up crossing the finish line, but not without disease and heartbreak.

  The ultimate sign that Mariana knew how to ignore her body came her senior year. She had sex that she describes as “confusing. I couldn’t tell whether I was forced or not, but I definitely remember saying that we shouldn’t because I knew I wasn’t on birth control at the time.” Soon after, she realized she was pregnant. Mariana reflects, “It seems like you hear so much about how not to get pregnant when you are a teenager, but then when it happens, you are so secretive about it, you don’t know what to do with yourself.” She told no one. It was almost as if she didn’t even tell herself, instead continuing to drink and do drugs at parties, run races, look forward to college.

  Not long after, she had a miscarriage. Once at the hospital, she refused to tell the doctors any of her family’s information, opting to pay the two-thousand-dollar bill with the money she had saved for college from her after-school job. At home, she got two hours of sleep, woke up at 4:00 A.M., and started on her psychology presentation, due that afternoon.

  Mariana felt like her body was something outside herself, uncontrollable and dangerous. It attracted attention. It got sick and hung-over. It got pregnant. It bled. The only way for her to deal with it was to ignore it. Pain became a passing nuisance, something to overcome on the way to achievement, or master in order to keep up appearances. Mariana’s body was weak and her determination to bypass it strong.

  DJing was and still is an outlet in which Mariana’s body takes a backseat. She explains, “DJing is a way to hide your body. I like to hide behind these two huge, hunking pieces of metal [the turntables] and play around with funky equipment. In essence, I get to hide my femininity for a second.” She describes the effort as mechanical and technical—words usually associated with masculine pursuits.

  Ironically, just as Mariana is using the turntables as an escape from the spotlight, many women have chosen to use them as the way in. Mariana can’t hide her disappointment with women who use their looks to get gigs and publicity. Other female DJs who are far more expert, such as Cuttin’ Candy, Mariana’s mentor, get less recognition because “they flaunt their skills, not their bodies.” Some female DJs even play clubs topless—“the ones and twos” that their audiences are paying attention to are certainly not the turntables. Mariana resents women who use their bodies instead of their skills because what they do undermines women’s already vulnerable place in the culture.

  Spinning was a safe way for Mariana to be part of hip-hop culture not only because it hid her body but also because it hid her privilege. Here was a white upper-middle-class girl, a next-door type going to an expensive college prep school—perfect on paper—who felt anything but ordinary. She swooned at the life stories she heard slip from her favorite rappers’ lips. They described a world she thought was tragic and beautiful in equal parts. She wanted to be part of a community more raw and real than the liberal lip service and fake smiles
of her classmates’ mothers and fathers. This is part of why she was attracted to dangerous men, part of why she drank and crossed the lines of her own square upbringing, part of why she got behind the turntables despite every indication that it was a man’s place. Mariana wanted a place of her own that allowed her to contribute to hip-hop culture but still feel “safe.”

  By DJing, she could participate in the music she loved without the risk of exposing herself. Paradoxically, she could win the respect of those around her while in retreat from them. Hidden behind the booth, she was no longer a growing girl with an exploding body or a privileged white chick. She was a music connoisseur, a hip-hop aficionado, an artist. She joined the collective scream of her generation without ever opening her mouth. “DJing,” she explains, “can be a way of expressing myself without ever feeling too vulnerable . . . without ever truly expressing myself.”

  Shut Up and Bling

  After we talk for a while, Mariana and I reminisce about all of the female MCs of the eighties—fierce women with brazen tongues who seemed to predict a future that never happened. She doesn’t have to search long among her hundreds of records before locating some of her favorite oldies: Roxanne Chante, Queen Latifah, MC Lyte.

  She laughs as she takes the vinyl out of a weathered sleeve and puts it on one of her turntables. As a commanding but playful female voice starts rapping, she holds out the jacket to me: “1998,” she tells me. “So fly.” The three solidly built girl members of Salt-N-Pepa grace the cover in spandex, head to toe. Their gold chains and African-print hats look to be making their heads too heavy to hold up. The song is appropriately called “Spinderella’s Not a Fella (But a Girl D.J.).”