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

by Courtney E. Martin

  So in this increasingly level playing field of airbrushed abs and steel thighs, both young women and young men are being pressured to fit a form. The mass media don’t run just one loop anymore but two—Barbie and Ken. In fact, recent research indicates that there is a rise in men suffering not just from obsessive working out or the taste of those god-awful muscle-building shakes but from full-blown eating disorders. In America alone, 1 million men have eating disorders, a 30 percent increase since 1972. The age at which men develop eating disorders appears to be a few years older than women, whose average onset is seventeen. The eating-disorder specialist Margot Maine reports on the unique nature of some men’s suffering: “New terms such as muscle ‘dysmorphia’ and ‘reverse anorexia’ have been coined to describe their eating disorders, reflecting society’s emphasis on strength and power and the changing ideals for men’s bodies.” None of these terms, however, appears in the psychological diagnostic manual at this time.

  Like minorities, many men may be undiagnosed because of the misconception that eating disorders are only a female disease. While we may not have gotten hip as a society to the fact that men are suffering from such disorders, it would be hard to deny that they are suffering for beauty (as women have since the first eyebrow tweezer was invented). The beauty industry has taken note of men’s anxiety about their bodies and created cosmetics lines and hair removal products for them. Nail and hair salons are no longer women’s country—now men get manicures, pedicures, and professional waxes. Men are just learning what women have known all too well for far too long—that there is a slippery slope from beauty regimen to straight-up tyranny.

  One twenty-year-old guy who described himself as “lower-middle-class and fatherless” wrote this in reluctant answer to my question “Have you ever struggled with an eating disorder?”:

  Okay. Well, I guess so. Back in high school I used to be heavier, by a lot. I’m six foot, and I’d say I weighed in at 240 pounds, and not the captain of the football team kind of 240. I never had a good opinion about the way I looked, so I did what any fat person does to be accepted, be funny. At the end of my senior year, my way too much beloved girlfriend broke up with me. I was an emotional wreck, if ever a guy in a potentially published statement could admit to being one. I didn’t eat for three weeks, and if I did, it was quickly vomited in a fit of distress soon after. I survived solely on a diet of Nestea Cool.

  Family tried to get me to eat, but I wasn’t really in a state to hear them, it was all one big depressed blur. I dropped 40 pounds in those three weeks, and even after I still didn’t eat much. In the following two months, I lost 40 more. It certainly was a far cry from healthy, and I burned away a lot of muscle mass. Even so, afterwards, once the overdramatic emotional issues were resolved, I found myself feeling a lot better. A lot of aspects of my personality changed, much of it in a way that, a year earlier, I would have considered a lot shallower.

  Any natural affinity we, as individuals, might have for more flesh or crooked teeth or short stature is washed away in a flood of airbrushed images. When you are young and trying to fit in, taking the time and energy to notice what you really crave would be like resisting a force feeding day in and day out. Holding on to your mother’s love of your unique beauty practically requires growing up in a cabin in the middle of nowhere. With no electricity. Alone.

  Making one narrow standard of beauty is the aim of corporate culture; if we acknowledged a variety of beauties, women would spend far less money on diet books and miracle pills, and men wouldn’t be shelling out for designer labels and Rogaine. A huge business is built on making us feel unattractive. The marketing of inadequacy also undermines our view of ourselves and how we understand our worth in the world. Instead of relying on our own perception, we look outside ourselves for constant affirmation.

  Every little girl, at one point or another, whether secretly or openly, wishes she could be a model in order to make her beauty official. Megan Hinton and I were walking around the Citadel mall in Colorado Springs aimlessly one average twelve-year-old’s afternoon when a “scout” from a modeling agency approached us and told us that we were both “raw beauties that needed to be cultivated.” Neither of us knew what cultivated meant, but we were sure this was our chance to prove, once and for all (mostly to ourselves, of course), that we were pretty. We begged our parents to let us pay the exorbitant fee for the start-up classes, but they wisely refused. I remember stomping up to my room and staring at myself in the sticker-covered mirror nailed to the back of my bedroom door. Was it real? Could I be pretty?

  A lot of guys, whether they admit it or not, get involved in sports or join a band, in part for the same reason. Coolness is certified by a captain spot on the basketball team or a drum set in the garage. Just as girls dream that the walk down a fashion runway would lead them to the end of their wondering—Am I beautiful? Will I ever be?—boys hold fast to the football and their delusion that if they score a touchdown, they will finally end the game and their own insecurities. At school talent nights, they freestyle a trail of clichéd, machismo rhymes, hoping that some girl will follow them. Both sexes wish for a quick fix for their self-image.

  We walk around wondering what we look like through most of adolescence and, with less urgency, for the rest of our lives. Our inability to really see ourselves imbues the judgments of strangers with tremendous and undue value. When I get catcalled on the street— “Hey, beautiful. Hey, smile, beautiful. You’re too pretty to worry”—I am slightly annoyed but also oddly swayed. I hate when people tell me to smile. Huh, a stranger thinks I’m beautiful today. That’s nice. I knew this shirt looked good. A man I have never met can instantly put a little swing in my step.

  Unfortunately, it works in the other direction as well. When I go to the bar feeling a little proud of myself for getting the mascara on my lashes instead of my eyelids, and wearing that new shirt I’m not totally sure about, and no one offers to buy me a drink, I sometimes go home feeling deflated. This shirt really isn’t that cute. I need to pluck my eyebrows. Who would buy a drink for a girl with hair as frizzy as mine? Again, a bar full of half-drunk strangers has the power to make me hang my head.

  We are dependent on the kindness of strangers because of the onslaught of skinny-and-fit female or tall-and-toned male images that we suffer daily. We become unsure of our own sight so early on, convinced that the only accurate view of ourselves is outside ourselves. We search for signs that we resemble the mold—an invite to homecoming from a football player, a wink in the elevator from a cute coworker, admission into an exclusive downtown club. We feel, in these brief, usually fruitless encounters, like we are being seen when really we are just being noticed. The difference is significant.

  Being noticed is ordinary, fleeting, and impersonal. Being seen is extraordinary, lasting, and intimate. Being noticed is common and only skin-deep. Being seen is rare and profound. It is what happens when you stay up all night talking in a stranger’s car because the conversation is so good you forget to reach for the door handle. Suddenly it is dusk outside and your stomach is growling and your future feels as if it is laid out in front of you like a highway in the desert. Being seen is when your boyfriend knows that the horseshoe scar on your knee was from when you fell in the gravel of the playground in fourth grade playing flag football, and he adores it. Being seen is a hand on the small of your back as you walk through a doorway, a glass of water when you are coughing in the middle of the night, his making a passing reference to something you said so long ago you barely remember it. Being seen is when your girlfriend asks, “Why do you seem sad?” before you have realized that you are, indeed, sad. Being seen is rarely about physical beauty. Being seen is never about being buff or thin.

  Being noticed, by contrast, is easy. It is par for the course for most women, especially young, to be noticed, a deeply engrained ritual of our culture. Men watch. Women are watched. In our reality-TV culture, ordinary girls, as well as models and actresses, become accustomed to being o
bjectified. The most significant example of this, of course, is the Girls Gone Wild empire, now estimated to be worth $100 million, built entirely on the naked breasts of spring-breakers, sorority girls, and brainiacs losing their minds and shirts on a bender. These women are compelled to take it off by their own bottomless hunger for attention—which, on a deeper level, is a sign of feeling fundamentally unseen.

  Maxim has a section specifically for the “girl next door,” where “readers put their girls on display for us”; one (supposed) girlfriend, half-naked against a wall of wooden slats, is accompanied by the disturbing title “Trapped in a Sauna,” and the boys at Maxim have written the caption “The background and the subject force the intrinsic question: Why the hell get married?” In other words, why create a relationship with a woman when you can just trap her in your local sauna or ogle her in your favorite lad mag? Perhaps the more disturbing part of this equation is not the drooling Maxim followers but the girls who misinterpret the drool as a sign that they are finally being seen. Cosmopolitan magazine, the U.K. edition, ran a recent article to convince women that their objectification is their responsibility: “23 ways to get bare-faced confidence: If stripping off is an instant no-no rather than a yes, yes, yes, you need a body confidence makeover.” It seems we are all supposed to be after the same goal: getting women naked and on display.

  Ben, twenty-seven, of Minneapolis, explains, “I think the first messages I ever got about women’s bodies and attractiveness came from magazines and TV. The messages I got from those sources were, in my memory, less about which specific body types constituted attractiveness (although I think I recognized that big breasts were pretty significant and sexual) and more the general objectification and sexualization of women’s bodies that goes on in most media. Despite my parents’ constant critique of those images, that way of seeing women stuck with me for a while.”

  The Porn Question

  The elephant in the room during any conversation about attraction, of course, is pornography. Men, while around women, usually pretend it doesn’t exist unless the women bring it up, and women, for their part, rarely bring it up. As a result, it festers in both of their minds, a telling silence in an otherwise candid conversation, a pretend game in an otherwise authentic intimacy. Neither is sure he or she can handle where the conversation might lead, namely to the question “But how does that change the way you see my body?”

  Most of the men I have talked to about this critical element in the alchemy of attraction supply me with the standard “separation-of-porn-and-real-life theory”—that the bodies they choose to look at on the Internet or in videos (magazines aren’t interactive enough these days) have absolutely nothing to do with the bodies they choose to love in real life. On a purely rational level, this makes no sense. The brain stores information and recalls it when similar circumstances arise. It is why you recognize a cheeseburger when you see one, even if you haven’t eaten one in months. Seeing a naked woman in the flesh again, even if you haven’t seen one in months, is going to remind you of other naked women you have encountered—whether in the digital or the real world. We can hope that your brain’s ability to recall allows you to react appropriately to familiar stimuli, biting the cheeseburger and not the naked woman, for example. (Or whatever floats her boat.)

  Porn is not evil. I am no Hustler-burning prude. Porn plays a role in a lot of people’s sexual lives, couples’ and women’s included. Sexual arousal is multidimensional (visual, sensual, emotional). I wish I had access to some kind of mood-altering URL that could instantaneously transport me to an imaginary land of sexy, fleshy real women and men whose sensuality was so powerful it could push the deadlines, appointments, and errands from my mind. (A Google search for “feminist porn” surfaces Dragon Lady: The Dungeon Mistress and other disturbingly funny titles.)

  Having said that, I feel very uncomfortable considering the implications of dudes everywhere spending even half an hour a day staring at girls’ bodies that have been, more often than not, surgically enhanced, covered in makeup, and airbrushed practically into animation. The days of finding big brothers’ Playboys, filled with tan lines and fan bangs, are long gone. Those big-haired women look pudgy and blemished compared with their faker, thinner turn-of-the-century equivalents. One guy told me that he actually remembers hiding in the attic next to his father’s stash and kissing a centerfold square on her two-dimensional lips. She was overwhelmingly womanly to him, round in the right places, lusciously intimidating. He understates, “Nowadays porn seems pretty different.” A little boy logging on to his dad’s favorite porn site today might feel like he is looking at a picture of a body strangely similar to his own, with the exception of the Photo-shopped giant fake tits.

  Even if men’s porn viewing is constantly counterbalanced by a social critique—most guys I know are hip to the fact that they are supporting a less than feminist business—they can’t control the way these images affect their sexual preferences over time. Sex drive, like hunger, is not easily circumscribed. Preference is shaped by biology and conditioning. A guy can’t make himself like a round belly if all he’s stared at for months on end is flat-as-a-board tummies. He can’t convince himself, no matter how politically conscious he is, to prefer small breasts if massive breasts are what he has conditioned himself to get turned on to.

  Guy after guy has told me that he feels as if he possesses two totally separate sexualities, the one in front of the screen and the one in front of the girlfriend. I’m skeptical. I know that when I get a pop-up ad for Häagen-Dazs while checking my bank account balance, I end up craving ice cream, not the frozen yogurt already sitting in my freezer.

  On an emotional level, of course, it is more complicated than that. How much association is there really? One guy puts a twist on the old separation-of-porn-and-real-life theory: “Pornography plays no role in what I am looking for in real life. When I’m looking at porn, I’m looking at porn. I’m not thinking about work, not worrying about my health, and I’m sure as shit not wondering if the girl being sexed up by a German scientist and his evil Frankenshlong creation would make a good girlfriend. That’s silly. Don’t worry about the porn.”

  Doesn’t the flesh-and-blood version kick the digital version’s ass any day, simply by virtue of being real and unpredictable? Another guy confirms, “Porn made me hate fake tits, I’ll tell you that much.” Since the first women were hunting down dinner and the first men were gathering the sticks to cook it, we have all loved the chase. It is not the ready and waiting that really turns us on; it is the real and unsure, the surprising and rewarding, the four-dimensional and hard to get.

  With the wide variety of images available nowadays—women of all ethnicities and sizes in all kinds of strange situations—could porn actually serve as a force that widens the definition of beauty, unlike mainstream magazines, which show only one brand of pretty? A dude theorizes: “Whatever you are into, there is a site out there for you. This could either be considered positive or negative based on your values when it comes to sex, but I think for some it’s positive because you don’t have to look at rib cages if you don’t want to. I find it a lot more attractive to see naturally lit, not-too-glammed-up people together, rather than some posed shit.”

  That’s all the good news. The bad news was explored in Pamela Paul’s recent book, Pornified, which contains exhaustive interviews with men, mostly young, talking about the huge force fake women have played in their real lives. Paul discovers that many men do make connections between the porn they favor and the women they seek out when they turn off the video or close the window on the screen. In fact, some men’s lives have been destroyed by their dissatisfaction with life (i.e., women) outside porn.

  Harrison, one of the men Paul interviews, reports difficulty even being intimate with real women because his sexual imagination was so bound up with perfect porn-star bodies. He worries: “Had I ruined my sex life permanently?” He was also showing up late for appointments, staying at home on weekend nights
, and having trouble finding or keeping a job because he would lose track of time looking at online porn. Eventually he cut back on his browsing time, explaining that he felt like he was “losing control” when “porn began affecting [his] thoughts with regard to [his] day-to-day life.” He still struggles to keep his mind from wandering to a two-dimensional porn star when he is with a woman in the flesh.

  I heard the same thing, rarely but strongly expressed, from a few men I interviewed. Usually these men worried about their expectations, not about the size or shape of women’s bodies but about behavior: “It causes me to have unrealistic expectations for what my sexual experiences should be like,” confessed one guy. And another reflected, “In general, I’d have to say that pornography affects what I view as sexy or hot in a behavioral way much more than a visual attractiveness sort of way.” And finally, one young man confessed, “Watching submissive women indulge every fantasy of the dominant male in a porno is, at the same time, arousing and horrifying. I hate myself for watching and being turned on by a submissive, weak-willed woman, but perhaps it’s that vulnerability that I’m attracted to. It’s just arousing to see a woman be dominated sometimes.”

  Perhaps men’s pornography preferences are a fun-house mirror of their real-life desires, for a female personality rather than a female body. Or as one guy put it, “Pornography is the carnival sideshow of attractiveness.” Guys who seek out vulnerable women off the screen want submissive porn on it. Guys who seek out authoritative women in life want leather and whips on their websites. One thing is for sure: Men who are worth a damn generally do not see porn stars as physical templates for finding women they want to have relationships with. If a man’s penchant for women with big tits and tiny waists disqualifies you from dating him, that’s a little gift from your old friend Cindy Margolis, the most downloaded woman in history.