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

by Courtney E. Martin

  But most of the audience members instead focus on her anger. They are not used to being called on the carpet for their judgment of obesity. They feel attacked, misunderstood, perhaps defensive. They have fat friends. They aren’t narrow-minded, just concerned about the obesity epidemic. They thought that was the right way to be. They feel unmoored, the first phase of a new consciousness.

  Gareth’s monologue provokes a storm of self-reflection. I would never say anything rude to a fat man or woman about his or her weight, but would I think it? I preach tolerance, but would I ever consider dating someone who is overweight? When I compliment Gareth on her new haircut, is there a part of me that feels relieved she is undeniably beautiful despite being fat? Do I identify her anger more quickly than I would a thinner friend’s? Do I patronize by complimenting her eyes, her sense of humor, her determination—as if the rest of her doesn’t exist?

  Just as racism is not primarily about frightened white women clutching their purses but about the seemingly mundane, unconscious voices in our heads—Why do black girls have to be so loud? That Latina woman is probably a great nanny. This new Asian guy is probably really smart—sizeism is not about the drunken man who screams “fat bitch” at Gareth on the subway as much as it is about the march of hateful inner monologues. She doesn’t hear, but she senses: That girl would be so pretty if she would just lose some weight. I wonder what is wrong with her, must be lazy. This fat bitch is taking up more than her share of the bus seat.

  When I started to pay attention to the voices in my own head, I was frankly horrified. It wasn’t only fat women on whom I unconsciously commented in my own head, it was thin women too: That skinny girl looks like such a bitch. I bet she’s vacuous and vain. That woman shouldn’t be eating that muffin. I feel sorry for that little girl. She is going to be lonely if she doesn’t lose some weight.

  Seriously humbled by my own judgmental nature, I realized that thinking this way about other people creates an inner climate of suspicion. If I think this way about her, what is she thinking about me? Like a chronic gossip suddenly aware that other people probably talk about her behind her back too, I woke up to the fact that I was sealing my own fate of mercilessly judging and being judged, even if my participation was unspoken.

  That understanding is Gareth’s gift to me. It is a daily struggle not to listen to the voices—the furtive whispers, the outdated instincts— that try to slip under the radar. But it makes me feel more generous in general. It makes me feel less scrutinized myself. Sometimes I sit on a subway car and look at every woman purposefully and lovingly—as if she were my mother or best friend. It is breathtaking how beautiful they all are when I see like this. It makes the entire world seem as if it is spilling over with humble loveliness instead of paralyzed with hate.

  Gareth shook me out of complacency again when she danced in a burlesque show on a small stage in New York’s West Village.† In only a purple teddy and fishnet stockings, she shimmied before a packed room of onlookers sipping glass jars of whiskey, hooting and hollering good-naturedly. In the scene, she was the object of desire. A wiry black woman with short dreads, dressed in a tuxedo, sang Bessie Smith’s old classic “Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl” as she gazed at Gareth adoringly.

  Seeing women of all different sizes, not just Gareth but others, dance in near-naked shamelessness, shaking their pockmarked thighs and generous booties, I felt suddenly comfortable in my own skin. It was a revelation to see my own body, in all its imperfections, reflected in the women dancing before me. I understood something different about sexuality as well—that it doesn’t have to be pumped full of collagen, taut, narrow, high-pitched. This sexuality was generous, sometimes large, idiosyncratic, very real. For me, it was a paradigm shift—from perfection to playfulness. For Gareth, it was a sacrifice.

  “After opening night,” she explains, “I had this weird mixture of pride in what I’d done and shame. I mean, how could I ever put this body out there? How could I ever show it to everyone, in a scenario where it was supposed to be attractive and sexy?” Despite her conflicting feelings, Gareth geared up to do the show two more times. Each night she strutted onstage, did what she had to do, and breathed a giant sigh of relief afterward. Gareth is a talented actor; she looked empowered through and through to the audience that cheered her on. She remembers, “People kept telling me that they were happy to see someone with some flesh on their bones up there.”

  “And what did you think about that?” I ask, eager to understand the dissonance between the way she was received and how she felt inside.

  “I think they’re trying to make me feel better,” she quickly answers. “They want to support this even if they don’t really want to see it.”

  “Just as you want them to see it even if you don’t really want to do it?” I ask.

  Gareth laughs. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. When I talk about the burlesque with people, I say, ‘Yeah, it was really empowering,’ but it hasn’t had any real effects on how I feel about myself.” Gareth pauses thoughtfully, then goes on: “I do feel two-faced about it. I mean, I lied about my confidence and my empowerment because I thought that it was important for people to see. I still do.”

  Even though Gareth exudes an air of comfort with herself, she has never been able to shed her own perfect girl, starving daughter dichotomy. Susie Orbach calls this enduring self-hate “inevitable. The cultural pressure is internalized and hard to evacuate. One tries through political activism, but the forces pressing in visually and commercially are such that the pain of being fat in this society and the pain of observing others’ struggles with their bodies cannot simply be met with activism.”

  Gareth still feels flawed, even though she advocates that others stop seeing her that way. She still feels weak, even though she appears the epitome of strength. She still punishes herself ten times a day, even though she asks others not to. She still suffers the echo of her weight being announced in a public waiting room. Even if she can stand onstage and urge the world to get comfortable with her weight, she cannot assuage her own decades-long discomfort.

  A tiny, noiseless tear builds up in the corner of Gareth’s black-lined right eye and spills onto the dirty floor. She is lying on her side, gripping my hand with the strength of a woman in labor, clenching her perfect teeth. Looming over her is a tall beanpole of a man with multiple piercings. He is concentrating, but not enough. Over the buzz of his tool, he asks me in a thick Australian accent: “So do you have any tattoos?”

  I take a swig of the beer I smuggled into his shop on St. Marks with the hand that isn’t being smashed and answer, “No.”

  “So you are her uptight friend?” he asks, a smirk spreading on his face. Gareth laughs through her grimace.

  “I guess you could say that,” I answer, and then immediately regret it. Surely this will only encourage him.

  Indeed: “So why don’t you get a tattoo? You think your body is too precious?”

  I take a deep breath. Look down at Gareth’s face, growing pale, feel our hands, stuck together with sweat in addition to the force of her grip. “No, probably just scared,” I reply, though I know that he hit the nail on the head. I do think of myself as too precious. The small of my back too smooth for the interruption of a clichéd butterfly, the tiny bump of my anklebone too endearing for a Chinese symbol. I also worry, of course, that my stomach is not flat enough for a flower, my upper arm not toned enough for a band of vines.

  When he is finally done, little traces of blood are bubbling up from Gareth’s armpit to her hip bone. He wipes them away with a damp cloth, stands back to admire his work. I stare at it too, impressed, mesmerized, honestly, a little bit horrified. There is a zipper, at least two feet long, etched into her pale skin in black ink made even darker by the blood seeping from its lines. At the top, it appears to be pulled a few inches open, as if Gareth is just aching to crawl out of her own skin.

  9. Past the Dedication Is Disease: Athletic Obsession

  Just as perfect g
irls tend to operate in either feast or famine mode, they are extreme in their fitness regimens. We buy expensive gym memberships with high hopes of sticking to our no-excuses get-in-shape plans, only weeks later to stop going altogether. Instead of just walking more, we pledge to run marathons; two months down the road, our expensive running gear goes to waste when we lose enthusiasm. We spend hours at the gym or no time at all. We are fitness nuts or sedentary TV watchers.

  The benefits of my generation’s involvement in organized school sports from a very young age are indisputable, but the costs have been largely overlooked. My own dad reflects: “I thought that succeeding in sports would be good for your self-esteem, that it would make you really competent.” He had no idea that my involvement in sports was also my first exposure to young women with the perfect-girl mentality.

  “This is what we’ve been practicing all season for, girls. This is what we got up early on Saturday for, what we went home early on Friday night for, this is why we have been running and lifting and busting our asses up and down that floor. Don’t let this pass you by. Leave everything out on that floor.”

  A few minutes before it was time to run out for our warm-up, Wendy,* the best junior on our basketball team, would gather us all around for a pep talk, something short and sweet but meant to make us understand the gravity of the moment. The rest of us would nod eagerly, some stretching or bouncing up and down with nervousness, fueled and focused by Wendy’s gurulike energy.

  That Wendy was the best player on the team was no small feat. Our big public school (two thousand students) in suburban America teemed with aspiring athletes and women raised on Title IX. Every year after tryouts, as many girls left the gym in tears as in triumph, and some of those in tears ended up relieved; we practiced, lifted, and had team meetings until 7:00 P.M. on weekdays and often had to come in for two-a-days on Saturdays. I wasn’t raised in a religious family, but when I was in high school, Sundays had an undeniably sacred feeling for me—Coach simply couldn’t ask us to come in for practice. If it wasn’t illegal, he might have. He did ask us to condition over winter break, which none of us but Wendy did. Most of us had to run to throw up from the intensity of the third hour of practice on January 2, but Wendy continued charging up and down the court. We would rinse out our mouths, wipe our faces, and get back in line beside her.

  Wendy was five feet nine, with long, straight black hair held in a French braid, beautifully svelte, strong calves, collarbones that stuck out of the top of her sports bra, a mischievous smile, a killer jump shot. Wendy was consumed with getting a college athletic scholarship. But by her junior year, it looked to me like her dedication had taken an ugly turn; she was shrinking.

  “Now everyone get together,” she shouted. We would huddle close, arms around one another in a big circle of shiny brown and white polyester, and do our final cheer before heading out on that floor. I was always next to Wendy, her tiny body pressed against me. She would scream, “Palmer High, what time is it?” And we would answer, “It’s time to get rough! It’s time to get live!” Louder and louder we would answer until we were all worked up into a frenzy of smiles and screams, and then Wendy would throw the locker room door open, and our intro music—something from OutKast—would begin, and we would wind our way around the gym to the cheers of our families, friends, and crushes filling the stands. It felt, absolutely, like being a rock star.

  “See Jane run” took on new meaning in 1972, when the landmark legislation Title IX was adopted, guaranteeing girls equality in access to sports, to playing fields, to school stadiums, and to funding for sports in educational institutions. No longer was our overwhelming choice between cheer squad and spectator. Title IX states: “No person in the U.S. shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, or denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any educational program or activity receiving federal aid.”

  Title IX was the air I breathed. In my blissfully ignorant, go-girl upbringing, no one ever put a limit on my physical activity. If I could run faster, I ran faster. If I beat the boys in kickball, I did so happily. When I wanted to be a serious high school athlete, my desire was as encouraged and admired as my brother’s aspirations.

  A lot of us girls have athletic leanings. One in 27 high school girls played sports in 1972, but today 1 in 2.5 does. In a recent story touting the health and hipness of girls today, based on interviews with more than one hundred, O: The Oprah Magazine reports: “Across socioeconomic lines, girls today feel entitled to do what they want professionally, to have what they want materially, and to be who they want to be emotionally. After talking to dozens, I came to believe that a good deal of their empowerment came into being on the athletic fields.”

  But this “you-go-girl” sentiment is, unfortunately, only half the story. Dr. Craig Johnson reports that 13 percent of female athletes suffer from full-blown eating disorders, and another 16 percent have a drive for thinness so severe that it warrants diagnosis, even though they don’t exhibit all of the symptoms. According to his recent National Collegiate Athletic Association survey of female college athletes, 70 percent aspired to get their body fat lower than the percentage required to menstruate. A leading organization on anorexia reports that out of 695 male and female athlete respondents to a recent study, a third were preoccupied with food and a quarter binged at least once a week. Twelve percent fasted for twenty-four hours or more after a binge.

  A commitment to and passion for a sport provide a foolproof disguise for many girls today; underneath the dedication is disease. Women martyr their bodies in the name of conditioning and competition. Encouraged by overzealous coaches and parents, many women overexercise and undereat. Clearly, not all female athletes have diagnosable eating disorders, but many fall somewhere on the spectrum of unhealthy eating to exercise that should alarm their families and teammates. After all, deprivation is not empowerment. As female athletes fade away, their stamina grows thin too, but as long as they can dig deep and perform, they and others feel, nothing is wrong. Sports are a performance.

  The Performance

  Our entire warm-up was choreographed. First layups, right then left, then pull-up jump shots, right then left. As we waited in line for our turn to lay it in off the glass, we tried to shake out the nerves or go through the motions of stretching to distract us from the other team, now taking their own shots on the other side of the court. They were inevitably bigger, but we were usually faster. Wendy was always faster.

  She stood at the top of the shooting line, folding her leg and grabbing her ankle behind her, stretching her quads, staring down the other team. Most of us might steal a glance, but Wendy had no problem looking the other team dead in the eye before a game. With her long white skinny legs and her spindly arms sticking out of her jersey, that stare made her look really hungry, ravenous for the win.

  The power of this kind of performance is palpable. Even when warming up for the game, we had the scary and wonderful feeling of being watched. Getting noticed is coveted in the complex social matrix of high school; being in front of that crowd was special, a moment apart at sixteen when the whole school was looking at you. At a time in most girls’ lives when the quest to get noticed can take a nasty turn—drugs, sex, dropping out—sports are a constructive high. You perform with a crew, gaining the coolness of an affiliation. Playing sports let me be down with all kinds of kids who otherwise would have written me off as a snob from the north end. Jasmine* was six feet tall, black, full of badass attitude. She couldn’t deal with the authoritarian style of our junior high coach, stormed out of the gym one day never to return, but when I went to parties in her neighborhood and spotted her there, we would embrace—old friends, bonded by our love of the game. I was seen by her on that court in a way that I never would have been seen otherwise. With a ball in my hand, I could transcend the label of “just another white girl.”

  When you play well, there is glory. I once got slammed by a girl twice my size as I was shooting a three-po
inter. I heard the crowd gasp as I fell to the ground . . . hard. When I got up, my vision was blurry, but I sank my three free throws anyway—to the crowd’s delight—only afterward realizing that a blood vessel in my eye had popped. I looked like a roughed-up boxer the next Monday at school, the white of my eye an ominous red. I got so many props it transformed the swelling into a badge of honor.

  The flip side of this visibility is that, when you have an off game, everyone knows. When you miss a jump shot at the buzzer, it is recorded in the collective consciousness of your entire class—at least for the next week. And a week can be an eternity in high school time.

  There were layers to our performance that had nothing to do with our actual athletic performance. Before the game, we combed and re-combed our hair into perfect ponytails; fretted over pimples, makeup, and dirty shoes; asked one another for help braiding and rebraiding our hair. Many a girls’ locker room is coated in a hard-to-remove film of glitter that doesn’t come from just the cheerleaders.

  As female athletes have gotten more press in the media and more playtime on major TV channels, more than their talent and skill has been exposed. Their bodies, not immune to the values of the culture at large, have come to be scrutinized. Nike ads or ESPN vignettes may emphasize how strong and powerful an Olympic runner or swimmer is, but just as often a female athlete is publicly pressured to prove that she is first female, i.e., pretty, sexy, sweet, and only secondarily athletic. As the Village Voice writer Joanna Cagan writes, “They’re everywhere, these proud offspring of Title IX—strong, competitive, and practically naked.”