To date, Olympic and professional athletes from America, Canada, and Australia have posed naked or nearly naked in Sports Illustrated, Maxim, Playboy, and their own pinup calendars. Some trace this trend back to Brandi Chastain’s dramatic reaction to the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team victory in the 1999 World Cup, when she surprised fans by ripping off her jersey to reveal the black sports bra underneath. Shortly afterward, she posed nude for Gear Magazine, “crouching,” as one reporter put it, “like a question mark over a soccer ball.”
The questions Chastain and her fellow athletes/sex symbols pose are complex: Are these playful attempts at reminding the public that female athletes don’t have to play “like men”? Or are these naked sportswomen being exploited? Most important, how are young women reading these images? A study in the Journal of Sport & Social Issues recently reported that a group of fourteen- to eighteen-year-olds felt overwhelmingly negative about their own bodies after seeing such pictures.
The athlete’s body is now another difficult-to-replicate form being dangled in front of adolescent girls. Although girls may be liberated by the emphasis on strength rather than thinness, the road to the Olympian’s body can look strangely similar to an eating disorder: overexercising, undereating, a reluctance to listen to the body’s signals that it’s tired, hurt, hungry. And the destination—the thin, muscular, perfect body—of the parade of scantily clad athletes also looks strangely similar. Athleticism was supposed to empower us, and in so many cases, it has; but in others, it has created another giant cover-up.
“Empowerment”
When the buzzer sounds to end warm-up, we run back to our bench, pull off our side-button pants with a resounding chorus of snaps, and sit side by side, prepared for the announcer to call our names. As he does, each of us leaps up from the bench, runs onto the court, and shakes hands with an opposing team member.
It is always thrilling to hear it—the sound of my own name over the microphone. As I run by the line of seated teammates, I feel their encouraging pats on my calves, my ass, my back, and I know that I am a part of something, that they believe in me. When I reach that opponent in the center of the floor, I shake her hand amicably, but inside my belly is raging with a fierce determination to beat her.
When the buzzer sounds to mark the beginning of the game, ten girls run out onto the floor, each with a pounding heart and a surging hope.
My brother insisted that I be good at sports. I have many fond memories of being dragged out to the alley, where he would force me to make ten free throws before dinner. By the time I’d made those free throws, I was sweaty and tearful, and Chris, triumphant and authoritative, would sink one more long-range jump shot before granting me permission to go inside. As we headed back to the house, he would say, half joking, half serious, “You know, I’ll kill you if you ever get an eating disorder.”
Chris was always a force that countered my adolescent black hole of self-hate. I bemoaned his hard-nosed methods but secretly loved our predinner ritual. It was evidence of the bond between us, but even more, it was proof that I too was strong and promising, that someday I would grace a basketball court as he did, run up and down for a whole hour without stopping once, have teammates who depended on me and taught me their secret handshakes. Someday I would be as coordinated and cool as my big brother.
I would do all he had, but I would also have teammates who refused to eat lunch or dinner on game days because it made them “too nervous.” I would have friends who withered away into shadows of their former selves over summer conditioning sprees, coming back in September with leathery, tanned skin and visible shoulder blades like folded wings. I heard the cross-country runners brag about losing their periods, clearly marking it as a tribute to their dedication.
Nonetheless, sports are empowering for girls. My teammates were among my closest friends. We shared bonds far more resolute and unencumbered by gossip than my other girlfriends throughout adolescence. Some moments after practice or a game, I felt completely and totally happy—my teenage angst soothed by the dance of our one-three-one defense or the almost psychic connections we shared as we passed the ball down the floor. Sometimes the anxiety I felt about my body during the school day totally dissolved in the sweat of a hard practice—calories or fat thighs made irrelevant when the only question was: Can you box that girl out for the rebound? This was when empowerment still felt like empowerment.
But beneath the surface is a darker, more nuanced story about teenage girls and the drive toward perfection. Feminists have used the word empowerment as if it were a wall that they could build between girls and the culture they grow up in, but confusion, self-doubt, competition, and pressure all creep in, one way or another.
Deprivation as Dedication
Our team is losing at halftime as we jog, heads down, back into the locker room. The team sprawls around the center aisle of the lockers; some of us straddle the wooden benches; others sit on the floor, backs against the cold metal doors, heads between knees. We wait for Coach in silence, knowing he is checking on the stats with his assistant before berating us about our unconscionably bad first half. The bubble has burst.
Though he can’t be more than five feet five, he has the wrath of a giant when he walks in and takes a deep breath, his voice growing louder as he recounts our foibles. “I don’t know who that team out there was. I really don’t. I have seen you in practice this week hitting the boards, running the plays, ready for today, but the team I saw out there looked like a bunch of losers. I could have put the freshman team out there and they would have stood up better against that team! At this point, I don’t know if you even deserve to go back out there!”
I lift my head long enough to peek at Wendy, who is sitting closest to Coach on one of the splintery benches. Unlike the rest of us, who have that adolescent knee-jerk reaction against authority, she is nodding in agreement, eyes closed, rocking back and forth, as if she finds comfort in being chastised by our coach, loud and humiliating as an angry priest. While the rest of us feel angry and resentful toward him, she feels better. Her penance for being imperfect is self-flagellation. I can already see the plan forming in her head—a thousand baskets shot tomorrow morning, a ten-mile run on no breakfast, deprivation as dedication.
Young women generally don’t take lightly their involvement in sports. Ask a serious female athlete, even one who didn’t play in college, and she will tell you she stayed up late after practice to get homework done, ran that last mile with a sprained ankle, went to swim practice even earlier than the rest of the team to get in some extra strokes.
Athletics are predicated on this anything-for-my-sport attitude, but somehow it seems to pervert itself in the minds of eager young women. The guys I knew in high school who played sports were dedicated, sure, but when they left the football field or the basketball court, they didn’t talk about a training regimen to make them improve, they gloated about how good they were. When they sat around Friday nights with a few friends, they glorified their own performance in the last game and talked about professional athletes whose physical ability they admired and tried to emulate. They had bravado—sometimes to a fault. No self-flagellation crept into their bragging monologues.
By contrast, girls feel strangely at home punishing themselves, as if we inherit some uniquely female gene for sacrifice and hard work that allowed our great-great-grandmothers to have babies in the middle of nowhere. We feel comfortable being hard on ourselves, justified in our self-criticisms, redeemed by our often outlandish dedication. We seem to crave the exhaustion of pressing to our physical limit, as if we thrive on unreasonable challenges. “Going the extra mile” is not above and beyond for female athletes; it is a must.
Girls take commitment to the extreme in their quest for perfection, often going past definitions of “healthy” in order to look or feel fully engaged in their sport. The trainer may recommend three miles of running a day for adequate conditioning, but the perfect girl decides that she will run five, then seven, then te
n—all in honor of the game. Knowing that a healthy breakfast doesn’t include too much fat or meat, she decides that means breakfast should be only a banana.
Teenage girls can be as dramatic about their sports as about their relationships. They want to be the best, whatever self-control or pain that requires of them. Megan, a nineteen-year-old Ultimate Frisbee junkie at Carleton College, explains: “I think that it pushes me towards excellence and finding the limits of my body, because I love having worked so hard I puke, or having taken such a beating on the pitch that I can’t move the next day.”
The girls with a drive for thinness and beauty used to be the ones in leg warmers heading to the local gym for an aerobics class, the ones who tried the latest diet and flipped obsessively through fashion magazines. But Jane Fonda, scissor-kicking her legs in the air, is no longer the paragon of the perfect athletic body; Mia Hamm is. In a 2001 study reported in the Journal of Sport Behavior, investigators found that perfectionism was significantly higher in Division I female athletes from the Midwest than in female aerobic exercisers. Thirteen percent of the exercisers worked out 450 minutes a week; that’s equivalent to five times a week for an hour and a half. The Centers for Disease Control recommend 30 minutes of moderate physical activity, five times a week. Even more excessive, 44.6 percent of the athletes surveyed exercised outside regular team practices. When you account for the fact that most Division I athletes have formal practice for at least three hours a day—with lifting and conditioning—that is equivalent to at least eight times more exercise than the government recommends.
I would guess that almost all female athletes have flirted with disordered eating, run a few miles on too little and realized they couldn’t compete without real fuel, practiced too long without drinking enough water and grown dehydrated and shaky. Being involved in sports automatically makes you think more about the way your body works, looks, endures. Sportswomen test the boundaries of how much they need to eat and how long their bodies can go.
An athlete who cuts back on her food intake for a week in order to be more svelte for an upcoming swim meet is certainly not anorectic, but she has taken the mental first step toward making fasting normal. In multiple studies seeking to isolate the risk factors for eating disorders among athletes, many were found to have dieted at some point to improve performance or because a coach recommended they lose weight.
Some girls drive straight past their dream of athletic achievement into the dangerous territory of overexercising, undereating, overtraining. They may exhibit the signs for months—the protruding collarbones, the loss of menstruation, the plate left untouched—before anyone calls them on it and tries to get them help for something that is no longer called dedication; it is called a disease.
Kimberly, a highly competitive high school athlete from the Boston area, was recruited to play college field hockey, but what she really wanted to do was play lacrosse. When she arrived at Hobart, a liberal arts school in upstate New York, she was determined to be one of the two (of twenty-eight) first-year walk-ons who would make the lacrosse team. Known for her willingness to take on a challenge and her ability to set a goal and reach it, she was thought of by friends and family as a perfectionist. Coaches and teammates recall her as a player who always “left everything out on the field.”
Adjusting to college was a bigger deal than Kim had anticipated. She went out to bars on the weekends and didn’t get attention from many of the guys. Next to her disappointed reports in her diary, she began to log her weight. Looking back at these diaries years later, Kim was surprised to see that the two sprang up at the same time. “I didn’t realize how much of my desire to lose weight was tied in to my desire to attract attention.”
She stayed late after practice to condition more, she threw her entire heart into drills, she was ferocious and unintimidated during scrimmages. She ate carefully and nutritiously, never foods that would weigh her down at practice. She won her spot on the team and felt vindicated, but the struggle of her life was just beginning.
By October, things were going well—Kim was part of a tight-knit group of girls, she was losing weight rapidly and toning her suddenly visible muscles, and she was attracting the attention of a lot of guys around campus. She was playing well on the lacrosse team, though there were times when she felt light-headed and had to pretend otherwise. Her body was tired, but she was good at digging deep, used to calling on some hidden resource of strength when she needed a boost. By Christmas break, she was noticeably thinner. By Easter, she was emaciated. At five feet two, Kim weighed just seventy pounds.
Looking back, she acknowledges, “I know that it happened so fast, and that is pretty abnormal for anorexia. I really think that the only explanation is that I just got so caught up in my determination to ‘beat the odds’ in making this team, and I knew I had to go above and beyond my call of duty with how hard I trained.”
How did Kim’s original commitment so rapidly and unconsciously slip into disease? Where was her community? Where was the intervention? She recalls that her coach complimented her on her dedication to training. Friends at school didn’t know her very well, so the rapid weight loss wasn’t a red flag to them.
Her family knew better. They were so alarmed when they saw her in the spring that they immediately hospitalized her against her will. Though she didn’t know it at the time, she would never go back to Hobart. She would also never play lacrosse again, but the competitive spirit was deeply engrained in her. “In the beginning,” she recalls, “the anorexia felt empowering because I constantly needed to win. I won when I resisted food. I won when I worked out more. I won when I convinced people that I was okay. Eventually it became a very sick and twisted game.”
Kim played this twisted game with all of her waning energy. She would feign a commitment to recovery just long enough to get out of the hospital and home, where she could control how little she ate once again. Her parents would go to work and she would exercise, against doctor’s orders, and skip meals until they returned. When her parents caught on, she would go back to the hospital. Again and again and again . . . She was hospitalized a total of eight times before recovering.
Kim’s revolving-door history is not unusual among anorectics. About 80 percent of the girls and women who get some kind of care for their eating disorders do not get the intensity of treatment they need to stay in recovery—they are often sent home weeks earlier than the recommended stay. In large part, this happens because inpatient services can cost as much as $30,000 a month. At Mirasol, a cutting-edge treatment program in Arizona, teenagers are required to stay for two months at a total cost of $57,000 (this includes a family program and continuing care). Ninety-six percent of eating-disorder professionals believe their anorectic patients are put in life-threatening situations because their health insurance policies mandate early discharge.
When Kim came home, she was barely able to think and was totally devoid of emotion, unattached to how she was making people around her feel—her family said it was like living with a “walking zombie.” “When I got deeper and deeper into anorexia,” Kim explains, “I truly did not feel like myself anymore. I literally was somebody else. I was not Kimberly for two and a half years.”
Her last hospitalization was at a residential home, a growing trend in treating young women with eating disorders, where Kim lived, ate, and attended group therapy most of the day with eight other women. This was supposed to be a supportive environment but was actually her worst nightmare. “The mind-set of every single one of us was based around competing. We would sit in a circle during group and just think: Who is the skinniest? Does she have smaller arms than me? Oddly enough, I would even analyze the way the other patients were sitting and see if I could contort myself into that same skeletal position.” Sometimes the competition was even more overt: “The second we were away from supervision, we would ask one another: ‘What did you get away with hiding at dinner?’”
The competitive and catastrophically toxic enviornment of gr
oup therapy for eating disorder patients is vividly documented in Lauren Greenfield’s HBO documentary THIN. Grown women infantilized by their diseases make fast friends as if they were thirteen-year-olds on the first day of middle school instead of patients in clinics, and then trash one another just as quickly. The catty, jealous, melodramatic nature of their relationships seems only to feed their disorders.
It was not the residential facility but the therapist she saw afterward who finally pushed Kim down the path to recovery. Wisely appealing to Kim’s steely determination and spirit of competition, her therapist told her, “Okay, so you’ve proven to yourself that you can do this. You’re really good at this. In fact, you’re awesome at this. Why not try seeing if you can gain some weight? You will still be in control. You were in control when you started this thing. You’re in control now. You’ll be in control when you gain weight. It is up to you.”
Kim had never looked at her disease this way, never realized that it had become one more game she was trying to master, one more competition she was trying to win. As with earning a spot on that elite lacrosse team, losing weight had become a goal. But there was no finish line with anorexia, no foreseeable end. The only way to heal was to convince herself that she would still be in control if she started gaining weight, that she wouldn’t be “giving up.” She decided to “compete” with her anorexia.
Almost two years later, Kim is still winning this, the most important game of her life.
Pressure from the Sidelines
Before the buzzer starts to announce the second half, our team squeezes in some shooting practice. Balls fly everywhere, few of them going in. It is clearly an off night. I take a few jump shots from the elbow, hoping to regain some of my confidence. There is nothing like the sound of the net to revive you.
Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body Page 26
