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

by Courtney E. Martin

  Wendy is hearing a different sound. Her father, a stern small-business owner, is giving her an earful behind the basket. I can’t hear what he’s saying, but the tightness in his face and the look on Wendy’s can’t mean anything good. Wendy nods like a dashboard doll and stares at her shoes.

  When he finally walks away, she heads over to the bench to retie her shoes, and I see Coach approaching. He’s got another earful for her; this one looks a little less harsh. She looks him in the eye, again nods, interjects here and there with what appear to be ideas about plays that might work against the other team’s defense. The buzzer sounds, and as we head back to the bench for the second half, I hear Coach say one last thing while giving Wendy a slap on the back: “Remember, we’re counting on you here.”

  Parents and coaches sometimes put even more pressure on the ego and, in turn, the body. Perfect girls, already dead set on the finish line, are given even more incentive to go to any length to achieve their goal by overzealous supporters. In fact, their goals can often be difficult to distinguish from those of their parents and coaches on the sidelines.

  The relationship between a coach and a serious female athlete is necessarily intimate. The athlete depends on the coach for guidance and inspiration. She looks to her or, most often, him to create training expectations and reinforce behavior that meets those expectations. When a coach makes offhand comments about weight or articulates a training philosophy that values weight loss more than getting stronger, the athlete’s drive for perfection can become desperate. Dr. Craig Johnson, who studies women and sports, explains, “Training girls in a method that equates low body fat with peak performance can bring disastrous results. All of us need to understand the risk of weight loss and realize that girls’ weight loss is not a benign behavior.”

  Girls are vulnerable to their coaches’ appeals to achieve—they want to please them, make them proud, prove them right about the worth of all that hard work. Coaches can take on a mythic force in young athletes’ lives and become mentors for whom girls go too far, carving their bodies into symbols of their devotion.

  Some parents also go too far in encouraging their daughters, not recognizing how vulnerable they are to the pressure to be perfect in all things at all costs. Mothers who were unable to follow their own athletic dreams sometimes live through their daughters. When things start to look dangerous, they fall back on the comforting notion that sports are “empowering” and turn a blind eye to obvious signs of disorder.

  Fathers, eager to find a place to connect with their complicated daughters, sometimes see sports as the one true thing. It may be difficult to discuss relationships with boys, friends at school, their interest in art or poetry, but Friday night’s basketball rivalry is something concrete, contained, and familiar. It makes dads feel progressive to support their daughters as ardently as they do their sons. Fathers are usually convinced that sports will give their daughters necessary life skills.

  Many girls seek attention from otherwise absent fathers through their achievement in sports. Dr. Margot Maine, who coined the term “father hunger,” writes that many women seek their fathers’ approval “by exercising excessively, with their dads or independently, pushing their bodies to the point of exhaustion. They strive for a hard, lean body, believing that their dads will accept them if they achieve this. Often they pursue sports hoping to please their father rather than to fulfill any personal desires of their own.”

  Athletic achievement can become the prerequisite for parental attention—a dangerous and conditional proposition. The pressure to be a perfect girl becomes even more intense. The starving daughter’s need to take a rest or show weakness cannot be tolerated by the superathlete aiming to win not just first place, but her parents’ attention.

  Sisters and Rivals

  The coach didn’t put me in during the third quarter. I can’t blame him, I thought. I’m playing like shit. I had missed three shots in the first half and been weak on the boards. I was considering chalking this one up to an off night, a game better spent on the bench, when he tapped my shoulder. “Shelley.”

  I quickly jumped up and headed to the scorers’ table so they could record the number on the back of my jersey. When the next buzzer sounded, I ran over to Shelley,* slapped her five, and said, “Great job.” Under her breath, she answered, “Bullshit,” and headed back to the bench, head down, but not before I gave her a swat at the head (translation: shut that up).

  Wendy looked over and shouted, “We’re in one-three-one. You’re baseline. Work your ass off down there.” Her sternness energized me, and I did a couple of little jumps in place to get my body warm again. We were not going to go down without a fight. No one could get me pumped up like Wendy.

  As she dribbled the ball down the court, I felt a surge of nostalgia. Wendy and I had been playing together since we were in fifth grade. Back then she had been taller than all the boys in our grade, and I had been obsessed with Magic Johnson. We would finish practice at Steele Elementary and ride our bikes home side by side, fantasizing about all the girls we were going to beat once the games started.

  We had been through a lot together, on and off the court, which created the kind of bond unique to teammates. But as I watched her body shrink, I had to resist the temptation to shrink mine as well. We had always been side by side; it took resolution not to follow her down this path too. Wendy was the girl whose body was most like mine in my group of friends. It was comforting to look at her on “bad-body days” and reassure myself that we were similar—that if I thought her body was an acceptable size, mine was as well (no matter how much the image in the mirror led me to believe otherwise).

  When she started losing weight, I felt deserted, as if her apparent choice to overexercise and undereat was a veiled comment about my body, as if Wendy were leaning over and whispering in my ear—we’re actually not good enough, you know? Of course, I never spoke to her about any of this.

  I knew she was going to swing the ball my way before she did. I caught it unconsciously and instinctually looked inside. There she was, doing her damnedest to get a body on her opponent. I bounce-passed it in to her, and she went up for a beautiful, easy layup. Two more points. Wendy and I quickly slapped five as we booked it to the other end of the court—reenergized.

  Sisterhood is complicated among teammates. Many female athletes express tremendous gratitude and love for the women with whom they grew up playing sports. Inherent in teamwork is a dependence on one another. Older team members are models for those just coming up. Michelle, a twenty-four-year-old gymnast from Denver, counters stereotypes about her sport when she explains: “If you don’t eat, or you eat and throw up, you’re not only hurting yourself, you’re hurting your teammates as well.”

  The bond between teammates has a physicality to it, an intimacy reminiscent of family. I can remember the bodies of my high school teammates as if I had been in that locker room with them yesterday, though it has been nearly ten years. In practice we threw our bodies against one another despite the sweat, did dog piles on the birthday girl, huddled close in vans to away games to tell the stories of our first kisses in whispers that Coach wouldn’t hear.

  Teams are the strongest kind of community because they are built on shared dreams, physical challenges, and a hopeful journey. Ultimately, hope held us most closely together. We began every season with our shoulders heavy with the weight of possibility—What if we could win state?—and our feet fresh enough to carry the load. As the season waned, our load grew lighter, our feet more tired, but we had one another.

  But the bond between teammates—especially female—is fraught with both covert and overt displays of competition, which is largely good and constructive but can also reveal how sensitive, insecure, and deprived girls feel. The stereotype is true—many girls become destructive and manipulative when faced with competition. Even teammates sometimes resort to backstabbing, unhealthy comparisons, and yes, unspoken but understood competitions between girls to lose weight and wor
k out harder.

  One Division I tennis player told me the story of her team and how it was corroded from the inside:

  We were all so unbelievably close, that when one of us wouldn’t eat or started just thinking more conscientiously about her calorie intake, the rest of us would follow suit. I knew that one of my teammates had once been hospitalized for anorexia, and so did everyone else. When she stopped eating again, instead of calling her out on it and trying to help her in some way, I think we actually started competing with her. I did. Finally the coach brought in a nutritionist to talk to us about the appropriate diet for athletes as physically active as we were. We took everything she said and twisted it—got hints of how to eat even less and still be able to perform. That girl and I never talked about it, but we both knew what was going on. Eventually she had to leave again and be hospitalized for a second time.

  Just as sisters can hold you up and encourage you, they can break you down. In an athletic context, this breaking down can be insidious, because teammates are often pitted against one another for coveted positions, a coach’s attention, or even a scholarship. And even beyond this overt competition, girls are notorious for creating their own subtle contests—most notably the race to be slimmer, stronger, and more in control.

  Slippery Slope

  My team lost. We didn’t always, but when we did, we were so deflated that it felt like we collectively had the wind knocked out of us. After customarily slapping five with the other team, we gathered our empty water bottles and headed back into the locker room one last time for the night. We complained about the referees, compared notes on the dirtiest players, and then circled around to our own responsibility. “Sorry, guys, I played like shit tonight”—to which a chorus of girls would supportively holler back, “Shut up, we all played like shit.” That was the beauty of the team-sport loss: There were twelve others to share in your disappointment.

  Each of us dealt with the loss in a different way. The youngest of us was notorious for breaking into tears. She seemed to feel that the world had lied to her when we lost. Shelley always took it really hard too—not crying but punching lockers, sometimes storming off without saying a word to the rest of us.

  Wendy faced loss as if it were a challenge from God; it only strengthened her determination to be more focused and condition harder. As she unlaced her sneakers and peeled off her two layers of tube socks, she would often offer a plan of action. “Guys, it just means we need to practice harder. We weren’t ready. We have to get out there tomorrow and show Coach that we mean it.” She skated right past any feelings of helplessness by visualizing her next workout, her next run, her next chance for redemption.

  It resembled a healthy reaction. Clearly she had the resilience thing down. She was courageous in spades. Undoubtedly Wendy got a lot of positive feedback from coaches and teachers for this never-say-die attitude. But there was something eerily detached about it all, as if she had crossed the line of determination and moved on to obsession. She didn’t process our losses the way the rest of us did—with obvious disappointment, a slow but inevitable recovery of confidence, renewed hope for a better game next time after pep talks from boyfriends and brothers. Wendy was a one-woman army. She marched straight past loss on her way to fight that inevitably losing battle (with herself) to achieve absolute and total perfection.

  There was no talk of wellness or personal best on my basketball team. It was “Win, win, win!” or go home with your head hanging—and be prepared to come in Monday and do some serious push-ups so that you remember your failings in the ache of your biceps. A high school athlete from the Bay Area also remembers this emphasis on competition without any thought of well-being or balance: “I dreamed of being a professional runner someday, and part and parcel of that dream was losing my period. I knew that that was what happened to serious athletes, so I saw it as something to aim for, something that would prove my absolute dedication to my goal.”

  The female athletes who achieved on the highest level were those who sacrificed everything for their sport. One high school lacrosse player from West Hartford remembers that she and her teammates were asked to attend practice over spring break instead of taking vacations with their families. Others stopped eating the foods typical of teenage happy-go-lucky life—pizza, burgers, soda—in the name of their sport, their childhood cut short by the desire to compete on an adult level. One Ivy League cross-country star I spoke to talked about missing her entire college experience because she was running. Only after college did she discover the joy of lazy Saturdays, sitting around with friends in a neighborhood park, drinking beers without worrying about every extra calorie.

  The competition inherent in athletics can teach girls to set a goal, practice in order to achieve it, and be resilient if it doesn’t pan out, but it may also teach them to drive forward like crazy, tolerate real pain, compare themselves with others constantly. This mentality gives female athletes an excuse to forgo food; run harder, faster, longer; strive—under all circumstances—to be the best. Their bodies are transformed into machines, not living, breathing flesh and blood but a series of muscles coordinated to achieve a task. Many female athletes stop listening to their bodies’ fatigue or hunger cries.

  This slippery slope from dedication to disease is too often ignored. Female athletes sometimes develop what sports medicine doctors and nutrition experts have come to understand as the female athlete triad: disordered eating, amenorrhea (the cessation of menstruation), and osteoporosis. This disturbing set of symptoms shows up in practitioners of all sports but especially those based on appearance, judging, or individual performance, such as gymnastics, swimming, cheerleading, and track and cross-country. However rampant the female athlete triad may be in these sports, it is certainly not limited to them. Doctors report seeing teenage girls with these symptoms in a variety of traditional and nontraditional sports. Of the big team sports of my high school—basketball, lacrosse, soccer, volleyball—all had one or two girls exhibiting the triad to different degrees.

  There is a type of anorexia associated specifically with athletes called “anorexia athletica.” Women suffering from this particular disease share the symptoms of anorexia—weight loss, gastrointestinal complaints, excessive fear of becoming obese, loss of menstruation— but they also compulsively exercise.

  I played organized team sports for fifteen years and was even recruited at the college level but never heard a thing about either of these diagnoses. The only name for the behaviors I saw—skipping meals, staying after practice to run more, getting up before school to run again—was dedication. There was no effort to educate me or my teammates about the dangers of overexertion or lack of nutrition. In a 2004 study that appeared in the Journal of Athletic Training, 93 percent of trainers felt that increased attention needs to be paid to preventing eating disorders among female athletes, but only one in four felt confident identifying a female athlete with one, and only one in three felt confident asking an athlete if she had one. Even so, 91 percent of those surveyed reported having dealt with a female athlete with an eating disorder.

  And when the game is truly over?

  After women athletes stop playing their sport, they often channel their drive into other things. They are the last to go to bed after a night out dancing, the first to wake up. They are the most obsessive about their jobs, staying into the wee hours of the morning even when everyone else goes home. They often continue to see their bodies as projects, as opposed to parts of them, and aim to sculpt their bodies, deprive them, harness their wild urges. Fiona, a dedicated field hockey and lacrosse player in high school, noticed that her ability to think healthily about food diminished when sports were over: “After season ended each year, I became more focused on what I was eating, how I would continue to stay fit, and what my scale read.”

  It is hellishly hard to be a serious high school or college athlete and then stop playing your sport. You have never known your body under these circumstances, with unstructured hours and unwat
ched appetites. Suddenly you are left with questions: When and in what way do I work out? What is normal to eat when I’m not conditioning a few hours a day? How much is too much? How much too little?

  I was recruited to play lacrosse for Columbia University, but when I realized that the practice required would cut into my overachieving time—no Friday internships, no newspaper meetings—I decided to quit. Instead, I woke up at 7:00 A.M. my entire first year of college to go running in the park, ate only a piece of fruit, if that, for breakfast on my way to Italian class. I hated running. It hurt my knees and felt boring and rote, but I didn’t know how else to carry over the familiarity of extreme physical conditioning. I would be stomping along Riverside Park, my joints aching, my breath heavy, thinking of what I wouldn’t eat that day because, now that I wasn’t playing a sport, I couldn’t justify it. I missed my teammates, missed the rush of running out of that locker room before a game, missed, even, the feeling of shared loss as opposed to the solitary displacement I felt as a first-year.

  I missed Wendy—her pale, fuzzy forearms, her long black braid swinging like a pendulum across her back, her hip bones sticking out of the top of her mesh shorts. I imagined her, somewhere back in Colorado, running just as I was running, footfalls in excruciating rhythm.

  We kept in touch sporadically after high school, and then not at all. Wendy never showed up at the impromptu reunions at smoky bars during Christmastime, when the rest of our high school came out of the woodwork. She wasn’t, as I had hoped, at Katie’s wedding. She stopped e-mailing back. Stopped returning phone calls. I wonder if she just got tired of the raised eyebrows when people saw how skinny she had gotten over the years. I don’t know if Wendy ever had an eating disorder. All I know is that she was my first intimate introduction to the determination and rabid willpower that can so easily slip into one.