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

by Courtney E. Martin

  Sometimes I still drive by her childhood home, a place where I spent a lot of time coming up with new plays or recapping the latest game. Last I heard—through the neighborhood grapevine—she was living with a boyfriend in a small town, thin as ever.

  10. The College Years: Body Obsession Boot Camp

  In Hewitt, the cafeteria affectionately labeled Spewitt by the Barnard first-years who went there three times daily, I fully understood the gruesome extent to which women hate their bodies. There girls hovered just above steaming trays of eggplant Parmesan or corn bread—seemingly paralyzed, their eyes glazed, their breath heavy. They wandered, back and forth, back and forth, among the sandwich station, the cereal bins, the salad bar, as if lost and frightened. Like little girls, they were wide-eyed, restless, incapable. Once in line, they watched one another intently, composing their meals by comparisons: How much did she take? The waiting, watching woman behind takes just that much, or less if feeling particularly insecure. Yes, just a few leaves of lettuce, fewer grains of rice, fewer flakes of Raisin Bran. She feels better than the next girl, less fat, undesirable, and out of control.

  When friends finally sit down together at a table, they all have a moment of silent calculation. At one meal my best friend, Allison, looked at my plate and said scathingly, “God, Courtney, you’re so healthy.” It was then that I understood that my choices made her feel bad, that I was no longer eating or not eating for myself but for all the women who sat beside me. My self-control was a black mark in their books, my indulgence was permission.

  This strange dance was even more disturbing after Columbia boys discovered the Barnard dining hall a few months into the school year and started to trek there for our larger, juicier hamburgers and peach cobbler. They strode into the north entrance with their baggy jeans and short-sleeve T-shirts over long-sleeve T-shirts, swiped their IDs, and went straight for the burger line. They laughed and hollered to one another, seemingly delighted that it was time to consume greasy food and share inside jokes with their friends. Each piled his tray with five glasses of soda, three dripping burgers, lots of sides, unselfconsciously. I envied them their freewheeling laughter, their autonomy, their simplicity, their joy found in food. Any joy the women at my table felt was in frightened spurts, self-hating indulgences, recriminating losses of control.

  We picked and picked and picked at our plates, tore apart slices of pizza one tiny yank of greasy cheese at a time, peeled the skin off the chicken, abandoned the top slices of bread off our tuna sandwiches, consumed slowly, methodically, piece by piece. Meanwhile, of course, we were describing the pretentious twits in our first-year seminars, laughing about our roommates’ sleep-talking nonsense, getting riled up about Rousseau or Machiavelli, Derrida when we were at our most brave. But all the while, even when constructing beautiful arguments about the primacy of the text or the misogyny of Aristotle, we were carefully, silently calculating our daily intake of calories.

  These women were not outwardly obsessed or shallow but smart, imaginative, optimistic, courageous, and loving. Underneath the buzz of our wonder at the world and the comfort of sisterhood, however, was an undeniable, ongoing negotiation. The inner scholar soberly reminded us, Naomi Wolf was right—the beauty myth is preposterous and destructive. The perfect girl warned, Watch it. Careful. Don’t lose control. And the starving daughter, far from home and afraid, whispered, I want dessert. I want dessert.

  Our bodies became a topic of volatile inner debate.

  Colleges are breeding grounds for eating disorders and unhealthy obsession with food, since this kind of neurosis usually starts between the ages of seventeen and twenty. Girls lugging trunks and stereos from far away land in one place, then proceed to teach one another how to starve, binge, and purge. Ninety-one percent of women surveyed on a college campus had attempted to control their weight through dieting, 22 percent dieted “often” or “always.” Even more frightening, 35 percent of “normal dieters” progress to pathological dieting. Of those, 20 to 25 percent progress to partial or full-blown eating disorders.

  There are cafeterias in California, Ohio, North Carolina that look just like Hewitt, the only difference being the regional cuisine (one college girl’s cheesecake is another’s green tomato pie). And in every one, you will hear furtive whispers about the dreaded “freshman fifteen.”

  The freshman fifteen has been proved a myth by multiple studies—56 percent of college first-years do gain weight, but the average is only 4.6 pounds, and 36 percent actually lose weight. Still, it’s a significant preoccupation of most college girls. Instead of exploring values, great ideas, sexuality, instead of learning to write and think critically, instead of composing an adult identity, too often girls are agonizing over which has fewer calories, the bagel sandwich or the muffin. This agonizing leads to some pretty bizarre behaviors.

  Christina, a graduate of NYU and a current Ph.D. candidate at UCLA, remembers, “A friend of mine would want to smell the food I was eating—food she wouldn’t allow herself to eat but often craved.” A fellow Barnard alumna remembers: “Spring break my senior year, two of my friends and I ate a piece of fruit each for breakfast. We spent the day at the beach, and six hours later, starving, we went to a restaurant where all my friends complained about how they felt guilty for being hungry considering we had been lying down on the beach all day. Then, of course, they all ordered salads.”

  Spring break, as The New York Times noted in 2006, has become a make-it-or-break-it moment for many of the young and body-obsessed, for whom “this annual weeklong bacchanalia, unfolding across Florida, Mexico, and the Caribbean during March and April, represents the summit of deprivation and denial.” Whenever girls travel in gaggles, as is the tradition come spring, they spread eating-disorder ethos. Dr. Margo Maine deems the disease-inducing drive for the bikini-ready body “contagious.”

  Eating disorders back on campuses sometimes take on a far more serious, even life-threatening form. In fact, Stonehill College, located in Easton, Massachusetts, was sued by its former student Keri Krissik when they denied her readmission after she suffered a heart attack as a result of anorexia. Resuscitated and implanted with a defibrillator designed to shock her heart back into a normal rhythm if necessary, Keri wanted to return to her Roman Catholic college for her junior year in 2001. One of Stonehill’s lawyers gruffly articulated their fear that she would “drop dead.” She never went back.

  How did this sad reality come to be—a world where girls smell food instead of eating it and get defibrillators instead of diplomas?

  Little Miss Can’t Be Wrong

  In college a perfect girl can indulge every fantasy, take challenging courses, join an unlimited number of clubs and activities, and exercise around the clock. After she gets over the shock of being a little fish in a big pond, she sets out to grow fast. Hungry for honor and status, she becomes class and club president, summa cum laude superstar, sits in the front row of classes, studies incessantly. My best friend, Allison, didn’t come home for three days once in the middle of a semester. I finally found her asleep on a pile of flash cards in the library with empty coffee cups and drained highlighters strewn about her.

  There are the occasional go-get-’em men, but they are rarities among a sea of running, hand-raising, worried women. When my Columbia boyfriend or his friends crossed campuses to take a class at Barnard, they commented on how damn accountable all the female students were. “I don’t take classes over there anymore because the Barnard girls are too uptight,” one complained. “I mean, they actually do all of the reading,” he scoffed. Eventually he admitted that he had never checked a book out of any of the libraries on campus. It was our junior year, and this guy is no slacker. Now in medical school, he is determined to serve an underprivileged community when he gets out.

  There are more of these perfect girls around than ever; women have outnumbered men on college campuses since 1979, and on graduate school campuses since 1984. This drive might be a good thing in the long run—if it were
just academic. Unfortunately, the insistence on perfection bleeds straight from the brain into the body: from perfect test scores and grades to perfect fitness and physique. Researchers and psychologists confirm that girls most likely to develop an eating disorder, or plain old obsession with fitness and food, are high achievers; many attend the best colleges in the nation. According to a 2004 study of eating disorders at the University of Pennsylvania, 60 percent of women were trying to lose pounds even though they were at a healthy weight. Since 2001 eating disorders have increased fourfold there. At Georgetown, as many as 25 percent of students suffer from eating disorders. In campus health centers across the nation, there are waiting lists to see eating-disorder specialists on staff: Support groups overflow into extra rooms.

  Take twenty-three-year-old Jennifer Boevers—a dedicated art studio major and an honors student at Mills College. The director of the Mills College Arts Museum, Stephan Jost, explained that she “pushed the limits of what undergrads are capable of.” A senior and classmate, Charity Tooze, described her ethic: “She was so ambitious. I thought she needed to take it easy. She would be in the museum for eighteen hours a day and up on scaffolding, and usually I would see her only drink milk.” Jennifer graduated in May 2004, destined for a career in the art world, but the only public exhibition that would ever be mounted of her work was a memorial at her hometown city hall—she died of anorexia on September 15, 2004. The casket was small; she was five foot five and weighed only eighty pounds.

  For every visible casualty such as Jennifer, there are thousands of college women holding themselves to an irrational standard of perfection. They meticulously choose their three hundred calories a meal, convince themselves that working out twice a day is okay because first it was the treadmill, then it was the StairMaster—different muscle groups, different delusions.

  Their bodies become biology experiments, split off from their minds. As Kate, Barnard alumna and Jane contributor, puts it, “In college, like no other time in my life, I was just so in my head all the time. I could go two weeks at a time without really feeling like I occupied my own body.” Christina agrees: “There was a classic split between body and soul—one was always waning while the other was growing.” This nasty disassociation cuts a college girl in half—part perfect girl, part starving daughter. She is driving toward success with her brain while trying to monitor the wild appetites of her neglected body. Running on the treadmill becomes mechanical rather than a joyful surge of adrenaline. Emotions—real, bona fide loneliness, not tears over Dawson’s Creek— are so neglected that they show up as vicious hunger pains.

  Young women know how to be savagely self-critical. As I lay in the dark of my first-year dorm room, listening to my roommate’s sweet snore, I would recount everything I put in my mouth that day: Banana for breakfast—good. Chicken Caesar wrap for lunch—bad. Salad for dinner—good. Cookie for dessert—bad. Another cookie at the newspaper meeting—bad, bad, bad. Tomorrow—run before class, eat nothing until lunch.

  A cookie can suddenly take on the gargantuan meaning of a grade—if you avoid the sweet, comforting taste in your mouth at a boring meeting, you pass. If you are lazy, out of control, undisciplined, and eat this wretched little concoction, you fail. There is nothing more disgusting to a perfect girl than the taste of failure.

  Shaky Beginnings

  As I sat down in the circle of cross-legged, wide-eyed women who made up my orientation group, I was shaking. A tall redhead with a severely thin, pointy nose was telling the girl next to her that she had chosen Barnard over Harvard. Others included a woman with frizzy hair intentionally uncombed, combat boots, fishnet stockings; a tiny woman drowning in a huge gray sweatshirt and baggy jeans, Timber-land boots on her tiny feet; and Allison, who was everything I always heard a woman should be: petite, blond, smart, and wealthy. She wore a periwinkle-blue sweater set and khaki pants. I had never seen a sweater set before. Her hair was curly, like mine, but somehow had been trained to sit in perfect coils all around her face. It seemed magical to me after the seventeen years I had wrestled with, ironed, brushed, and sprayed my own mop.

  Allison offered immediate intimacy. She told me about her boyfriend, an equally blond “Choate man.” (I had no idea what a Choate man was at the time but nodded in fake recognition.) Allison was a ballerina back in Texas—the Ice Queen in The Nutcracker, no less. I had tried out for a local production of The Nutcracker three times, finally to be awarded the part of a shuffling angel with plastic wings and an itchy costume. Allison’s magic deepened. I was mesmerized by her and her stories. I was mesmerized by her perfectly flat stomach, small feet, ribbed turtleneck sweaters, and Searle coat.

  Before long Allison and I were best friends—bonded over being so far from home. I was terrifically afraid, and Allison was my guide. The first thing she taught me was that perfection is usually very ugly on the inside.

  The first months of college are like learning to walk and talk all over again. Your high school status as the smartest, prettiest, bitchiest, nicest, or sluttiest is washed away by new beginnings. You arrive ignorant of the rites and rituals of college life. Along with everyone else, you are fresh and clean, and totally, completely freaked out.

  In this insecure state, it is common for young women to latch on to the first person who seems slightly more seasoned. Her guide may be the girl who taught her the differences among the various fraternities, let her borrow a two-hundred-dollar sweater, knew how to attract an endless string of newly pimpleless boys. She may also teach a thing or two about how to starve.

  A college first-year is a veritable sponge, soaking up the civil rights movement and the details of the Atkins diet as she constructs her identity. Indeed, 42 percent of undergraduate women told the feminist author Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner that their foremost concern is “self-identity.” Some of this process is joyful—being young and experimental, kissing boys on fire escapes, watching a subtitled film and actually liking it, maybe even dancing at a downtown club until the wee hours of the morning, high on something your parents just watched a Nightline special about. Some of it is downright excruciating. You get a D on your first political science paper and have to camp out at the Writing Room for extra help. You have to go to that chemistry class even though the guy you made out with the night before sits two rows behind you. I’m never doing that again is a frequent mantra of the college first-year.

  In the yearlong Women’s Initiative study at Duke that revealed young women striving for “effortless perfection,” women students reported a “social scene in which women feel pressed to conform to powerful social norms that are often at odds with their personal educational development, and with affirming themselves as strong and distinctive people.” A first-year’s self-image is completely insecure and hinges on the smallest feedback from other people—the guy who asked for your number Saturday night suddenly confirms your worth as a human being; the professor who wrote “an original and well-written essay” on the bottom of your midterm convinces you, at least for the moment, that you are destined for great and wonderful things. And as the Duke study also confirms, even in the most rigorous of university settings, “being ‘cute’ trumps being smart for women in the social environment.”

  Your friends hold a potent social power when you are in this amoebalike state. I looked down at my plate one Wednesday evening in late September and noticed that I had the exact same meal as Allison: one piece of dry toast and coffee with artificial sweetener. Six months earlier, I would have been quite clear that this didn’t constitute a meal, but here, in this wild and wonderful place where all the rules were new and all the faces foreign, it looked safe. My instincts were rubbed raw from all the self-doubt; the shady guy at the party, my professor’s lecture on Machiavelli, that girl on my floor who did ecstasy on weekdays all gave me stomachaches but were admired by others. I began chalking up my little surges of small-town fear to naïveté, pushing through the yelps of fight or flight and sticking to it.

  Allison seemed unh
appy a lot of the time, but she was smart and beautiful. I was awed by her size-two jeans and her ability to attract boys instantly. If eating dry toast and drinking coffee translated into attention from boys and a jealousy-inducing waistline, I would try it. In this way, a piece of unsatisfying dry toast becomes a membership card into the biggest, most active club on campus: the girls who choose food not to satisfy hunger or desire but to avoid it.

  Caroline Knapp disappeared pound by pound while an undergrad at Brown University. In her memoir Appetites, she describes how it all began: “If I had to pinpoint a defining moment in my history, I’d go back twenty-three years, to an otherwise unmemorable November evening when I made an otherwise unmemorable purchase: a container of cottage cheese.” This tiny choice was the pinprick that let in the flood of deprivation. After tasting the unsatisfying nuggets of white pasty goo for the first time and feeling adept at denial, she decided, somewhere deep in the recesses of her powerful brain, that she would stop eating. This became the cornerstone of her identity—smart, fun, and skeletal, or, as she put it, “The inner life—hunger, confusion, longings, unnamed and unmet, that whole overwhelming gamut—as a sculpture in bone.”†

  For most women in college (or high school, for the quick studies), there is a similar moment when they unconsciously choose to buy in. For some it is marked by a container of cottage cheese or a piece of dry toast and a cup of coffee, or a Diet Coke, or nonfat yogurt, or tofu. These seemingly simple, fleeting food choices are actually representative of much larger decisions. They are not choices about food. They are choices about control. The first time you let deprivation feel good, you let in the possibility of disorder. What begins as just a flirtation with willpower can quickly become an obsessive love affair.