The Elephant in the Dorm Room
On the first really warm day in May, the students of Columbia and Barnard gather at the steps leading up to the luminous dome of Low Library at the center of campus and pretend that school is over, despite the reality of finals looming. Frat boys play Frisbee. A crew of black guys laugh over inside jokes. Three short, stocky girls with their sorority symbols displayed not so discreetly on the backs of their short shorts eat frozen yogurt out of minuscule foam cups. I sit with Allison and a couple other girls from my floor, watching the melee, and gossip:
“Those shorts are way too short. Who do those girls think they are?”
“I know,” I chime in. “Why would you ever want to be in a sorority?”
“Yeah, they just remind me of the girls back home. Why would I want to pay dues to live in a house of gossipy girls who all have eating disorders?” Allison wonders aloud. I look around, silently counting how many of us have or are on our way to having eating disorders. Every last one.
An eerie silence follows.
We were not in an official sorority, but every girl everywhere who has a group of girlfriends can’t claim to be far from the short shorts and the club dues. We didn’t wear ribbons in our hair or have secret handshakes, but we certainly had our own unspoken rituals: the milling over the salad bar, the silent survey of plates at the table, the chorus of “shut up” when one of us admitted to feeling undesirable. And, of course, one of the most engrained rituals of all—the slow walk back up to our dorm floor with requisite groans and regrets: I can’t believe I ate all that. Yeah, no kidding. I feel like I need to get on a treadmill for a week. Why didn’t anyone stop me from getting that last cookie? If you didn’t express your disgust with yourself, you were smug. If you did, you felt bad, but at least you didn’t feel alone.
All-female communities are both the best and the worst of college life. Whether they are composed of sorority social butterflies or the cynical and serious breed who vehemently reject sorority ethos, they are basically incubators for screwed-up ideas about food and fitness. In a recent study, women both in and outside of sororities showed equally disturbing levels of body dissatisfaction. Sororities put their body hatred right out on the table. Literally. In one University of Oregon sorority, a friend of mine told me, new recruits are forced to stand on tables in their underwear and let the older girls circle their “problem areas” with black permanent marker—reminders of what they need to work on in order to achieve the standards necessary to call themselves sisters.
My girlfriends did not circle girls’ problem areas with black marker, but the shared agenda to be thin and perfect is evident in the raised eyebrows of a critical suitemate at dinnertime or the one-upmanship in subtle deprivation: If Allison can be nonchalant about skipping meals, why can’t I? Christina’s girlfriends at NYU wouldn’t tell one another when they were going to the gym because “it was a way to get one up on the rest—sneak in a workout and avoid the possibility of encouraging another girlfriend, who you were in competition with, to burn some calories.”
She also remembers: “The girls with the more discreet eating ‘issues’ would make fun of the girls with more flagrant ‘in-your-face’ eating disorders. Sometimes we would rag on the girls with anorexia because every once in a while they would listen to their screaming hunger and eat all of our food in the dorm kitchen. Like, ‘Oh, great, Heather decided to eat tonight and devoured all of my pesto pasta. What a stupid bitch.’”
Eating disorders, or less severe weight obsessions, are often masked as diet restrictions or food preferences. Your roommate eats nothing but nonfat yogurts and Luna bars because she claims she just can’t get enough of them. You haven’t seen a morsel of solid food pass the lips of your best friend in days, but Diet Coke goes down fine. Another friend insists that she eat only a quarter of every dinner out so she can take home leftovers, but you have never seen her unearth a single foam container from her fridge. A University of Texas sophomore describes some of the most common excuses: “Girls feign lactose intolerance or pretend they have food allergies to avoid eating carbs, dairy, and sugar. Vegetarianism is also a common trend among those trying to shed a few pounds.”
Hidden within the otherwise supportive and intellectually vibrant all-women’s communities is the canker of acute competition over food, a constantly escalating drive to work out more, better, faster than the girl next to you at the gym. Like a monster, it lurks within the hearts of otherwise loving girlfriends, rearing its ugly head at mealtimes. It talks in furtive whispers, disguised as an inner voice: She’s skinnier than I am, I hate her. I can’t eat tomorrow. Or even worse: I’m so relieved she’s getting fat. Look at her, her stomach is getting really gross. I’m much prettier than she is. It reverberates in my head during a yoga class, where, ironically, I am supposed to be breathing in self-love and light: That girl is better at this than I am. I’m too fat and inflexible to look like that.
The University of Pennsylvania junior Caroline Rothstein knows this voice all too well. She has suffered from bouts of anorexia and bulimia over the past ten years. Caroline told her campus newspaper that she feels like at least half the students at Penn, especially women, have some sort of issue with eating but laments that nobody will say it aloud: “The fact that nobody talks about it makes it more shameful. Everyone thinks that she’s alone. People can keep everything inside their heads.”
This silent, festering hate is destructive. Marna Clowney is a black woman who studied at the University of Michigan, where she struggled with severe anorexia and people’s misconception that women of color don’t get eating disorders. Ample research in the last fifteen years documents the significant rise in eating disorders among ethnic minorities, but Marna’s doctors and nutritionists still avoided the diagnosis. Only after battling the disorder for eight years—and suffering a heart attack caused by malnutrition—did Marna finally find a helpful therapist and nutritionist.
In a vibrant, verbal college community, young women share almost everything—test scores, literary theories, boyfriends, and makeup secrets—but when it comes to their own food and fitness regimens, they become mute. Naomi Wolf describes this silent breed of college girls as “walking question marks challenging—pleading—with schools, universities, and the other mouthpieces that transmit what is culturally acceptable in women, to tell them unequivocally: This is intolerable. This is unacceptable. We don’t starve women here. We value women.” But still, fifteen years after The Beauty Myth was published, there is no such transmission.
To speak about our disordered relationship with food, to externalize our most unwise inner voices, would confirm how sick we are. So we stay silent. We write about the theme of the body in The Scarlet Letter. We make fun of our mothers’ fad diets. We sneak into a bathroom stall, wait for the last girl’s slippers to go padding out, and then stick our fingers down our throats to dislodge the secret. Somehow retching our innermost fears and failures has become easier than saying them aloud. One woman remembers: “Hearing someone throw up for the first time in a public bathroom at school—and it’s not like I hadn’t thought about it before, but—that was what made purging a reality for me. It made it accessible.” She would go on to purge a few times a month for years after college herself.
The silence is contagious. While it is socially appropriate to complain about gaining a few pounds—a little self-deprecation makes others feel you’re nonthreatening—admitting to skipping meals or throwing up after them was generally taboo when I was in college. Today it seems more acceptable for college women to talk about it. We wanted to believe that we were smart enough to stay very thin but not stupid enough to get an eating disorder.
Too Smart to Be Sick
Serena speaks in a torrent of words. She is a brilliant, endearingly clumsy, hip, and self-effacing young woman who makes other people feel smarter just from being around her. She studied cultural anthropology at the University of Michigan, focusing on contemporary religion and society, and
lived in a co-op filled with hippies, hip-hoppers, and indie rockers—all kids who thought of themselves as far more enlightened than those who blindly followed the sexist edicts of the dominant Greek system there.
But after one year of drinking beer, eating dining hall food, and getting side effects on a birth control pill, Serena suddenly felt fat. She didn’t talk about it with her friends. It would have been horribly uncool and would have transformed her from a cool girl who knew a lot about indie rock and contemporary literature into a cliché. The last thing that Serena wanted was to be a cliché. Perfect girls pride ourselves on uniqueness as we are constructing our identities—I need two more parts carefree drinker and a bit less bleeding heart, or maybe a little more Heidegger and a little less Toni Morrison. We want to be seen as free from the lame hang-ups that other girls have. It is so suburban to be counting calories or reading diet books, so philistine.
But when we succumb to feeling fat, just like the next imperfect girl, we are hit with guilt. We develop a double consciousness, or what the British psychologists Helga Dittmar and Sarah Howard describe as a marked contrast between our “awareness of ideals versus our internalization.” Serena, highly educated and bursting with conviction, despised the thin ideal that terrorized young women (her awareness of ideals), but in her heart she was never good enough (internalization). The contrast led her to keep silent, and she developed low-level anorexia—at her worst, shedding thirty pounds in three months.
Her disease was fed by the silence surrounding it. Because she was embarrassed that she was thinking and feeling like a “stupid girl” inside, she projected a blasé detachment on the outside. She was nonchalant about her weight loss with family and friends when she went home to New Jersey on vacations, and her friends at school largely ignored her disappearing flesh. It was as if no one addressing it out loud made it stay in the realm of smart-girl happenstance rather than become a very deliberate and restrictive stupid-girl obsession. In fact, educational attainment continues to prove one of the most predictive factors for eating disorders. A 2004 Canadian study confirms that “education appears to be more important than occupationally defined social class in explaining body dissatisfaction.”
Another woman I interviewed, who prefers to stay anonymous, talks about losing weight after a breakup as a seemingly magical, spontaneous event. Suddenly she was fifteen pounds lighter and getting compliments from friends and family, but she remembers, “I wished people would stop talking about it, as if the more they mentioned it, the less real it would get. I actually felt like I was walking around on eggshells, so as not to scare the weight back on or something. It was like this precarious silence that I clung to while trying to look like I wasn’t clinging at all.”
Despite what carefully silent girls try to exude, the weight does not magically disappear, nor does it magically stay off. Serena was not, despite her performance for family and friends, “effortlessly perfecting” her body. She was keeping exhaustive lists of the foods that she succumbed to each day and the number of miles she ran. She remembers, “My best friend found the lists of what I’d eaten and freaked out at me. After I rebuffed her, she only made occasional joking comments.”
Irony and humor are the ultimate weapons of the smart girl trying to evade her stupid-girl fate. We make fun of the calorie counters in the dining hall and then pick at our milkless cereal. We brush off the concern of our mothers with quips: “Afraid you’ll lose good feminist points if your daughter loses a few pounds?” We mercilessly make fun of ourselves if we let a little self-consciousness about our weight spill out. It is a fine distinction: Looking in the mirror and whining, “I feel fat!” is lame, but smoking cigarettes and feigning disinterest in food is cool. Being Barbie-like is unoriginal, but resembling the actress Chloë Sevigny is hip. Churning away on treadmills is stupid, but going on long, meditative runs with your iPod blasting the latest Björk is smart. Though we make an effort to keep track of these fine distinctions, many of us slip up and reveal that we are as obsessive about our weight as the cheerleaders we so mercilessly made fun of.
About five years past anorexia and two years into medical school, Serena recognizes that her perfectionist tendency is both the backbone of her success—she scored almost perfectly on her recent boards—and the bane of her existence—she continues to feel ravaged by critical thoughts about her body. The anorectic behavior has gone away, but much of the insidious, destructive thinking hasn’t changed. She explains: “Despite a certain amount of insight that tells me such a view is unfair and masochistic, I have a tendency to believe that everything comes down to self-discipline—if I fail at something, be it not doing well on an exam or eating too much at a meal, then that represents a breakdown of self-control.”
In the next breath she admits: “I hate being this way; I dislike that I am associating myself with the superficial, diet-obsessed women I scoff at. I am often shocked and frustrated with myself that, despite being an insightful, self-aware feminist, I feel bad when I eat a freaking bagel.”
This double consciousness—being “an insightful, self-aware feminist” on the one hand and a guilty, obsessive sheep on the other—festers inside perfect girls. We end up not being liberated but enduring a double dose of guilt: the initial guilt over eating too much or skipping workouts, and the subsidiary guilt of feeling dumb for it. It is an ugly, silent spiral that seems to feed perfectionism and secrecy. The silence means that smart girls don’t get help. Which, of course, is really stupid.
I spoke with a group of mostly first-year students at Colorado College after a screening of Jean Kilbourne’s Dying to Be Thin, a documentary on the tyranny of the advertising industry. Twenty or so eighteen-year-olds poked fun at Kilbourne’s conspiracy-theory take on the “evil gatekeepers” of the industry when so many of those with power are now women. I was impressed with their analysis of Dove’s Real Beauty campaign—“Sure, it is awesome to see real bodies, but do you notice what they are selling? Thigh cream!”
However, when I brought up this idea—that college-age women often feel too smart to have eating disorders and, therefore, don’t talk about their personal struggles—I was met with a silence so thick you could hear the buzz of the television behind me. The conversation sputtered to a revealing close.
Survivor Guilt
Pointing out to a friend that she seems to be too thin or is obsessing about her fitness and body is awkward and dangerous. Unless she admits to it—a rare case—you become insta-bitch, the girl who thinks she’s better than everyone else, free from the disease that everyone knows (if not admits) is pretty much universal on some level, a meddler, a Pollyanna. If she does admit to it, chances are you will feel guilt anyway—over confronting her too late or not in the right way.
These kinds of interactions demolish otherwise vibrant friendships. Many girls in their late teens and twenties have suffered a lost friendship, the casualty of an eating disorder or related issue. I have stood in buffet lines at weddings listening to wet-eyed accounts of college roommates confronted and lost. Over coffee and drinks and in walks in the park, girls have told me of their undying regret that they didn’t say something, anything, earlier to a friend who wasted away. Adult women, women with babies and even grandbabies, blurt the names of friends who used to “throw up after meals,” though back then they didn’t know the label for what was happening. It is now a typical female experience—identifying disordered behavior in a close friend, mulling over whether or not to say something, worrying about her reaction, nervously intervening, suffering the consequences.
My fear over offending or misinterpreting or prying kept me from saying anything to Allison for a very long time. It actually took me almost a year even to put it all together—the four helpings of peach cobbler in Hewitt followed by a sudden disappearance, the constant sore throats and lame excuses for skipping meals altogether. It was very real, but very hard to put my finger on. Certainly a part of me didn’t want to shatter my own fragile illusion about Allison: the i
deal, gracefully flawless blonde. I had made up a story in my mind about our friendship—two fiercely smart, effortlessly alluring girls taking on the world arm in arm, two Lois Lanes destined to be their own Supermen, two third-wave feminists, as smart as our moms but not afraid to be a little excited about being pretty.
The truth was ugly.
I listened to her vomiting in the bathroom of our ninth-floor apartment, the retching and the gagging, the small pause, and then more of it. The sound filled my ears, echoed inside me. I got up from the kitchen table, where we had just shared a lunch of Kraft macaroni and cheese, and stood at the door of the bathroom helplessly. I opened my mouth a few times, meaning to say something, to yell stop, to tell her how much I loved her, to ask “Are you okay?” and nothing came out.
Eventually I heard the sound of flushing, and she opened the door, running into me as she left the bathroom. We were standing so close, tears filling up my eyes, a look of blankness, of numbness on her face, as if the entire five minutes had never taken place. The tears in my eyes spilled over. Finally I found words: “How can I help you?”
She didn’t respond then, didn’t even change her facial expression. It scared the shit out of me. How could she see me crying, hear me ask this question, and not feel connected? Not respond? Where was my best friend?
We walked into her bedroom, just left of the bathroom, and both sat on her quilt-covered bed. After a minute of my tears, my helpless, aimless blubbering—“I want you to get help. I don’t want you to be in so much pain. I hate this. How often do you do this? Don’t you want to stop?”—she finally started to tear up too. Finally there was some energy in the room, some reciprocation, some trace of the best friend I had pajama-danced to Madonna with in our first-year dorm room, the one who had flushed our first weed purchase down the toilet in a frenzy of paranoia, my beautiful ex-cheerleader best friend.
Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body Page 29
