We hugged desperately, clinging to each other, and then she finally spoke, barely audible, her words lost in my dirty-brown curls: “I want to stop.” Then a sob escaped her.
Confrontation doesn’t always go so well. One extremely thin history major told me a painful breakup story. After converting to the virtues of vegetarianism, yoga, and marathon running at twenty-one, Joey* lost a lot of weight fairly quickly. She felt wonderful, like she finally had some control over her impulses and some awareness of her emotional needs. She was getting interested in new ways to make elaborate vegetarian delicacies.
Joey went to visit her best friend in Los Angeles, excited to share her new insights and lifestyle changes. Because Joey had suffered from bulimia when she was younger, she figured her friend would be thrilled to see that she was finally finding a healthy way to lose weight. But when she arrived, her friend was anything but thrilled.
She seemed distant and preoccupied. Joey asked about her new boyfriend, and Beth shrugged and gave rote answers. Joey asked how her writing was going, if she was still thinking about applying for an MFA, and Beth replied unemotionally, “Not really.” Joey stopped trying so hard, and the silence grew thick. She left the next day confused and worried about her friend.
But a few days later, it was Beth who turned out to be most worried about her. She phoned and left a grave-sounding message on Joey’s voice mail: “We really need to talk. Please call me back as soon as you can.” Joey, thinking perhaps her friend was going to own up to whatever was making her depressed and disconnected, called back immediately.
“I don’t know if we can be friends anymore,” Beth began. “I can’t see you like this. You look like a Holocaust victim. It’s repulsive.” Joey was stunned. She listened to her best friend since childhood express her concern, but in such a way that all Joey could feel was a full-on attack. Her friend was accusatory and scared, fearful that what she saw as Joey’s unhealthy obsession would rub off on her (she too had suffered from bouts of disordered eating and excessive exercise). The Holocaust comment would be crushing for anyone but was especially painful given that the two best friends had grown up attending the same synagogue and danced at each other’s bat mitzvahs.
It was the last exchange they have had in over a year. “I miss her,” explains Joey, still thin but certainly not skeletal. “I just can’t get over those words. They were so calculating, so unjustifiably cruel.”
Eating-disorder clinics and associations offer recommendations on how to confront friends with eating disorders. Some of the tips are helpful— “be a good role model in regard to sensible eating, exercise, and self-acceptance”—but most of them read like copy from a 1980s Girl Scout manual: “compliment your friend’s wonderful personality, successes, or accomplishments. Remind your friend that ‘true beauty’ is not simply skin deep.” They might as well add: Sing your friend a few high-pitched notes of Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You.”
Our drive to be beautiful is not about just a manicure and some makeup; it is about respect, power, and love. When we confront someone about her eating issues, we are also confronting her about her deepest hungers and insecurities. You confront with your best intentions and pray like hell—despite being otherwise agnostic or atheist or confused—that your friend sees your love through the fog of her own defenses.
Allison did get help, though her recovery was not clean or quick. She went to one-on-one therapy, group sessions, was an inpatient for a spell at a Manhattan hospital. But eventually her eating disorder would land her at a residential facility in Tampa, Florida. She remained in Tampa after completing her program and is now in the process of applying to law school. She isn’t healed completely, but she is completely healing.
When we are together, I feel like I am back in the company of a long-lost sister—someone who has seen the best and worst of me, someone of whom I have seen the best and worst. She comes to New York fairly often, and we have brunch and go out dancing.
When we are apart, which is most of the time, she writes beautiful e-mails: “I know that my recovery is in my hands and I feel equipped to handle that responsibility. Most importantly, I know that I have a choice today. I can be ruled by a number on a scale or I can live my life. Those are really my two options.” Despite her bravery, Allison says that sometimes it feels like she is still deciding after all these years.
Going Back
Some naïve part of me actually thought that if I went back to Hewitt, over five years after the first fateful swipe of my ID card, things would be different. Surely I had experienced the worst of the worst, the climax of unhealthy body obsession among Barnard women—some sort of strange meeting of social and psychological forces that made us, the class of 2002, the really screwed-up ones. I could sleep at night if I knew things weren’t as bad today. I could stop talking about it if only I knew girls today weren’t.
I was not comforted.
There were more leg warmers and fewer hooker boots, more blazers and fewer hoodies, more cropped sweaters and fewer cardigans, but besides that, things seemed to have stayed about the same. To my surprise and delight, the cafeteria had been remodeled and brightly painted; it no longer felt as if we were in a submarine. Now it was opened up, almost unrecognizable, but the ethos about eating had not undergone similar reconstruction.
A gaggle of girls, resembling my own first-year crew, piled in and waited patiently as their IDs were swiped. They giggled, running into one another as the line grew longer, swapping stories of the day’s mishaps and epiphanies. I overheard two girls talking about my favorite old professor: “When he read that letter from a former student about regretting becoming a lawyer, I had to swallow back the tears. I mean, now I don’t even know if I want to go to law school anymore!” Another pair, one tall and brunette, like me, the other petite and blond, like Allison, were singing the lyrics to Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl” to themselves, laughing at their piss-poor rendition and searching for their IDs in oversize purses of neon hues.
The jovial, light mood became heavy as the girls entered the land of overwhelming choices, the cereal bins smashed up against the vegetarian options smashed up against the hot chocolate and the soda machines. The hot food steamed ominously from those same aluminum trays. I watched, this time overtly, as the Courtney and Allison look-alikes retraced our nervous path through the maze of options, almost as if they had learned the choreography, a dance passed down, one Barnard girl to the next. They first peered through the glass at the hot food options.
“That macaroni and cheese looks so good,” said the blonde, squinting at the condensation-covered glass separating the drooling coeds from the food.
“I know, I hate that,” said the other, sighing. “Are you going to get it?”
“I don’t know.”
They stood there for a few more seconds, as if they were still confirming whether, in fact, that pile of orange cheese and pale noodles was what they had first hypothesized. The blonde finally wandered away to survey the vegetarian options, eventually picking up one of the standard white plates and putting a few pieces of spongy tofu and overcooked squash on it. She looked at her friend, who had given in and was now standing in the hot-food line. “Going for it?” she asked as she brushed past. It was more recrimination than question, more gloat than inquiry. “Going for it?” hung in the air, an understanding between the two of them that one of them had failed.
Back at the crowded tables, women sat down one by one and started picking at their food. Most girls still didn’t seem to know how to take a real bite. A girl in black-framed glasses and Converse All Stars, the hipster uniform, cut her grilled chicken into tiny strips, and then tinier strips, and then even tinier strips, until she had a mound of pale meat shredded to nothing. Her company, another hipster, this one more hip-hop than punk, with a Triple Five Soul sweatshirt and big hoop earrings, took three bites of a tuna fish sandwich and then pushed it aside, seemingly disgusted by the prospect of completing the task. At another
table, a delicate black girl with a Caribbean accent shoveled half a bowl of Frosted Flakes into her mouth. In between bites she described an evil professor—“an angry man with some serious little-man syndrome”—to a girl with practically a mullet haircut who was gnawing on a tiny piece of cheese like a mouse on Ritalin. They abruptly stood up, took their trays to the conveyor belt, and walked away.
As their trays disappeared under the rubber curtain, I felt hopeless. That bowl, that half-cleaned plate, those sticky glasses, would be washed by the kitchen staff, piled up, filled with some other sorry excuse for a meal, consumed or half-consumed guiltily, put back on the belt to disappear again. Rinse, repeat. Just as it had happened when I was here. Just as it will continue to happen... unless we make it stop.
11. The Real World Ain’t No MTV: How the Body Becomes the Punching Bag for Post-College Disappointment
All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.
—William Faulkner
After college, I tossed out everything that stank of the girl I had been before: a tattered poster of a Georgia O’Keeffe painting, platform shoes, Mardi Gras beads, a massive trunk that my parents had thought would be part and parcel of my East Coast experience. I was preparing to be someone new. Someone who carried a briefcase instead of a backpack. Someone who knew people who knew people. Someone who didn’t have to watch her best friends pick at paltry meals and stare off into space in the common room or listen to the echo of gagging against bathroom tile.
Composing a Life
Getting your first job and moving into your first apartment or house is a second birth, a time for, as Mary Catherine Bateson puts it, “composing a life.” A cultural anthropologist and daughter of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, she knows what she’s talking about. Her landmark book, Composing a Life, followed women of different persuasions and passions as they created their lives in the eighties.
Reading it right out of college, I was moved by the common threads—a drive born of a vision, detours that turn out to be destiny, a search for balance. I passed the book around to my crew of best friends and received it back with dog-eared pages, highlighted and underlined. One of the passages most decorated with stars and exclamation points was: “Ambition, we imply, should be focused, and young people worry about whether they are defining their goals and making the right decisions early enough to get on track. These assumptions have not been valid for many of history’s most creative people, and they are increasingly inappropriate today.” We each highlighted this passage, but none of us heeded its wisdom. Once again, the dissonance between what we knew in our heads and what we practiced in our lives proved significant.
As much as I was comforted by Bateson’s words, I felt she had left out a piece: the body. None of the women she followed spoke about their bodies or about trying to see food in a different way (not as an indulgence but as a necessity, not as a foe but as a friend) or about exercising in a healthy way. Maybe their generation didn’t share this preoccupation; or maybe they didn’t talk about it.
Inherent in “composing a life,” I believe, is developing an adult approach to a healthy body. Many young women dreamed that, along with our new apartments, we would inhabit new bodies: bodies that we didn’t criticize so much, that were grown-up enough to want balance, that could finally step back and let our intellects and personalities step forward. That dream, unfortunately, is rarely realized.
The (Feminist) American Dream
Rolled up in a diploma, whether from Princeton University or Hazard Community College, is a lifetime of answers to the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” My dad would videotape my brother and me on each birthday and ask us that proverbial question. Perched atop our hot tub back on Tejon Street at four years old, swinging my leg warmers happily in the air, side ponytail in full effect, I answered like a true inheritor of a confusing feminism: “I want to be part-time waitress, part-time doctor.”
Legacy is also rolled up in that diploma. The go-girl parenting taught us to set goals and go after them, enter interviews with poise and purpose, believe that we deserved just as much money and just as many promotions as any guy. We girls were destined for big, important things, just like boys, and had an obligation to take ourselves seriously and have fancy titles. I wanted to make my mom proud. The hitch is this waitress thing.
My generation was raised on a steady diet of empowerment and equality, but we saw who was serving it up. Some moms were the CEOs, indeed, but also the caretakers, the washers, the cookers, the criers. They were obsessed with their weight, exhausted, bitter, self sacrificing. The food for thought that we got as little girls didn’t exactly constitute a balanced diet. The ambition wasn’t tempered with wellness. The demand for excellence wasn’t countered by a reasonable expectation for flaws here and there. The responsibility was still visibly and weightily on the shoulders of our mothers for most everything. Yet they were still expected to look “light as a feather” while carrying the load.
I wanted to be a waitress, in addition to being a doctor, because I thought that meant I would be pretty, thin, helpful, and witty. I wanted to take care of people. I wanted to make them feel good. I wanted to wear little skirts that showed off my perfect little legs.
Thus we have the paradox of the (feminist) American dream. The women of my generation are busting with ambition and fully believe in our capacity to take over/change the world. But we are not free from the notion that, to be successful, one must also be thin and pretty. Coupled with our ambition to lead is our ambition to disappear—two highly contradictory forces. We still don’t want to take up space. We are still concerned with caretaking (not for ourselves, of course). We still want to look good while climbing our way to the top (and most of us are not particularly excited about stepping on anyone else’s toes on the way up). We still believe that we will never be fulfilled until we are thin, never be complete until we are pretty.
“You can be anything” has become the (feminist) American dream—a beautiful theory without solid evidence, a cruel carrot dangling in front of young women. Although we may be able to land any job, hold any public office, direct any movie, most of us will never feel thin or pretty enough while doing it. Even our work, well known or award-winning or world-changing, won’t make us feel beautiful. We can be well educated, creative, capable, experienced, and still not have the capacity to figure out how to free ourselves from guilt over every little thing that we put in our mouths.
Jane,* a Bellevue, Washington, native with a self-effacing sense of humor and a go-get-’em attitude, was big-city-bound. Upon graduating from Connecticut College, she packed her boxes and shipped them to the Big Apple, far away from her family. Jane wanted to distinguish herself. The plan: move to New York City, become a publishing diva, and lose the weight she had been struggling with for the past ten years.
A job listing on craigslist—every post-college girl’s new best friend—led her to apply for a “junior account executive” position at a public relations firm that represented authors. In a bubbly cover letter, she wrote: “I am a professional spinner. I have been cultivating my skills since the days when I didn’t push my sister down the stairs. I’ve used my skills to convince my parents to send me to Europe, to transfer to an almost top tier school, and to most recently convince my dad’s tumor that it needed to be eviscerated. The doctors, who didn’t initially believe, tell me that it was the drugs; I like to believe it was my power of persuasion.”
She heard back the next morning, but when she went in for the interview, she was a little thrown off by the debris that littered the office. Her potential supervisor, Calvin,* assured her that they had so much business, there was no time to clean up. He was looking for a smart woman who wouldn’t buckle under the pressure of coordinating key interviews for some of the nation’s top-selling authors. He seemed instantly to fall in love with Jane as the woman for the job.
His unfettered
enthusiasm was intoxicating. She was already signing on the dotted line when he mentioned a small caveat: She would be replacing someone else in the company who didn’t yet know he was getting the boot, so her first task would be to come in after hours and download all the documents from his computer. Red flags waved aggressively in her head, but the image of shaking hands with Augusten Burroughs, one of her favorite writers, crowded out the warning.
One Rung at a Time
Perfect girls like to move full steam ahead, climb the ladder of success two rungs at a time, run rather than walk. Perfect girls are planners. Most like to set short-term goals and then take the appropriate steps to reach them as quickly and efficiently as possible. If there is a spot/boy/job at a team/bar/company that we desire, we are usually pretty adept at doing whatever it takes. This tendency—to stick to a goal under any and all duress—makes us especially vulnerable to eating disorders. Once we decide to lose weight, we can be tenacious about taking off the pounds. When that fails, as almost all diets inevitably do, we inflict a tremendous amount of guilt, shame, and disappointment on ourselves. If we succeed, well then, we usually just whet our appetites for more success.
Setting short-term goals and going after them works beautifully for perfect girls throughout high school and college. By being so productive, perfect girls get a lot of attention, encouragement, affirmation, even love from teachers, parents, and coaches. They have constant reinforcement that they are, in fact, destined for greatness. But short-term goals aren’t as straightforward in tall buildings with matrices of five-by-five cubicles filled with other smart, ambitious people. Suddenly an onslaught of external forces—inaccessible supervisors, nasty coworkers, downturns in the economy, office policy, precedent— can derail a perfect girl from her path. Turns out that, unlike the design-your-own-major flexibility of college, the corporate hierarchy is pretty firmly set in its ways. Your boss does not intend to brainstorm a nontraditional career path for you that would allow you to bypass the coffee pouring and the collating on your way to real responsibility and prestige.
Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body Page 30
