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

by Courtney E. Martin

  Perfect girls also need templates—women who have survived some years after college and become calmer and wiser in the process. During my senior year in college, I attended the Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership’s Young Women’s Retreat, an experience designed to give newbies necessary skills in negotiation, public speaking, and financial literacy, and a chance to reflect on their dreams. Far more life-changing than these skills was my exposure to women in their late twenties. Wide-eyed at twenty, I looked at Jessica—six years my senior—and thought, I could be like that. I could be a journalist, and at Robin, twenty-nine, and still composing her life, and thought, Look at that. Robin is awesome, and she doesn’t have every little thing figured out. She’s creative and spontaneous, loving and open. Kimmi, twenty-five at the time, was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen, and she wasn’t the size of a toothpick.

  Calm surrounded me at that retreat, as if someone had put a heavy blanket over my tired body. There was none of the teenage angst I had become so used to, none of the frenetic energy of mealtimes, none of the self-absorbed rambling. The calm filled me with a great hope that one day, in the near future, I might be friends with women just like these, and what was more, be a woman just like these.

  The problem is that I had to go on a retreat to get this kind of experience. Our society is not set up for intergenerational interaction. We run around in our little circles composed almost entirely of women just our age, and unfortunately, at twenty, these women are chickens with their heads cut off as cleanly as our own. We can confirm one another’s experiences, be sisters in struggle, and speculate until we are blue in the face, but we can’t provide that unparalleled calm or wisdom that a mentor or a “big sister” can. We can’t comment on the water with radical insight because we are the guppies anxiously and erratically swimming in it.

  Not only is our society not set up for intergenerational interaction but, in my experience and the experience of many other young women I know, when we do set our sights on a mentor, we are often disappointed. I have had a self-described feminist supervisor pull me aside and tell me that it was in my best interest to dress more ladylike. Keep in mind, I’m not a tomboy by any stretch of the imagination, but I do prefer pants when the windchill factor is ten below zero. She also demonstrated for me how to flirt shamelessly with each and every man who walked into her office. She smoked long, skinny cigarettes and took the bread off her tuna sandwiches so she could avoid the carbs. Every time I got a salad for lunch, she would affirm my suspicion that my value, even at work, was predicated on my appearance: “Look at you! You are so good!” And it was not only what she did say that disappointed me but also what she didn’t say. She knew little about my life or my aspirations beyond the four walls of our tiny office. She seemed to speak only in exclamation points and periods, never in question marks.

  A friend who was trying to break in to the film business contacted a female director she greatly respected and asked if they could speak. After a few rescheduled meetings, Paula* finally got to meet her potential mentor. But as soon as she arrived in the office, she realized that there was a glaring contrast between the woman she had built up in her mind and the one sitting before her. The director complained about many of her peers, telling Paula all about their character flaws and poor choices while describing herself as a “martyr for truth.” She said, “I would give you some names so you could network, but they’re all bitches.” She detailed her physical ailments. She lamented having to pay so much for a decent script. She didn’t ask Paula a thing. She ended by talking about how grueling and political the industry is, advising Paula: “If you like anything else a fraction of how much you like film, do that instead.” Paula was crushed. She shook her fallen idol’s hand, but in the elevator on the way down, she cried. I’m sure the director would have called it “tough love,” but Paula called it devastating.

  Despite a gallant effort to make connections with female academics in her field, my friend Mara* has been repeatedly dismissed and ignored. She doesn’t know if it is simply a matter of time, although she acknowledges that the women professors are usually the primary care-givers for children in addition to being full-time faculty members. “It also feels like they’re threatened by me or something,” she admits. “I hate to say that, because it confirms everything bad about women, but I honestly feel that way.”

  Male professors are more interested in Mara, perhaps too interested. One male academic with whom she felt a very close platonic bond cut off their friendship when he confessed he had romantic feelings for her—an admittedly respectable choice. The life of the mind is titillating, but if Mara could keep her romantic feelings under wraps, you would think a man fifteen years her senior and supervising her could as well. Mara has ended up feeling like her femaleness is a strike against her no matter which coach she plays for.

  Even those in the traditional corporate workforce, where you would think that mentoring would be institutionalized, complain of a lack of female guidance from above. Pamela,* a new lawyer at a major New York City law firm, explains: “There are very few women partners to begin with, so I struggled to even find a mentor who shared some of my concerns about balancing family and being taken seriously. When I did find a woman mentor, she was so bitter about all the sacrifices she has made that she couldn’t imagine a different path for me. It was like, ‘I suffered, so you’re going to suffer. I had to be thin and perfect and have no free time, so that’s what you’re going to have to live with.’ ”

  Women my age learn quickly that the only way to find and retain mentors, especially if you aren’t from a “connected” family, is to take everything with a grain of salt. We are stripped of our delusions about finding the “perfect” mentor and must, instead, accept the idea that mentors are as flawed as human beings at large. I have had great success in creating relationships with older, wiser women by deciding to be realistic about what I am looking for in a mentor and never throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Dr. Robin Stern is a brilliant, sometimes irritating, always visionary and supportive mentor, and has been for six years. If I had run the other way the first time she was fifteen minutes late or checked her e-mail instead of listening to an answer I offered to one of her questions, I would have missed out on one of the most fortifying relationships of my life.

  But the responsibility doesn’t fall only on our young shoulders. It is also unfair that so many older women dismiss, ignore, or compete with those just starting to make their way in the world. You may have earned your cynicism; let us earn ours too. You may have had bad experiences with women in the past; let us be the first women who don’t backstab or take you for granted. Protect us from your unresolved weight issues to whatever extent feels authentic. Celebrate us not for our slim waists but for our strategic planning. You certainly paid your dues, but don’t punish us by making sure we pay them as dearly as you did. You labored for the working world to be more egalitarian and compassionate toward women. Now enjoy what you’ve birthed.

  The Woodhull Institute preaches the “psychology of abundance”— the idea that women don’t need to feel deprived or competitive or stingy anymore. They advocate the notion that there is enough in the world to go around, and that the more we share our resources, the more we gain. This includes not despising a skinnier woman because of her weight, giving a younger woman much-needed advice, sharing your wisdom and wealth with those who can benefit from it. Abundance, not accumulation, is the goal. Generosity, not perfection, is the way to get there.

  Unfortunately, our shared psychology is still one of scarcity. Many older women lament the lack of dedication and feminist passion in the next generation, yet many young women are floundering, alone.

  Looks as the Last Salvation

  Once a perfect girl has wrestled with disappointment long enough, and lost, she succumbs to the new reality that she will not be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company by the time she is, say, twenty-five. There comes a point when she admits that she has a bit to l
earn about the business. But that same perfect girl, newly sober about career mobility, can still be intoxicated by the notion of being thin and hot. Even if she can’t be the boss, she can be the secretary everyone is talking about. If she can’t afford the Armani suit, at least she can get a knockoff and look better than her supervisor, who shelled out for the real thing.

  The perfect girl focuses her energy on controlling her appearance. She spends her paycheck before the ink dries, buying trendy outfits that make her feel remade. (Never mind that they will bore her before the month is out.) She compulsively buys makeup, gets a membership at the tanning salon, purchases the same pair of shoes in a variety of different colors—all so she can feel worthy of attention when her job garners her none. The upkeep of her appearance, in essence, becomes her preferred full-time job. She feels good at it. She feels special again, if only on the surface.

  This frivolous spending is no passing thrill. The economic damage is long-term. A 2002 study by the Women’s Institute for a Secure Retirement found that over half of single young women are living paycheck to paycheck. Part of this may be because a woman still makes seventy-three cents for every dollar a man does, but if the gaggles of young women in trendy outfits buying out Urban Outfitters at the first of the month are any indication, I dare to argue that young women are also trying to buy self-esteem.

  Ultimately the ritual is empty. No matter how much she “improves” her look or buys the latest gear, she is just a disillusioned postgraduate in an expensive outfit. None of it makes her feel any more hopeful on Sunday when the clock ticks down to another week of administrative blah. If anything, the reality of her dwindling bank account—or more likely, her amassing debt—hits home, and she fires up the burner for another ramen-noodle night (trying not to remember that the cosmopolitan she drank last night is equivalent to fourteen of these now traditional Sunday-night delights).

  Sometimes, when the new shoes or the makeover or the Friday-night fix stops making her feel a sense of momentum, she resorts to more drastic measures . . .

  Jane couldn’t stand it anymore—not the after-hour calls from her boss, not the little judgments from her mom about her ballooning weight, not her Friday-night bar tabs (no guys asking to buy her a drink). She decided to take matters into her own hands and do something that she believed would push her life in the right direction. At twenty-two, she got liposuction.

  Jane’s mom had mentioned the option (and offered to pay for it), explaining: “You just have one of those body types where you can never really lose the stomach.” Jane was hesitant until a coworker confessed that she had done the same and lost five dress sizes. When work was unbearable, Jane began to fantasize about what it would be like to leave on Friday and come back a week later with a toned and tightened body. She could almost hear the compliments that would be lavished on her. She could almost feel her hand, waving away the praise. Then her computer would let out a piercing ding, dragging her back into reality—another one of Calvin’s inarticulate requests via e-mail.

  Two hours and seven thousand dollars later, Jane had lost two inches around her waist. She had also lost some innocence—in the middle of the surgery, her anesthesia wore off and she woke up to the sound of the machine sucking away her insides.

  When she healed, the compliments weren’t exactly lavish. She explained: “I have a few friends who know about it, and they’ll comment and say I look thinner or whatever, but I’m not really happy with it. No one else really notices.”

  As with any quick fix, nothing was actually fixed. A few months after our interview, six months after her surgery, I get an e-mail from Jane. She has moved away from New York City. She has started writing for a local newspaper. And she has begun to binge and purge habitually: “It has taken me weeks to formulate this email to you. I have fallen into a really bad bout of bulimia since leaving New York. It’s odd that one of my reasons for leaving the city was because I felt it made me overly appearance conscious, and then I get to Bellevue and I end up having even bigger problems. I started therapy today again, which is perhaps why I am able to admit this to you now.”

  I read her e-mail sadly, as I do all of the e-mails I get these days from former interviewees who are updating me on their precarious conditions. If only there were some way to make Jane and all post-college wanderers believe that thinness is not a prerequisite for success, that self-esteem cannot be bought, that their wandering and waiting are justified. I am amused to see that Jane’s e-mail signature line is “Forget the clock and take your compass because the direction you’re headed is more important than the time it takes to get there.” I can just imagine her typing it in—desperate to remind herself, to make herself believe. If only she did. If only any of us did.

  Plastic surgery is becoming increasingly common among women of all ages and socioeconomic backgrounds. The most popular procedure, liposuction, was performed on 455,000 Americans last year, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. Almost every kind of cosmetic surgery is on the rise, including a 25 percent increase since 2000 in breast augmentations (264,041 were performed in 2004). A staggering amount of money is being made off women’s (and some men’s) dissatisfaction with the bodies they were born with—almost $8 billion in 2004. Americans spent $890,610,213 buying bigger breasts alone.

  An option that was once considered couth only among aging women, or those with “glaring” abnormalities, is now a fairly common high school or college graduation gift from Mom and Dad. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons reports that 335,000 teenagers, eighteen and younger, had plastic surgery in 2003. BBC News reports that 40 percent of teens in the UK want cosmetic surgery. Nose jobs, disguised as oh-so-necessary deviated septum surgery, are done all over the country for girls whose noses aren’t even done growing yet.

  What was once a wealthy woman’s indulgence has now been marketed to middle- and low-income women, complete with financing programs claiming to help even those with bad credit. Many travel abroad for cheap cosmetic surgery procedures—dubbed “medical tourism” by the agencies popping up to make a buck off uninsured and low-income Americans—which are often unregulated and dangerous.

  One young woman from a middle-class background in Texas told me this story about being a teenager and watching her mother suffer through multiple plastic surgeries: “She came home with vials filled with fat that had been taken out of her stomach, and she wasn’t overweight to begin with, because her surgeon had suggested that would be a cost-effective way to have her cheekbones highlighted once a month. After she recovered from the liposuction, she returned to this surgeon to have one vial injected into each cheek once a month. Her face would bruise so badly from her injections that she had a purple tint under her makeup for most of the month. Then, by the time the purple had dissipated, she’d have the process repeated all over again.”

  What was once a “big deal”—something associated with serious medical risks that required ample recovery time—is now becoming a stop-and-shop pastime. The New York Times reports that women are upgrading their bodies the way they do their cars. In “the designer-body approach . . . an increasing number of doctors are using a technique known variously as precision, selective or micro liposuction”—in which a woman can have just an ounce of fat taken from her ankle, for example. Dr. Luiz S. Toledo, a plastic surgeon from São Paulo, Brazil, explains, “It’s liposuction for skinny people.” Dr. Howard D. Sobel of Manhattan describes his patients: “Some of them are perfect 10’s who want to be 10.5’s.”

  Precision plastic surgery is a dramatic example of how far perfect girls—and their older, though not wiser, counterparts—will go to make sure that their bodies are unnaturally flawless. The health risks and costs are not enough to deter them from a practice that gives them ultimate control—the ability to reconstruct their own forms, eradicate their imperfections, sculpt their bodies into visual symbols of how far they will go for the illusion of perfection.

  The rub is that they can never go far enough.
This kind of “lunch-time liposuction” encourages women to see their bodies as never-ending projects to be fine-tuned until death. Plastic surgery addiction is not a joke. Like diet or exercise obsession, it sucks the life, energy, time, and money out of otherwise brilliant women, resulting—ironically—in their being completely and totally out of control.

  So What Next?

  This island of success that we have imagined, this place where we would finally feel full, where that nagging emptiness inside would dissipate once and for all . . . it doesn’t exist. We learn this the hard way—trapped in identical cubicles, deep in debt, out of control, stuffing our faces to numb the disappointment. The adolescent relationship with food that once plagued us has changed but not improved. We have new vices to tempt us into betraying our diets: lunch breaks at fast-food joints, snacking through the dull day. We have idle evening hours in our new apartments, endless bad reality television to make it through, Saturday nights at 2:00 A.M., alone at home, after a string of slobbering drunks asked for our phone number. Not exactly Sex and the City.

  We don’t really feel as if we have enough control to compose a life; life seems to be composed for us, and we tolerate it. We don’t even choose what to eat in the end. It feels more as if it chooses us, and we deal with the guilt/shame/hopelessness that follows.

  At stake here is not just our career goal or our vision of ourselves as thin, successful adult women, but our faith in the idea that we have a purpose. Before this time, we projected our personal purpose into the future, rehearsing for a day when we would be launched into the world. Someday I will be rich and famous. Someday I will feel beautiful. Someday I will change the world. But suddenly the future is now. Suddenly we realize that none of the answers we had for the ultimate question—What will make me complete?—have held up. It’s not a paycheck from a fancy corporation. It’s not a nice apartment, trendy clothes, a new car. It’s not a nonprofit job that guarantees a spot in heaven. It’s not even thinness.