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

by Courtney E. Martin

  No wonder my generation is distracted by this obsession with our weight; it is the running commentary in our heads—like a whole team of sportscasters commenting on every grab and pass that we make throughout the day. The external voices are obvious and straightforward. You can disregard them or scoff at them—your mom telling her sister about the latest fad diet on the phone, Anna Nicole Smith idiotically leaning on a sports car and gurgling “Do you like my body?” in her TRIMSPA commercial. But turning off the voices in your head is not so easy. We go through life making choices without realizing that we are responding to these inner voices.

  Some girls, unable to resist the starving daughter who wants food now, more, never enough, binge. This gluttonous act leads to temporary relief but is followed by unbearable guilt. As penance, they purge—rid themselves of their sin, pray to porcelain gods. The bulimic’s experience of bingeing and purging is often a religious fervor—equivalent to the collapse and shake of Southern Baptists in the aisle—followed by the deep, dark shame of having gone astray. The starving daughter is awakened from her stupor of feeding (some women truly do eat in their sleep) by the outraged inner perfect girl who then tries to resurrect herself by ridding her body of its egregious imperfections.

  For others, the answer to quieting the dull roar in the brain is a matter of willpower. These perfect girls rarely act compulsively, don’t like to drink or feel too crazy about a guy. They believe the devil inside their own heads—there is evil out there, and they want to avoid it. They also believe the god—the messiness of life must be put into tiny compartments and managed. They want to make their lives, their bodies, into symbols of purity. They want to transcend the weakness of the common woman—the girl who lives down the hall who says, “Oh, I really shouldn’t,” and then takes another cookie. That kind of wavering disgusts the true-blue anorectic. She believes, profoundly, in control.

  For either kind of perfect girl, there is a breaking point. Somewhere along the hilly road of the bulimic or the straight-and-narrow of the anorectic is a moment when she collapses, unable to perform the illusion of “effortless perfection” any longer, unable to say no one more time, unable to weather the bloat and disgust of a binge. At this moment, the light creeps in.

  “Handing It All Up”

  Heather,* the runner, had grown up with a very loose grasp of Christianity. She tells me, “I thought it was just about going to church a few times a year, singing some songs. I believed in God, but Jesus was just some guy to me.” As her health got worse and worse—her injuries wouldn’t heal; the therapists she tried to go to were unhelpful; her bingeing and purging had become a roller coaster—she agreed to go on a weekend retreat with some friends who happened to be pretty serious Christians.

  It seems, in retrospect, like an incongruous choice. A woman hell-bent on privacy, rationality, planning goes on a retreat with people she doesn’t know well in a place where she will not be able to control her eating. “I know, it doesn’t make any sense, but at the time I just felt compelled,” she explains. “I think God must have wanted me to go.”

  Heather was struck, throughout the weekend, by how joyful and loving everyone seemed to be. They accepted her without really knowing her, laughed easily, woke early with bright eyes. “Their quality of life seemed so different than mine,” she remembers. “I thought, If this is because of this guy Jesus, then I want to be a part of it.” It is easy to picture the vast contrast for Heather—her tedious lists of calories and diary entries filled with self-hate versus the elated, communal rapture of a cabin full of born-again Christians celebrating their faith.

  She started attending church on campus more frequently and studying the Bible with other Christians. “This guy Jesus” turned out to be a pretty fascinating character. She was drawn to the unconditional love that she was taught he possessed for her, for everyone. She was comforted by the idea that someone was beside her, invisibly helping her through the huge struggle that lay ahead.

  And it was huge. Heather did not discover Christianity and then immediately resurrect herself—healthy, fleshy, at peace. Instead, she wrestled with her religious education. At times she used it to make herself sicker. She recalls, “I got this twisted sense of what holy was. I decided that it was the opposite of greed and gluttony. Not eating made me feel like I was holy or pure.” But her new tendency to binge and purge offered no religious justification. It was simply devastating.

  The hamstring injury refused to get better, so Heather was forced to stop running entirely. Her identity was, once again, shot. When her team made it to nationals, one of her most desired goals, she was further crushed, left behind with her broken body and broken heart.

  At a time of real confusion and overwhelming defeat, she went on another Christian retreat with friends. This time a guest speaker mentioned in passing that eating disorders were an example of a sin that God could not tolerate. Heather’s ears perked, and she started thinking hard about the way she had been reinterpreting the faith to fit her disease, about how tired she was, how hopeless. She remembers reading in the weathered Bible in her lap: “It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery” (Galatians 5:1). It dawned on her, with a violence so sharp it made her double over, that she was a slave to her eating disorder. She felt compelled to leave the lecture, as if God had spoken to her and told her that it was time to deal with her eating disorder once and for all. Right now? she remembers thinking, in the middle of this lecture? But God had a plan.

  She went out on the porch, the sun practically blinding her, and started sobbing. It just flooded out of her, and for once, she did not restrain it. She did not try to stop it. She just gave in. She surrendered through her lifetime of tears, and she heard God speak very clearly to her again: “It is time to give this up. It is time to want to get better.” Heather describes this moment as absolute revelation: “I just sobbed and I spoke to God. I just laid it all out, everything. And as I laid it out, I felt the Holy Spirit taking it away. Anything I could hand up, He could handle. I was just handing it all up.”

  This concept, “handing it all up,” is anathema to perfect girls. Instead, we go through life trying to “take it all on.” The idea that there is room to, in a sense, give up is hard to understand. That there is a time to admit that you are in over your head, that you have run out of options, that you are exhausted and unable to keep going, whether religious or not, is a revelation.

  Our more-better-faster society doesn’t talk a lot about these kinds of breaking points, especially for women. Women are expert, instead, at grinning and bearing it. Perfect girls are into control, into privacy, into performance. Handing it all up makes them feel vulnerable when they are aiming for invincibility.

  But just as Heather was unable to transcend the chaos and messiness of life, all perfect girls attempting to do it right all the time do it wrong and lose it at some point (think Reese Witherspoon in Election). We are, after all, fallible, and one of the most beautiful, neglected parts of our humanness is our inability to handle everything on our own.

  Stating aloud that you aren’t happy with your relationship with food and fitness, asking for help, admitting weakness can be the first step toward becoming stronger. I chalk up my own rare admission of imperfection one promising spring day in Central Park as the moment that kept me safe from a full-blown illness. I was walking with my mom, who had come to pick me up from my first year at college, and I suddenly blurted out, “Mom, I think if I’m not careful, I could get an eating disorder.” There was no premeditation. It just came out, blurted from some deep, unconscious place. It was almost as if the army that Nicole Blackman talked about wanting for her daughter, the one that lives inside you waiting to save your life, had rescued me from my own stubborn pride.

  My mom was as shocked as I was that I had admitted to being on the edge, but she managed to respond calmly and constructively. She assured me that I could talk to a therapist at home
that summer if I thought it might be helpful, that together we could reestablish a healthy pattern of wholesome and sometimes indulgent eating and fun exercising.

  Truth is, I suffered long after that summer. Everything was not magically fixed by our mother-daughter bond or the afternoons in the mountains. The pull of perfection was much stronger than even those, my most precious gifts. However, whenever I got dangerously close to the edge again, I would think of that afternoon with my mom, those words I had unconsciously blurted out, and I would stop myself from slipping off. I knew, with that admission, I had committed myself to honesty. I couldn’t stomach the idea of looking my mom in the eye and telling her that, despite all of her efforts, all of her fierce love, I had fallen.

  Lynn Ginsburg and Mary Taylor, writers on food and spirituality, offer this perspective: “Accompanying an underlying sense of suffering is a feeling of emptiness. We feel something missing. Inside of us is a void, a longing deep within for some elusive satisfaction.” Though perfect girls were not raised to believe that our devotion to any one religion is an integral part of our success, we long for some kind of cosmic reassurance, an unwavering sureness about our own worth in a world that constantly puts it into question.

  The search for a god, this drive to understand mystery and meaning, is universal. But as my own mom explains, “Those of us who grew up with too many rules often didn’t find our way back to a structured dogma that we could pass to our kids, so we left you searching for something. We didn’t even show you the continent, much less the country, never mind the map.”

  We, the perfect girls, have been on our own version of a pilgrimage—going many miles and denying the most basic of our needs in the futile hope that all this will lead us to some kind of salvation. When we are thin, we have reasoned, we will be godlike and no longer need the reassurance of a higher power. We will possess a power within ourselves potent enough to get us loved and promoted and recognized.

  We have sought perfect gods, and we have come up empty-handed. We have learned that, no matter how much we deprive ourselves, our bodies refuse to become holy. They are fleshy, curved, bleeding messes, made in an ancient form—certainly divine but not devoid of discomfort. We have learned that, no matter how much we control our appetites, a hunger remains at our cores. It won’t be satiated by food or the swollen pride that results from refusing it. It certainly won’t be satiated by perfection. As Anna Quindlen predicted, those of us who have tried to be perfect all of our lives will face a moment when we discover not an impeccably ordered soul within, but a black hole.

  Only wonder will fill you and satiate your spiritual hunger— wonder at your little life, wonder at the struggle, wonder at minute and overlooked beauty. There is no secret path in the sky, there is only the very human work of slugging on the ground. It is at once mundane and miraculous, at once daily and divine. You will fail to bypass the nitty-gritty choices of life. Inevitably. You will fail to live life completely in your head. Inevitably. You will fail to lose weight, keep it off, stick to a diet. Inevitably. You will fail to deny your hungers, cravings, and desires. Inevitably. You will fail to be a perfect girl. Inevitably.

  Ultimately you cannot organize a soul or a life. You cannot achieve well-being. You can only move toward wellness and peace of mind and happiness with a humble, transparent intention. You can only admit your smallness in a large and overwhelming world, and then be surprised by the power of that smallness. You can only see your body for what it is—a miracle of coordination, curves, resiliency, a partner in your life’s journey.

  Our generation’s spiritual hunger is not a separate issue from our obsession with food and fitness. In fact, acknowledging the depth of our hunger is the beginning of the end of it.

  13. Stepping Through the Looking Glass: Our New Stories

  The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.

  —Susan Sontag

  The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them.

  —Albert Einstein

  Back in the packed Marriott ballroom, surrounded by women much older and more versed in the language of pain than I am, the air is getting lighter as we anticipate the close of Carol Gilligan’s keynote. Like antsy junior high students five minutes before the bell, the audience members start shifting in their seats.

  I am overwhelmed. My questions have become a dozen nagging children all pulling on my heartstrings, and I have no answers or peanut butter sandwiches with which to appease them. My program is covered with notes in the adolescent language of absolutes, followed by a parade of exclamation points and question marks: “But what is the answer?! If we have ‘lost’ our voices, how do we ‘find’ them? How do we stop being perfect girls if this is all we have ever known? How can we stop when everything around us reinforces being thin all the time? Where is the power? Really?!?”

  I look up from my ink and angst right as Carol Gilligan looks up from her notes on the lectern. Staring straight into the faces of her audience with determined, steely eyes, she says, “The seemingly impossible task is to tell a new story.”

  These words still echo inside me today.

  What could our new story be? I have wondered this as I listened to unique, beautiful women construct their individual histories out of eerily identical parts—diet that led to disease, ambition in overdrive, unspoken suffering. I have wondered this as I tried to blend in among a dozen fourteen-year-olds spilling their insecure lives and reveling in the spilling as only teenage girls can. I have wondered this when sitting at a Brooklyn diner and watching a woman pour water over her breakfast to prevent herself from eating it all. I have wondered this as I heard the voices of all those women I spoke to over the phone who seemed as if they could not stop talking once they started.

  The studies on eating disorders say there will be few happy endings, but I can’t believe them. I won’t believe them. Yet as much as I don’t want to accept that eating disorders are an inevitable epidemic in our spiritually bankrupt culture of thin-worship, when I try to think of a new story, it sounds an awful lot like a fantastical fairy tale.

  Once upon a time there was a generation of little girls born with furious cries and tiny hearts swollen with potential. They were raised in a world that told them daily how special and capable they were but also how unfinished and burdened with hope. A seed of anxiety was planted in the center of their beings. It sprouted and spread quickly. By the time they were twelve, they no longer remembered what it felt like to climb trees or become bored at meals. Their bodies, growing bigger and more uncontrollable all the time, became their enemies.

  They wandered the world hungry, trying desperately to appease their anxiety with accomplishments—gilded little plastic trophies engraved with their names, report cards covered in A’s and stuck to refrigerator doors with magnets, letters from colleges confirming their superiority. They wanted things other than these little tokens, but they couldn’t quite remember what those things were. Their forgotten desires turned to bellyaches, numbed only by food or the refusal of it. They couldn’t hear the whispers originating from deep within over the roar of their exercise bikes churning in place. They slept in fits and starts, waking with sweaty foreheads and pounding hearts; their dreams were full of monsters with their own faces.

  They looked in mirrors, scrutinizing their reflections so long they forgot that a whole world existed outside the looking glass, a whole world that needed their ideas and their commitment and their passion. They were a generation of narcissistic Alices who forgot to step through.

  But one day, one girl looked at herself in the mirror and was shocked at how beautiful her crooked nose was, how strange and lovely. Another girl noticed the striking curve of her big hips. Another suddenly relished her chest, flat as a board and ready for anything. Another discovered her rounded belly, and another her long, sturdy feet, and another her strong thighs.

  And then these same girls started to wonder. If they were so su
rprisingly beautiful, what surprises did the world beyond the looking glass hold? One day, one brave girl stepped right through. And another followed her. And another and another and another . . .

  And slowly, like the quiet creep of spring after a dry, brutal winter, this generation of girls remembered the power of their furious cries and the potential of their swollen hearts. They grew angry at the world that had told them daily how unfinished they were and started refusing to hear it. Instead, they started listening to the whispers from deep within, and as they listened, the whispers grew louder and they began to feel more and more complete.

  They had much more time to do things they had always pledged to do, such as save the world and watch the sunrise with good friends on rooftops and hold the hands of their grandmothers. They had the resilience to pick themselves up and dust themselves off, because they realized that falling made them not more perfect but better somehow, more right with the world. They began to laugh at themselves, to like themselves, even, because they knew that imperfection and struggle were actually what prevented the day from being dreadfully boring.

  The seed of anxiety that had once made them feel perpetually hungry withered and died, and in its place, a quiet power grew. It made them feel solid and satisfied, prepared to storm the boardrooms and bedrooms and battlefields of the world and save people. After all, they had already done the most difficult deed in saving themselves.

  It just took the difficult but not at all impossible effort of stepping through the looking glass—leaving behind the world of someone else’s making in order to enter one of their own.

  And, of course, they lived . . .

  I realize, however, that real girls with real lives, eating disorders, and real problems may not have the perfect ending. There is no glass slipper and certainly no Prince Charming. Our hair, no matter how much we deep-condition it, isn’t strong enough or long enough to throw out the window for some hopeful dude to climb up. We don’t live in houses made out of candy and gingerbread (thank God). Now I am sounding like Alice herself: