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

by Courtney E. Martin

  “I can’t believe that!” said Alice.

  “Can’t you?” the Queen said in a pitying tone. “Try again: draw a long breath, and shut your eyes.”

  Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”

  “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

  How do we “step through the looking glass”? How do we recognize the world we live in for what it is—just one version of reality, of which there are many? How do we distinguish between our own truth and the dominant culture’s dangerous views of beauty and ambition? We are beautiful in spite of our imperfections, even more beautiful as a result of them. And we are a generation of women on the brink of amazing things, regardless of our weight, held back, in fact, only by our preoccupation with it.

  I close my eyes. Gilligan did say “the seemingly impossible.” This time my fantasy is less fairy tale and more manifesto:

  We were a generation of women raised to believe that power was outside ourselves. Sure, the expression “girl power” was thrown around as we came of age, but we recognized it for what it was: a marketing campaign to get us to buy T-shirts and plastic diaries with flimsy aluminum keys. We were too smart for that. Instead, we observed what was deemed powerful in the real world, and we took copious notes: beautiful, thin women with flawless business suits and easy laughs, and always men with lots of money. Our mothers’ intuition, their curvaceous, often neglected bodies, their intensity and easy tears were nowhere in the landscape of real-world power.

  So we did what any smart, observant newbies in a cutthroat climate do—we prepared to play the game. We cultivated our lists of accomplishments and attempted to sculpt our bodies to fit the template we saw everywhere. We hid the pain, the blood, sweat, and tears, the exhaustion, behind expensively straightened smiles. We posed as the great, thin hope—the next wave of women who were too competent to need feminism and too cool to admit to the time and energy wasted on appearing so.

  But the running and the deprivation, the controlling and the self-hating finally caught up with us. We couldn’t pretend any longer that ambition was enough to fill the void where our faith should be.

  So we started admitting to our own vulnerability. We started yawning when we were tired and crying when we were sad. We started talking to our mothers and fathers and friends and lovers about our fears—describing the ugliness underneath all of our prettiness. We acknowledged the existence of the black holes at our centers. We admitted that we were scared and unsure of what to do to make things better.

  And soon after we started to admit to our own weakness, we started to feel strangely free and strong. We started talking to one another and recognizing our stories told a thousand times over by strangers’ voices. We stopped seeing one another as fierce competition and started recognizing fierce collaborators.

  Most important, we discovered that power was not outside ourselves but inside, that it dwelled, hidden by the shadows of those black holes growing lighter all the time, at our centers. Eventually we exploded with light.

  Now, that feels a little better, but I distrust the cohesion and ease of the story. My generation has grown up in a time devoid of grand, sweeping social change. Our activism is mostly relegated to point-and-click campaigns. Most of us have never fought for anything that didn’t promise a community service award at the end. We have individual values, to be sure, but outside of hip-hop and indie rock shows, we hardly ever connect the dots between our frustration with the culture and others’. Maybe it is part of our delusion of specialness. Maybe it is the result of living in the shadow of massive corporations and an all-powerful television culture. Organizing a boycott of a sexist magazine or having a Love Your Body Day event feels like looking for a needle in a haystack.

  Social change has crept up on us primarily as trends and new technology. E-mail and cell phones have changed the way we communicate. Online dating has altered our expectations for relationships. Protest is usually dressed up in our favorite tone: sarcasm.

  Biographies change before culture. Our new story will not be a new story. It will be thousands of new stories, maybe even millions, that would together constitute a cultural shift in the way we think about our bodies. These stories may share common themes, protagonists, and villains, but they will all read differently depending on each author. What do you find when you step through the looking glass? Where does your power lie? What will your new story be?

  Mine began with anger. As I started taking account of all the friends whose passion and intellect were being wasted on their weight, as I forced myself to be honest about my own wasted time and energy, I got pissed. I felt duped. Here we were, the brightest, best-educated, freest generation of women to walk the earth—protected by all kinds of institutional laws and social mores—and we were afraid of our own power. We were distracted from great opportunities by nagging insecurities.

  My initial anger was made even bigger and harder to ignore when my concerns were dismissed and I was told that weight preoccupation is an unavoidable part of being a woman. Then my anger became a conviction that there had to be girls out there as frustrated and disillusioned as I was.

  Then my words led to listening. I got to hear from these girls. I got to have my conviction confirmed over and over again. In listening, I became more reflective, which led me to think about culture, to ask myself: How did we get here? I began considering the past, assembling a narrative about who we were and who we had become. I went back to find the sources of our fears, the cataracts and dams that were misdirecting our energy.

  Here is what I have learned.

  Ask the Experts

  There is no catchall treatment for an eating disorder; there is only very personal healing. If you are sick, you need professional help. No cultural loophole or superwoman strength is getting you out of this one. Professionals use a variety of time-tested models for healing. These heroes and sheroes know far more about the delicate work of reenvisioning a self-image than I do. It is with my utmost respect and humility that I refer the sickest and most pained among us to them.† They have listened, observed, studied, developed, innovated, collaborated, evaluated, reevaluated, and continue to do so day in and day out.

  In the biopsychosocial model, therapists take account of the wide variety of factors contributing to an eating disorder and try to treat them simultaneously. In the medical model, the focus is on restoring a biochemical balance, usually with antidepressants or antianxiety medication. Cognitive behavior therapy (known as CBT) is a time-limited process in which patients, primarily bulimics, are asked to identify their irrational thoughts and destructive behaviors, and, through awareness, heal them. Some girls with eating disorders go through family therapy. Some are taught to see their disease through a feminist lens. Most also see nutritionists who help them develop reasonable meal plans. Professionals usually incorporate a variety of these models to treat one patient.

  One of the most promising new approaches is called Maudsley, named after the hospital in London where it was developed. In this approach, the family is seen as the home of healing for anorectics. Rather than being blamed for their daughters’ diseases, parents are encouraged to become active in helping their sick daughters “get better.” There are three phases of this medical approach, culminating in the daughter earning the power to make independent food choices again once she has gained back 95 percent of her ideal weight. This cutting-edge approach is gaining popularity in America.

  There are treatment programs and residential centers, private and public, short term and long term, all over the country and all over the world. The problem, in most cases, is not finding help but affording it. Most of these programs are outrageously expensive, as much as a college education in some cases. Families are strapped, dipping into their retirement savings or taking out second mor
tgages just to get their daughters the care they need. Many parents spend the time they aren’t mourning the loss of their daughters’ well-being, or wrestling with their own guilt for not recognizing that loss sooner, fighting with insurance companies or applying for loans. It is one more undeniable piece of evidence that our health care system is unjust and horribly broken.

  Given the intractable nature of anorexia and bulimia, it is critical that you own up to your eating-disordered inclinations early and try to get help before they grow into full-blown disease. I have heard so many stories of girls and their parents who approached doctors early on and were turned away—told to come back if things got worse, if they dropped more weight. They lost a critical window of prevention and intervention. Many medical doctors process weight in pounds and ounces, rather than in the more relevant units of measure in our culture: anxiety and obsession.

  The sad thing is that most of these parents and their daughters left the doctor’s office with a surface feeling of relief undergirded by a deep feeling of unease. They knew—in their hearts of hearts—that sickness was imminent. We respect doctors as the final authorities in our culture, so we take their word as fact. You have to listen to your own body, mind, and spirit. If you are dissatisfied with how much you are thinking about food and fitness, if you have an intuition that there is something wrong with your body, if you feel like you need help—you do. End of story.

  The Power of Being Young and Mad

  Perfection and thinness are not your most potent sources of authentic power; your potential is. We dwell in the most powerful of places, a place reserved expressly for those who are young and naïve: a land of nothing to lose.

  Our obsession with weight is not simply pathology; it is a message about our anxiety and ambition. We are poised to change the world forever—we are that powerful. The preoccupation with food and fitness itself is disempowering but not a waste. Settling for that preoccupation most certainly would be. Accepting self-hatred as an inevitable part of being a woman would be tragic.

  It takes tremendous will and determination to fight your natural cravings each and every day. It takes finely tuned control to resist the excess all around you. It also takes profound depth of emotion to buckle under this pressure, to eat until you are bloated with the evidence of your own fragility. And revolting as it is, it takes real, physical strength and strategy to find a toilet where you can rid yourself of this fragility. If you harnessed just a fraction of this will, determination, control, emotional depth, strength, and strategy to get better, to take care of yourself, to resist the culture’s monotonous messaging, imagine how powerful you could be.

  Our teacher will be our struggle. The wisdom we will gain from having been sick, to one degree or another, and gotten better will be more powerful than never having suffered. The therapist James Hill-man writes, “Psychology regards all symptoms to be expressing the right thing in the wrong way.” We hunger because we are hungry for the world. We starve because we are overwhelmed by this hunger. We binge because we want love and recognition and peace. We purge because we are ashamed that we don’t know how to get it in the right way. We run because we are eager. We chase perfection because we are idealistic. We obsess because we are determined. We will heal because we are too young and too strong not to.

  I recently went to a reading where an old white poet chain-smoked cigarettes, pushing the words out of his tired mouth along with the smoke in between sips of whiskey. I liked his poetry—it was filled with profound declarations told in very small, ordinary ways. But sitting there and watching this old man read poetry about his dog and the moonlight, I realized that I am filled with rage. I felt incredibly young and beautiful and angry—as if there weren’t enough poems about dogs or moonlight in the whole world to express how much I cared about people or despised the conditions that made them hurt. I realized that my words are filled with a bursting, slightly embarrassing, mad passion. And this is my power. If you are angry, like me, this is your power too.

  Truth and Humility

  There is no single prescription for eating disorders. Where do you fall on the spectrum of this disease? What have you lost by dwelling there? What truths do you need to tell and to whom? What practices do you need to adopt in order to feel less weighed down by the burden of your own self-loathing? Who do you trust to hold your hand when your pants or your expectations or your punishments don’t fit? When and where and with whom do you feel most beautiful, and how can you be there with them for more of the time?

  There is no one-size-fits-all mantra; there is only awareness of the voices inside our own minds and the fierce interrogation of their validity. Our power begins in our ability to be aware of the holy war going on in our heads and our dedication to disputing it on a daily, hourly, even minute-to-minute basis. We must reckon with our inner perfect girls, harness their ambition and optimism, and throw out the self-criticism. Teach them how to be quiet and listen, to be comfortable with slowness, to savor a victory. Teach them about the strength and knowledge born of failure, pleasure for pleasure’s sake, the inevitability and beauty of imperfection.

  Likewise, we must answer the cries of our starving daughters. We have resented them all of these years, thought them weak and embarrassing, when in fact they are the only things anchoring us to our authentic appetites. We must make them stronger by acknowledging their fears, cravings, intuitions. We must translate their aches into the language of emotion, identify loneliness and anger and boredom and disappointment before they become insatiable hungers. Our starving daughters’ voices will sound less like whines and more like wisdom if we stop pretending they aren’t there.

  Listen to the whispers of the self-protecting voices and encourage them to speak louder. Sympathize with the insecure thirteen-year-old in you and the neglected five-year-old, but ask both to quiet down and let the wiser, stronger you lead. We must be able to laugh at our ridiculous parroting of the culture around us: Did I really just watch that commercial for thigh cream and pull up my shorts to analyze my cellulite? Am I an automaton or a living, breathing girl? We must banish the critical bitches and the abusive ex-boyfriends and the tight-ass health freaks until we are left with only our “original minds,” in the language of Buddhism, or our “God-created selves,” in the spirit of Jesus. What does the kindest, wisest, strongest version of you know about your body?

  What does the kindest, wisest, strongest version of you know about other women’s bodies? Don’t let the voices in your mind fall into the bottomless pit of jealousy and judgment. The more critically and less compassionately you view other women’s bodies, the less you will have the capacity to accept yourself. You will fear that others are covertly criticizing you as much as you are them. The more you practice judgment and jealousy, whether consciously or not, the better you get at it. Instead, as Wendy Shanker wisely suggests, send a “little mini-vibe of compassion” to that beautiful old woman sitting across from you in the doctor’s office or the round-bellied waitress who takes your order with a warm smile. Or better yet, give compliments honestly and often, especially to the kinds of women who don’t get complimented by our culture.

  We must raise our consciousnesses through raw conversation. We must talk about how bad it really is in order to get better. We must admit we are not invincible. We must ask brave questions so we can learn about our family histories and our genetic risks. We must face these and ourselves with brutal truth and fierce optimism. The self-help guru Geneen Roth writes: “The nature of obsession is that it protects you from the truth.” The nature of truth, then, is that it delivers you from obsession.

  Sometimes stopping the holy war in your head is possible only if you say your thoughts—even ugly—aloud, make them real. If I turn to my brother and admit that I have just looked at my profile in the mirror and thought, I’ll never be a successful writer until I get rid of this fat neck, then I am forced to see that impulse for what it is: irrationality. Caroline Knapp wrote of her own path of recovery from anorexia: �
��Pain festers in isolation, it thrives in secrecy. Words are its nemesis, naming anguish is the first step in defusing it, talking about the muck a woman slogs through—the squirms of self-hatred and guilt, the echoes of emptiness and need—a prerequisite for moving beyond it.” When you externalize the voices in your head, they lose power. They become silly and strange. You can hear them for what they are—destructive voices with an ulterior motive (money, usually), pretending to be looking out for your best interest. We are lousy ventriloquists.

  Coming Home

  Diets fail. Excess is a health risk. Starving can lower your blood pressure until your heart stops. Bingeing and purging can cause electrolyte imbalance so severe your heart stops. It is time to quit these unhealthy behaviors and addictions. It is time we blazed a new path home to our bodies.

  One of the most effective ways to stop obsessing about your body is to start listening to it more. There is no magic diet or miracle fitness regimen; there is only tapping into your authentic appetites. You may need to relearn the hollow, surprising ache of hunger or the small satiation of fullness. You may need to remember how to like food without coveting it or how to taste it instead of calculating it. Your body does not know the diet language of “good” and “bad”; it knows only what it needs or wants at the moment. You may need to ride waves of cravings until they break. The less that wanting is mediated by your intellect, the less threatening it will seem. A cookie becomes a cookie again—sugar, butter, flour, and milk—not a statement about your worth as a woman. You may need to take it all less seriously.