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

by Courtney E. Martin

  The Good Guy

  Tanya’s* mother and father got divorced when she was five years old. She was disturbed by watching her dad carry boxes from the house to the car, one after the other—the march of her family breaking apart. Her big brother, Sam,* the pleaser in the family, held her hand and told her everything would be okay. Tanya scoffed. Even at five, she knew that everything had changed.

  She was right, but couldn’t have possibly understood the depth to which she was wise at that moment. Her father, a teacher in Omaha, moved into a little house ten miles away, where she and Sam would spend every other weekend with him. At first there was something vacationlike about their time with him—he would feed them foods that their mother banned, such as peanut M&M’s and McDonald’s Happy Meals. He would throw them in the air and sing songs for them and generally make them feel like the two most special kids in the whole world.

  But when they returned home, to the house over which their mother ruled like a military chief, it was torture. They loved their mother, but she restricted everything they did—especially what they ate. Both Tanya and Sam were chubby kids, teased by cruel classmates, their full cheeks pinched by fat aunts. Both were subject to their mother’s rules—no opening new boxes or bags of anything unless given permission, no snacks before dinner, no eating after dinner. Eventually she would force them both to get on the scale once a week to track their weight. Because of the pounds added by their father’s “fun weekends,” the scale would climb higher and their mother would grow angrier.

  Fathers feign innocence and get away with it. Men like Tanya’s dad, desperate to show love to their children but incapable of doing it in words, often resort to food. His steaming pots of Kraft macaroni and cheese and bags of Lay’s potato chips were a guilty father’s attempt to indulge his kids, to show them that he still adored them even though he had moved out. Dr. Brad Sachs, a family psychologist, has seen many similar cases in his practice and explains: “A lot of fathers feel such guilt about not being available in a day-to-day way, yet they hesitate to take on the hard work of strong, effective parenting.” The result can often be more severe than a few extra indulgence pounds. Dr. Sachs goes on: “Sometimes the daughters will develop an eating disorder as a way to elicit active, firm involvement from their fathers that they can’t elicit in other ways.” As with all unspoken guilt, this one festers and mutates, as it sickens both children and parents.

  In addition to guilt, the psychologist and feminist author Robin Stern argues, many fathers had little aptitude for parenting: “Many of the men who raised your generation had no role models of involved and authentic fathering to rely on,” she told me. “They were forced to invent the wheel, so to speak, and many of them failed. They were ‘good daddies’ and ‘ineffective fathers.’” Most of our fathers did not know how to manifest what they wanted in their own adult, family lives—especially with the complications of divorce. Advocacy organizations such as Dads and Daughters, founded in 1999, cropped up to try to fill this gap, producing a newsletter and providing workshops for committed fathers. Unfortunately, not all dads recognize their own value to their girls’ lives. In a recent poll conducted by Dads and Daughters, two-thirds don’t believe that “their active involvement is vital to their daughters’ well-being.”

  Tanya’s story proves otherwise. When she started therapy, ten years after this indulge-and-deprive pattern began, she would point the finger of blame at her mother, who restricted and chastised her, made her feel bad about her weight every day, tried to control and curtail everything “large” about her. Tanya’s mother had plenty of blame to shoulder, but it took Tanya much longer to point the finger in her father’s direction as well. It took much longer for her to make the connection between the care packages of cookies and cakes that he sent, substitutes for his increasing absence, and her lifelong struggle with her weight. It took much longer for her to see that, as damaging as her mother’s overzealous restrictions had been, her father’s one-note act as “the good guy” was just as demoralizing for a little girl who wanted only to be loved for who she was.

  Even among parents who stay together—which is actually the minority case these days—fathers often play the role of risk taker and rule bender. “Don’t tell Mom” is a playful instruction thrown around by workaholic fathers who want to bond with their children without putting in real time. The father of a friend of mine would fill the house with junk food when her mom went away on business, allowing the kids to indulge in everything they wanted. He disbanded mealtimes and instituted a new house rule: “There are no rules!” The kids shrieked with joy, ate cartoons of rocky road ice cream while staying up late on school nights and watching Terminator 2. Dad was the best. When Mom came home, the fun came to an end. She was grumpy and mean.

  This may be many fathers’ method for livening up houses where rules and responsibilities get too heavy, but the burden of figuring out what it all means ultimately falls on the children. Mom puts in the time, but she also restricts and restrains. Dad is rarely around, but when he is, it is a laugh a minute, a real party time. As a result, femaleness is equated with restriction in many little girls’ minds. Maleness is about wild abandon, sweetness, fun.

  These days Tanya can hear her mother and father speaking in her mind whenever she faces down a refrigerator of possibilities. She eats a sensible dinner—chicken, spinach, a little rice. The mother voice inside her mind is pleased, impressed with the sensibility of the meal, holding her breath that Tanya won’t do anything to ruin the proper restraint of her dinner choice. She sits down to watch TV by herself. Her roommates still aren’t home from work. Tanya begins to get antsy. She gets up at commercials and wanders around the kitchen. Sits back down. Wanders again. She gets the ice cream out of the freezer, her father’s voice growing stronger, drowning out the angry, high-pitched whispers of her desperate mother. She heaps a bowl with vanilla ice cream, goes back to the living room, and shovels it in, not even tasting the rich sweetness. Then she gets a couple cookies, eats them quickly, and lies back on the couch, taking in the brief moment of contentment that she knows will fade quickly. She is indulged. She is filled. She is her father.

  A sitcom later, she will be her mother again. When she kneels in the bathroom, finger down her throat, and tries—unsuccessfully—to purge her father out of her, she will hear her mother reading a diet book aloud at the dinner table, saying things like “I just don’t want you to struggle with your weight the way I have.”

  As she lies in bed, trying to fall asleep, hands pressed on her bloated stomach, she will cry, still the little girl torn between two houses.

  Daddy’s Little Girl

  In so many ways, the girls I have spoken with retain a part of their little-girl neediness beneath a veneer of security and savvy, the characteristic I have named the starving daughter. Girls like Tanya are not completely paralyzed by the parental voices inside their heads; the perfect-girl parts of them succeed in keeping prestigious jobs, having boyfriends, going out on the weekends looking nonchalantly hip—which is why these kinds of partial-syndrome eating disorders are so rarely treated. Tanya binges and purges a few times a month maximum—not the clinical definition of bulimia. She rarely talks about her tendency with her friends, never with her family. In fact, she is irritated beyond measure when either of her parents treats her as if she is still a child.

  So many fathers seem to relate to their daughters in a Father Knows Best time warp—where a daddy called his daughters Princess and Kitten well past their adolescence. These retro fathers delude themselves that their daughters are still six and enamored with their daddies, even when, in fact, they are sixteen and painfully aware of their fathers’ shortcomings. Many fathers seem adept at filtering out the cacophony of adolescent angst, boyfriends, complex friendships, hearing only what they want to hear—the straight A’s or the marching band at the homecoming game. Parenting sons seems straightforward. Fathers expect a little rough-and-tumble rebellion from their growing guys, but their
daughters’ coming-of-age seems so emotional and conflicted that they prefer to avoid it altogether.

  On my sixteenth birthday, my dad exclaimed, “Happy fifteenth birthday, Courtney! You must be so excited to be able to drive next year.” He was joking, as he has on every single one of my birthdays, about his own discomfort with seeing me grow older. Each year we laugh and trade jabs about his increasing senility and my decreasing dependence, but there is a seriousness underlying our jokes. It is hard on my dad to watch me grow older. It makes him proud but uncomfortable, because he knows that being a woman and having a woman’s body include a lot of dangerous terrain.

  Many fathers would like to keep their daughters frozen in time. They resist their daughters growing up and becoming more complex, more pained, more independent women. They adore their “little girls” and want to keep them safe. Unconsciously, they must reason that keeping their daughters small, if only in their own minds, will ensure that safety. But daughters’ bodies demand otherwise. In fact, Dads and Daughters was started by a father, Joe Kelly, when a friend told him a disheartening though common story: His nine-year-old daughter asked him if she looked too fat.

  When nine-year-old girls are taking on womanly worries, not even the most sentimental dads can pretend nothing is happening. Mr. Kelly explains, “We came to the idea that it was significant that she asked him and not her mother. A girl is going to want to know how to get the attention of members of the opposite sex. The first one she knows is Dad. How he responds to her and reflects back to her is incredibly important.” Today Dads and Daughters, based in Duluth, Minnesota, has only sixteen hundred members nationwide.

  Most fathers are still in the dark about how to deal with their daughters’ changing bodies. Silvia* grew up in the Bronx in one of those rare families that had a mother and a father both living at home. When her body started developing, at age ten, her mother made her wear a girdle to, as Silvia put it, “hold in my blossoming body.” She says of her father’s outlook on her early maturation: “He didn’t say anything, but I knew he wasn’t too happy. I don’t think my father could deal with it. He would have been happy if I had stayed underdeveloped or wore a huge burlap sack at all times.” Silvia internalized her father’s fears, hiding her body in baggy clothes until she was sixteen.

  Foremost in this effort to keep daughters little girls is the denial of puberty, and all the horrifying surprises that go with it, which is Mom’s domain. Fathers often pretend to be oblivious to growing pains and late-night phone calls, the boxes of tampons and acne wash in the grocery cart. The changing body can seem a hidden, dangerous secret to the daughter whose father refuses to acknowledge its existence.

  Silvia, now twenty-nine and a human resources coordinator at a law firm in Manhattan, continues to struggle with her body image. She says, “I do experience guilt, especially when I am shopping for clothes. I immediately feel like I have to lose weight.” Silvia has also considered getting plastic surgery: “Truthfully, I think that my legs are too big. However, one of my aunts, who I was very close to, died in the process of receiving a tummy tuck. This experience opened my eyes.”

  Many women realize, in retrospect, that they developed anorexia just as their bodies were changing. They include the author of The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf: “Anorexia was the only way I could see to keep the dignity in my body that I had had as a kid, and that I would lose as a woman.” Womanly bodies seem fraught with complexity, sites of service, starvation, submission. When fathers ignore changing bodies, they contribute to the cultural messaging that surrounds girls and young women: Ignore your bodies’ wisdom, tame your bodies’ hungers, they will only get you in trouble. A girl’s ability to speak the emotional language of her aches and pains—differentiating, for example, between hunger for company and physical hunger—fades away. Taught to fear, ignore, and control her own body, she loses essential attunement to her unique appetite.

  With the onset of girls’ puberty occuring at younger and younger ages—one in seven Caucasian girls now start developing breasts or pubic hair by the age of eight, and one in two African American girls do—this split between “the girl” and “the body” can happen very early. Eating disorders now occur fairly commonly in nine-year-olds, and there are clinics throughout the country that devote themselves entirely to treating eating disorders in tweens, ages eight to twelve.

  Some girls dive into the risks their developing bodies bring. “Easy,” they are called by the guys at school. “A handful,” they are called by a group of neighborhood dads standing around the barbecue. Emily White, a young journalist intrigued by the seemingly universal “myth of the slut,” wrote Fast Girls, a dramatic narrative of teenage reputations ruined. She captures the “fast girl” at home beautifully: “The invasion of hormones turns the child into a stranger, and the stranger in the house forces the adults to ask questions: What happens behind the closed door? What dreams live behind the half-closed eyes? What does the body need, and furthermore, why does the body suddenly seem so urgent, angry, maybe transgressively beautiful?”

  These girls who enjoy their new bodies scare fathers the most. The fathers are afraid of the choices their teenage daughters might have to make, afraid of the looks they will receive, afraid of the world their daughters are entering, which doesn’t seem any kinder than when they were young men, especially not to young girls with women’s bodies.

  As their daughters inevitably stretch and strain against “little-girl” idealizations, fathers cling. So many relationships between young women and their fathers seem stunted—as if the father never truly saw the daughter after she turned twelve. This dynamic makes for cute nicknames and lots of coddling but little authenticity.

  For all of his teasing, my dad made a gallant effort to acknowledge my transition into adulthood. When my mom was tearing through Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher, he was reading How to Father a Successful Daughter by Nicky Marone. Like a lot of baby-boomer fathers, exposed to men’s groups and feminism, he was into being a father. His intention has always been to be a part of every aspect of my life, even those that were once relegated to bathroom chats with aunties and moms. Even though his job prevented his full involvement, when it counted, he showed up.

  When I first got my period, despite my best attempts to keep my dad away entirely, he tried to be a part of the conversation. I sat in the front passenger seat in our suburban-staple minivan with my lanky legs bent and my feet resting on the dashboard in front of me, my flip-flops thrown in the backseat with the groceries. He drove, humming along to the fifties music on the radio, his hands at ten and two, as always. When he reached to turn down the radio, I knew something was up. He cleared his throat and said, “You know, your mom told me about you getting your period, and I just want to say how wonderful I think that is. This is such an important time in your life, and I am very proud of you.”

  I was horrified. Proud? What could he possibly be proud of? I’d spent two hours in tears, bathroom door shut, as my mom shouted tampon insertion instructions through the keyhole. I didn’t feel like it was an important time. I felt like it was an introduction to gross fluids and unpredictability, one more thing to feel insecure about, as if my chicken legs and lopsided breasts weren’t enough.

  I turned to look out the window in the opposite direction and said, “Thanks, Dad. I don’t really want to talk about it,” effectively cutting off the father-daughter bonding opportunity. We didn’t speak the rest of the way home, only listened to the bubblegum sounds of Lesley Gore singing, “It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to,” lyrics that were stupidly simplistic compared with the complexities we both knew I was just beginning to face.

  In retrospect, I am so thankful my dad took that risk. Even though it embarrassed me at the time, even though we didn’t talk further about this rite of passage, it was somehow comforting that he’d broken the ice. He had said the word period out loud. He had admitted that my body and its strange new functions were not secrets or shameful. Even though I refus
ed his attempt to have a dialogue, his words lived on in my mind. They were important at that important time.

  A lot of father-daughter pairs are intimidated by the enormity of the task of creating a relationship in which they can talk about these kinds of things, but in reality, it takes only a two-second exchange. It takes only this kind of brief acknowledgment to open the door. Whether you walk through it or not is another matter entirely. My dad and I usually chose not to—or, more accurately, I usually chose not to. But that was okay. We didn’t need the heart-wrenching, soul-baring relationship I had with my mom—we only needed to be us, with a dash of healthy discomfort thrown in.

  My mother, bless her heart, had pushed us in this direction, sometimes to my horror. Once when I was home from college for a little vacation, she pulled up in front of the supermarket and said, “Ronnie, do you want to run inside and pick up Courtney’s birth control from the pharmacy?” When she looked around and saw that both my father and I had turned ten shades of red and were shaking our heads at her infamous tactlessness, she persevered, saying, “Oh, come on, we’re all adults here.”

  As much as I wanted to throw a toddler tantrum at that moment, I recognized that my mom was right. We were all adults. If I have learned anything from my mom’s shocking and sometimes painful exposures, it is that a little awkwardness goes a long way in service of an authentic relationship. I didn’t want to sit down and have a heart-to-heart with my dad about my sexual history, but it was important to me that he have an accurate picture of who I was. Though I retained some of my childhood spunk and stubbornness, I was not the same little girl Dad had coached in YMCA basketball, although sometimes it feels comfortable to act as if I am. I still hold my dad’s hand, still curl up under his arm on the couch if we are watching a movie, still complain to him in my smallest girl voice if I want a reassuring fatherly fix (taxi money, ice cream cones, tax information). Then we talk about my health, my struggles in romantic relationships or complex friendships. I also look to him for authentic adult connection, as uncomfortable as it might feel at first. It usually ends up feeling just right. My dad gives great advice about how to be patient with my boyfriend or address underlying tension with a girlfriend. He gets outraged along with me at the rising price of birth control and my unending search for health insurance. Even if neither of us goes there intuitively, as my mother and I do, we are happy once we arrive. We are closer. We are friends.