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

by Courtney E. Martin

  Before I can respond, Kaya laughs at her. “You can’t spell it, can you?”

  Everyone else laughs along with Rachel, and she wonders aloud: “Why do I say really stupid things?”

  “Yeah, why do you talk?” Kaya, definitively emerging as the queen bee, echoes. After a few moments, perhaps realizing how harsh she sounds, Kaya adds, “Whatever. Don’t listen to me. I’m dumb too.”

  No one even looks up from her survey. Rosa puts the earbuds of her pink iPod into her ears. Raya plays with Rosa’s long, curly hair. Rachel flops down to sit on the floor so she can write on the coffee table, crosses out “cauc” and writes “white” and “jewish.” To the next question—How often do you think about food and fitness?—she writes, “All the time... I’m constantly thinking about how I look and what I can do to meet expectations.”

  In Santa Fe, things are a bit more civil, at least on the surface. The eight girls in the room don’t go to the same schools during the year, so they seem to have less resentment toward one another, less fuel to throw on the fire. They have even renamed themselves the “Skittles.” Despite the fact that some of them are far more sophisticated—hoodies, cool sneakers, and highlights seem to be the markers—everyone is included in the conversation. In fact, they have taken over one of the walls of the garage and written their group name in big bubble letters, and their individual names all around it with stars, hearts, and emphatic underlining by the most enthusiastic members.

  But the harmony is just on the surface; stories about underlying tension quickly emerge. Lori, the one with the cat’s-eye glasses, gets the other girls thinking when she tells a story about the way her “friends” used to treat her: “Nobody liked me because I was fat. Seriously. Every time I would say hi to someone who was a friend of mine, or someone I thought was my friend, they would be like ‘Who’s that?’ It sucked.”

  “And it changed,” I probe, “when you lost the weight?”

  “Yeah, all the sudden these people are being nice to me again. It made me so mad. I mean, these girls think it is easy to be skinny or something. Do they think fat girls don’t have feelings?”

  This strikes a chord with Gina, who brings the conversation closer to home: “I don’t mean to talk bad about people, but one of the girls in this group”—she pauses and then reassures everyone—“she’s not here right now. Anyway, if I do look at the nutrition information on something we’re eating, she will throw it out of my hands and be like ‘You’re dumb.’”

  A few of the others let out little gasps. One girl, an uncombed, dirty-shirted twelve-year-old, seemingly content listening in while untangling different colors of yarn from a big knotted ball, says quietly, as if to herself, “That’s mean.”

  Gina continues, “Sure, she has a nice body. She doesn’t have to worry. It makes me feel self-conscious standing next to her.” I’d actually seen this conspicuously absent “mean girl” when I came to visit the center earlier. She had the quintessential “stick legs”—long and thin but still unshaped, spaghetti-string arms, a flat chest. Clearly the body that Gina is coveting has not even endured the aches and pains of puberty. Gina goes on: “People tell me I’m big-boned. I have to worry about these things.”

  Gina looks like she would weigh about 110 pounds soaking wet. Her tiny arms and legs look dense, like they are made of pure muscle.

  “You’re not big-boned,” Lori reassures her.

  “You’re built!” another girl chimes in. “Like Madonna!”

  Julie adds to Gina’s story: “Yeah, that same girl says stuff to me too. She’s like ‘You think you should really eat that?’”

  More gasps escape from the Skittles. Julie goes on: “See, we always go swimming on Tuesdays, and I never like to go swimming, because I’m self-conscious of being in a bathing suit. So I’m there, right? And I was eating in the snack bar area, and she’s like, ‘Should you really eat that?’ She’s running around in her little bikini, and I just feel like she’s screaming, ‘I’m skinnier than you!’”

  The specifically female cruelty of these girls and their stories reminds me of myself at fourteen. Sitting in a ceremonial circle, the light cast from a candle painting ominous shadows on my best friends’ cheeks at midnight on a Saturday. Time for our weekly “truth talk,” where we would masochistically revel in telling one another brutal, entirely unnecessary truths—“The shirt you wore on Monday was so ‘sixth grade.’” “Jay told me he doesn’t actually like you.” “Your mom told my mom that your parents aren’t doing very well.”

  I don’t know exactly when or how truth talks were invented, but they took on a destructive life of their own among my girlfriends starting in junior high. Slumber parties, once marked by playful games of truth or dare that led to the flashes of little white butts running through the backyard, became ominous. We sat, cross-legged, face-to-face, and tore one another apart—dissected every clothing choice, flirtatious fumble, lapse in hygiene, or uncool transgression.

  Girlhood friendships quickly morph into adolescent power struggles. Relationships that once shared soaring joy and delicious secrets become more like indentured servitude. If you’re not on top, you have to pay your dues in snide comments and backstabs. If you are on top, you cling to your authority desperately, ever aware of how far the fall to the bottom really is. Everyone is watching everything that everyone does, always. It is a grueling performance that seems unending.

  The body is a critical part of the act. Tween girls are afraid that their forms don’t fit the mold. They have seen the social deaths of girls who are too big or dressed wrong. When they go through the big double doors of middle school, they learn the math of self-hate—pounds, calories, and carbs—and the language of body critique—fat, chubby, gross, nasty. They pepper conversations with these words and measurements to show that they too are cool enough to participate in the female ritual of weight obsession. They establish their distance from their kid selves through skimpy lunches, public self-deprecation, and girl bonding over the dreaded bathing-suit season.

  Eating disorders and their extensive knowledge of them are a common topic in this constant effort to appear savvy. Raya confides in me that the Manhattan girls have their own abbreviations—“a-rex” for anorexia and “b-mic” for bulimic—which they throw around, mostly in reference to others. Raya explains, “Like someone might warn me, ‘You can’t even eat around her. She is totally a-rex.’” Her admission reminds me of the recent uproar over the Gossip Girl series, risqué fiction for girls Raya’s age. In I Like It Like That, the characters—all teenagers much like the ones I’m interviewing, growing up in the lap of luxury in Manhattan—dismissively refer to bulimia as “stress-induced vomiting.” Apparently “art” does mirror life when it comes to eating disorder-normalizing tween lit.

  The teen body is on display at all times. Teens know that they are being watched, because they are also watching. A fourteen-year-old is trained, it seems, in the merciless observation of even the most minute imperfection. If she is casting this eye on others, she rightly reasons, certainly her own thick thighs and little belly are being noted by the judges. I had evidence in our ritualized truth talks. Teen girls, especially those who live in Manhattan, seem to have a running dialogue of brutal truths.

  They see their bodies as enemies conspiring against them, plotting to leak, explode, bloat at all the wrong times. And like self-fulfilling prophecies, they inevitably do. On Halloween, a dark red spot seeps through tight bell-bottoms, revealing exactly what the thirteen-year-old sought to hide. She aches for the wrong boys, has legs too chubby to be cute, gets pimples on the most important days. One breast grows before the other. Her Contempo Casual miniskirt sticks out on the sides because she has no hips to fill out the built-in cotton curves.

  All of these imperfections, so big and looming in private, can be overshadowed in public by associating with the coolest, most desirable girls in school. But being in that shadow is never comfortable; these girls are living examples that the closer you get t
o popularity, the further away you get from feeling like you belong there.

  Best Friends, Fiercest Rivals

  After a few reenactments of the day’s bloopers and a dishing session about how hot one of their teachers is, the Manhattan girls start to delve into their experiences of food, friendship, and the inevitable competition.

  Ella, who wears a cut-up Knicks shirt over a white wife beater and designer jeans, launches in. “I have friends who have eating disorders, and they seem proud of them. It’s like a competition. I ask them to explain it to me, and they’re like, ‘If I go out to eat with someone, I try to eat half as much as they do.’ ”

  Kaya laughs nervously and says, “I sort of was like that. You guys know how I eat. I get a bowl of pasta and throw half of it away so that I don’t eat it.” She pauses for a moment and then squeals, “I’m so hungry right now!”

  “But who are you doing it for?” I ask. “Is it for you, for guys, for other girls?”

  Heather,* a girl with long highlighted hair, a gray Champion hoodie, and eyelashes covered in mascara, holds a cell phone in her lap but pauses from text messaging long enough to jump in: “I feel very self-conscious a lot of the time, and a lot of that has to do with the girls who are around me. Girls don’t try to impress guys; they try to impress girls. When I get up in the morning and get dressed, I am not trying to look good for girls, but I am trying to be accepted by them. If I’m at school around older girls or girls who have a higher social status, I want them to look at me and approve of me.”

  Rachel affirms, “When you walk down the street and pass another group of girls, you look each other up and down. It’s as if you are all asking, ‘Who can wear more money?’ I hate girls.”

  “Yeah, girls are such bitches,” says Rosa.

  Ella, emerging as the voice of tough truths, counters, “It’s not as if we are really nice to everyone, guys.”

  “Sure,” Rosa replies, “but it wouldn’t change anything if we were. There is this girl in our grade who is so nice that you don’t want to be around her. We’re not mean people.” She pauses, pushed by her friends’ skeptical looks to justify further: “I mean, I think her new haircut is awesome.”

  “Seriously?” Heather balks. “What the hell died on her head?”

  Everyone laughs, and Ella screams, exasperated, “You guys!”

  While each girl from Manhattan seems to have developed a customized method of diet madness designed to outdo the others, the girls Gina describes from her Santa Fe public school have created a climate of collaboration, tinged with a competitive spirit—a sort of cooperative self-hate.

  She reports, “We’ll be at lunch, and my friends will see something and be like, ‘Oh, that looks good.’ So they’ll all eat, and then right after, one of them will be like, ‘That was gross. I need to get rid of that.’ And the other ones will be like, ‘Oh, yeah, me too.’ And then they all just follow, one by one, into the bathroom.”

  “They all go in there and throw up together?” I ask, hoping that I’ve misunderstood her.

  “Yeah, all together. Like a big party. I think it is so stupid. I really do.”

  “So you don’t join them?” I ask, trying to keep the emotion out of my tone.

  “No, I think it’s pathetic. I mean, I really want to be skinnier, don’t get me wrong, but I’m not going to go make myself throw up to get there.” She stops for a moment, takes a breath, and then launches in, louder than before. “Also, it’s like I’ve seen them doing this, and they do get skinnier and everything, but they never think they are skinny enough. They always want to look like someone else. They’re like, ‘I hate that I am three pounds overweight.’ Or ‘I want her hair, it’s so pretty—’”

  Julie steps on the end of Gina’s sentence. “Actually, Gina, I do want your hair. I was just thinking that. It is so pretty.”

  Gina blushes, and everyone laughs.

  The habit of comparing yourself mercilessly to others first forms at this age, and it proves central to the development and continuation of eating disorders and eating-disordered behavior. One teacher at an all-girls, private school tells me that, out of her fifty seventh-grade students, twenty are in constant competition to eat less. Some of them make pacts—pinkie swearing that they won’t eat anything but vegetables for two weeks. If one girl slips and breaks the pact, she is thought of as an untrustworthy friend, a girl with a lack of dedication. “I am disgusted by the gap between most of these girls’ thighs,” the teacher tells me, “but there is nothing I can do. If I call attention to it, I will just exacerbate the problem.” When she has informed parents, she explains, it usually results in her students feeling punished, not cared for. “Honestly, the mothers are usually worse than the daughters,” she admits with a sigh.

  Multiple studies have analyzed the effects of this bitter competition among teenage girls. A recent study found that 44.8 percent of girls look to their friends for advice on “how to get a good body.” In the same study, 55.3 percent of girls thought that their friends would choose an ideal weight smaller than their own. In another study, researchers found that girls were more likely to worry about their bodies because of the pressure they sensed from their friends rather than their actual weight deviation from their ideal. In other words, it is the pressure, not the pounds, that weighs most heavily on a teenage girl’s mind.

  Some girls seem to swallow this pressure hook, line, and sinker and have some sense that they deserve it or even like it. These girls answered my questions with shocking declarations in that trademark teenage language of extremes—“Yeah, I diet all the time. I eat nothing”—and then shrugged. They looked at me with skeptical fourteen-year-old eyes, almost amused at the concern of this girl in her twenties. “Thanks for talking with us,” one of the Manhattan girls said to me with a sticky sweetness. “I’m sure this isn’t how you normally spend your Friday evenings. Don’t you want to be out on a date or something?”

  But a few of the girls who were not prematurely cynical seemed to have the eyes of trapped wild animals. These girls expressed an underlying outrage at the world around them, confiding in me about their extreme behavior and then clenching their teeth, stiffening their jaws, holding back tears as they looked off into corners. One of the Manhattanites said, “Yeah, we’re a bunch of the most blessed girls you will ever meet, and we spend all of our time feeling not blessed. Sometimes I wonder if I would be happier if I were poor and went to some terrible public school.” There was an undercurrent of anger when these girls talked that was absent from their friends’ commentary. They felt indignant and disgusted with the way things are but, at the same time, unable to escape.

  On the one hand, most teenage girls recognize that the competition, cruelty, and judgment that saturate their friendships are wrong. They are fully capable of critiquing these attitudes from both moral and philosophical bird’s-eye views. On the other hand, they feel helpless to break out of this behavior. At fourteen, these girls can wax poetic about the injustice of gossip and fake friends and, in the next breath, crack a joke about a girl’s skirt being way too short. “She’s a cheerleader,” one tells me by way of justifying their cruelty. “She’s not even smart or anything.”

  Not participating in the culture of observation and judgment seems like a choice that doesn’t even exist; it would lead to social obliteration. A girl who can’t sass or throw out a biting comment here or there is boring—relegated to the back of the class, the lonely table in the lunchroom, Saturday nights with Mom and Dad. Raya tells me that her group of friends interacts almost entirely in sarcasm and criticism cloaked in jest: “If you get mad, the girl will inevitably be like, ‘Whoa, chill out. I was just joking. Why do you have to take everything so seriously?’” Raya’s friends tell her that she acts uncool around guys. They roll their eyes and assure the shaggy-haired rich boys from the neighboring prep school that “Raya is just weird, ignore her.” Raya has no recourse.

  The only way to evade the sting of a joke, these tween girls beli
eve, is to provide no material, to be, in essence, perfect. The constant sense of being watched, the merciless critique, the competition over body, boys, brand names, and everything else, lead them to strive for perfection and avoid vulnerability. Being vulnerable in a middle school is dangerous. So they swing their own punches to become part of the machine of judgment and criticism, two more observing eyes in the audience. This is one of the sickest parts of the teenage girls’ twisted version of the “crew”—it feels so damn good when you are on top.

  Megan Hinton, her perfect dark hair lying in layers around her shoulders, didn’t say anything outright, but when we would go to the movies with boys, she would always make sure we had extra time beforehand so she could do my hair and makeup. I reveled in those moments, sitting on top of her washing machine, feeling the soft brush of the eye shadow applicator across my eyelids, Megan’s breath on my cheek as she leaned in close to make a perfect corkscrew curl with her state-of-the-art curling iron. I felt taken care of, comforted, loved.

  I had fantasies about being the awkward girl in The Breakfast Club, the one with beauty potential that would be miraculously unleashed when her hipper best friend gave her a makeover. I imagined walking into the movie theater to a soundtrack, all the boys turning and gasping at the suddenly transformed Courtney—whereas I had once been a bookworm with knock-knees, I would suddenly be a newly discovered beauty.

  It is funny, now, to reflect on how intensely powerful this fantasy was to me; but it is even funnier to realize that, ten years later, this is still my self-image. Despite the men I’ve seduced, the inches I’ve grown, the awards I’ve won, the compliments I’ve garnered, I still feel, in the deepest parts of who I am, like frizzy-haired Courtney Martin, sitting on Megan Hinton’s washing machine wishing for silky locks. Perhaps at the center of so many women’s body hatred are their still-lingering thirteen-year-old selves. Beneath the corporate CEO and the talented pianist, deep within the supermom and the supermodel, is the teenage girl, still hating her own body after all these years.