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

by Courtney E. Martin

  For the Boys

  Apparently some girls are waiting to be discovered, just as I was a decade ago. The girls in both Manhattan and Santa Fe repeatedly bring up specific incidents when guys at their schools made comments. Sometimes you want these comments—“If they call you fat,” Raya explains, “then you know you’re not fat. So if they don’t call you fat, you worry that you actually are.” Sometimes you don’t want these comments. The Santa Fean Gina explains the less ironic situation at her school: “If a boy calls a girl fat and tells her she needs to lose weight, she will seriously go straight to the bathroom and throw up. That’s how stupid the girls at my school are.” Either way, boys are dictating who gets the stamp of approval and who is socially defective. Through their casual commentary about what is hot and what is not, they perhaps unknowingly set the standard to which these girls strive.

  When I ask the Santa Fe crew if they care what boys think, an instinctual chorus of nos follows. Girls Inc., though a 140-year-old organization, feeds its contemporary gals a constant diet of “go-girl empowerment,” so they can be “smart, strong, and bold.” To the camp counselors’ credit, these girls have a Pavlovian response to boys, as if the word itself recalls afternoons spent listening to inspirational speeches they have sweated through about independence and feminism. “So you really don’t care?” I ask.

  “I mean we don’t want to care,” Gina clarifies. “I mean I don’t care as much as some of the girls I know. They will do absolutely anything a guy tells them to.”

  Julie agrees: “Yeah, I know girls like that. Whatever their boyfriend says is cute, they will wear. If he doesn’t like an outfit, they’ll throw it away.”

  “Okay, honestly,” Gina confesses, “I once had a boyfriend who told me, to my face, that he thought I was fat. I was so crushed. At the time my self-esteem was so low that I just stayed with him and tried to lose more weight.” She brushes her hair out of her face, looks up, and lets out a guttural sound. “God, I hate thinking about that. I hate how weak I was.”

  Julie comforts her: “A lot of people have stuff like that, Gina, I did. It was my birthday, and my boyfriend bought me something, like, thirty sizes too small and then said I should lose weight until I could fit into it. I broke up with him, but that made me depressed for a while. It made me really upset, and it shouldn’t have because he was such a jerk. It was one of the most painful times of my life.”

  As the sun starts to set over the skyscrapers outside, I ask the Manhattan girls the same question: “So do you care what the guys think?”

  Ella gets real: “I notice that people who go to Josh’s* house every Friday or Saturday night”—she pauses for a few seconds, considering how blatant to be, then continues with a fuck-it sensibility. “Okay, Heather and Kaya . . . you both are so skinny and so freakin’ hot and whatever, and I don’t usually go. I’m never invited ...” She trails off and then sarcastically adds, “Whatever, I like doing homework.”

  The air in the room gets thick. Everyone shifts in her chair and readjusts the pillows on the couches. Heather unbraids and braids her hair nervously. Kaya plays with the rubber LIVE FREE bracelet around her wrist.

  Rosa reassures Ella, “People invite themselves to Josh’s house, Ella.”

  Ella’s not buying it. The volume of her voice rises as she slips into second person: “You try to be thin. You feel like you might be accepted in some way, like it might change who you are, what crowd you are with, who likes you. But nothing changes.”

  “Ella, it’s not like that,” insists Rosa again.

  “Yeah, right,” Ella spits back with an acidic tone.

  Thinness is desirable, not just because it is the standard presented on the cover of the Victoria’s Secret catalog (which these girls already receive in the mail and order from with their own credit cards) but because it translates into party invites and boyfriends—tangible markers of ninth-grade popularity.

  Though these girls have been raised on Spice Girls feminism, they can’t pretend that their self-images aren’t drawn partly by the boys whom they crush on. The girls in Santa Fe seem especially in tune with what boys want, even if they are clear that they think these boys are scum. The girls in Manhattan take a more nuanced approach to guys— talking about some as genuine friends, others as enviable competitors, just a few (many of whom turn out to be teachers) as “cute.”

  Boys certainly have power in influencing girls’ friendships. If Heather and Kaya get invites to Josh’s house on a Saturday night, their friendship will be strengthened by the experience. They will have inside jokes on Monday about the stupid kid who puked in the bathroom or the surprise kiss. It is here, in their ability to influence girls’ bonds with one another, that boys matter most.

  Even if Josh doesn’t make his party list based on whom he finds attractive, it is Ella’s theory, not the reality, that keeps her running home from the movies after eating popcorn or working out before school five days a week. In fact, Ella’s drive to exercise has gotten so obsessive that her parents took away her gym membership as punishment. They have no idea that, in her mind, they are also taking away the one way she knows how to work toward those Saturday-night invites in her desperate grab for attention.

  Perfection Projection

  The Santa Fe crew has a bit more sober outlook on the popular clique, probably because they aren’t in it.

  Gina breaks it down: “To be popular, you have to wear tight jeans with nice shoes—like something from Foot Locker or Hollister. You can’t get your clothes at Ross.” (I’m in trouble. I love Ross.)

  Julie confirms. “Yeah, if you want to be popular, you wear short skirts, tiny tank tops. There is a certain group of girls at school who wear the skimpiest clothes and show their thongs and stuff. Then there are a bunch of us who just wear jeans and long shirts. Those girls, the thong ones, will be like, ‘You’re ugly, why don’t you do anything for your looks?’”

  “Yeah,” Gina agrees, “those kind of girls are at my school too. They think they’re perfect. They think everyone should try to look like them.”

  Julie wisely explains, “Sometimes I do wish I looked more like those girls, honestly, but I also know that their lives aren’t so wonderful either. Even the people that you think are perfect have their flaws and things that they’re not happy about with themselves.”

  Back in Manhattan, Ella isn’t done breaking it down. She is brave, but she again uses the second person to soften the blow: “You really do want to go to those parties. You really do want to be accepted by the pretty, skinny girls, and they look like they don’t give a shit. They look like they can be who they are—effortlessly gorgeous.”

  “Ella, you’re hot,” Heather counters.

  But Ella will not be placated that easily. “Nothing anyone says is going to change how I feel about it. It is so hard because I feel like no one understands it. It seems like everyone else is accepted.”

  This pushes Heather, clearly one of Ella’s “effortlessly gorgeous” friends, to set the record straight. “I think that everyone has their own opinion on everyone else. They evaluate other people according to how they live, but really, maybe they have the same issues. If I were to look at Kaya, I might think, Oh, she has the perfect world, but meanwhile she’s looking at everyone else and thinking they have the perfect world.”

  This age is the beginning of the giant, deadly delusion that perfection is just out of reach for you and effortlessly possessed by the next girl. At fourteen, you are always one step away from being cooler, prettier, smarter, and more athletic, but that step turns out to be nothing less than a leap, your insecurity an insurmountable hurdle in your own mind. Despite a teenage girl’s best intentions, perfection is impossible, and even self-confidence will not be accomplished by buying one more pair of shoes, spending one more hour at the gym, eating one fewer meal. It requires work far more internal and difficult than simple deprivation or drive, but at fourteen, in an instant-extreme-makeover culture, that kind of work seems irrelevant
. What is relevant is your best friend, Kaya, whose calves are long and spindly, tiny but muscular in platform sandals. Ella swears, “I will never show anyone my calves. Not even my husband.” The two centimeters that she would like to cut off of her calves with a knife, so they could look like Kaya’s, define her entire self-image.

  I am struck by the way this group of Manhattan girls has clearly identified who is perfect among them and written it in stone. When I look around the room, I see girls with varied forms of beauty. Kaya has a nymphlike quality to her, a flitty, fun, and loud presence. Rosa reminds me of a grasshopper, long-armed and spunky. Raya has a small-bear quality to her, a round face that suggests sweetness. Rachel has a striking nose, a mane of long, cascading hair. Heather looks pulled out of the seventies. Ella is, in fact, the one I find most beautiful. Her anger intrigues me but, even more, her stately face and style. She stands out in a way that Kaya and Heather, her perfect idols, don’t.

  These girls see themselves not through kind eyes but through the lens of perfection, a hungry, unsatisfied view built up from years of biting at one another’s heels, surviving the neuroses of their own mothers, trying just to make it through an elite adolescence. Self-confidence, like love, cannot be bought. These girls are some of the most privileged in the nation—in fact, some of the most privileged in the world—yet they all have stories to tell me about their own intimate oppressions, their daily battles to feel good about the women they are becoming and the girls they have been.

  There could be no more apt candidate for “perfection projection” than Heather. Beautiful, with professionally highlighted, long, straight hair, soft, clear skin, and striking blue eyes, she is the daughter of one of the most powerful women in the advertising industry. She lives in a fabulous penthouse on Park Avenue, has a cook to make all her meals, a driver to chauffeur her to school, autographs from all of the stars who have gone through her mom’s corner office. But beneath the appearance of a calm surface is a murky underwater world where Heather holds her breath.

  “I started going to a nutritionist when I was eleven years old,” Heather explains. “I had to have surgery on my collarbone. My mom wanted me to go so I wouldn’t gain weight while I wasn’t as active. My mom has to look really good. She works with a trainer and stuff. My dad is really muscular, and so I got the man body from him.

  “When my mom loses weight, she’ll ask me, ‘How much do you weigh now?’ And I’ll be like, ‘Oh, I weigh 112.’ She weighs 109 now. She’s not trying to rub it in my face, but she’s trying to show me how it works when you really stick to your plan and work out and stuff.”

  Heather goes on: “I go to my nutritionist once a week for an hour, and she helps me through my family issues or anything that’s bugging me, anything that can make me eat more. We’re not close, but I can tell her stuff. I told her stuff about my mom and how she is always watching me.” Heather morphs into her mother, doing what I can only imagine is a dead-on impression: “ ‘Heather, are you sure? That’s your second Tasti D-Lite of the week?’”

  Back in her own skin: “It made me want to not eat at all or eat in her face—ha! I brought home Tasti D-Lite after dinner one time, and my dad was like ‘You need to watch this sweet tooth.’ I was just like ‘Fine, I’ll have it in my room.’

  “When I went downstairs afterwards, my mom was waiting for me, and she was like ‘Your dad told me what you did.’ I was like ‘I didn’t do anything!’

  “I told my nutritionist, and she talked to my mom, and my mom is no longer allowed to say anything, but I still feel her watching me and judging me as I eat.

  “I can’t eat in the same room as her. I was a vegetarian for a while. Because I wasn’t having chicken, I could eat by myself. I enjoyed that so much because I wasn’t being watched.”

  Ella corroborates. “Yeah, I don’t like eating in front of a lot of people because they judge. Like ‘Why aren’t you eating?’ You are suffocating me! Get away from me! Oh my God! That’s how I feel 95.7 percent of the time. I want to be able to eat in front of all of you guys because I love you”—she motions toward the group—“but I just can’t do it. It’s annoying that people assume that you have an eating disorder because you have a salad for lunch. Fine. You don’t want me to eat, I won’t.”

  Just Being a Girl

  As most of the Girls Inc. campers head home, I am hoping for some kind of high note to finish off my time with these revealing, fascinating, and sensitive girls, but I will have no such thing.

  “So is there anything else you want to say? Anything else you want me to understand?” I ask.

  After a bit of reflective silence, Julie sighs and says, “Look, I’m saying all of this. I’m saying you don’t have to be like the popular girls, you don’t have to want to be skinny or whatever, but am I like that? No. I’m not self-confident. I have absolutely no self-respect for myself. I’m ugly. I just want to go in the corner. I don’t want people to see me. I want it to be like that—feel good about myself and all that. I tell myself, ‘Oh my gosh, I wish I liked myself for who I am.’ I hope I do one day, but right now, I just don’t.”

  “It sounds like the voice inside of your head is really critical,” I respond.

  “You know, you’re verbally saying, ‘I’m skinny. I’m beautiful. Look at me.’ Inside, you’re like, ‘I’m fat, I’m ugly.’”

  “Is there any way to change that voice inside your head?” I ask.

  Julie shrugs, suddenly looking forty-five instead of fifteen. “I tried. It’s not working. It’s just life.” She looks down at the glittery bangle on her wrist and adds, “A girl’s life, at least.”

  The New York City girls start to gather up their things and put their Diet Cokes and Bic pens into trendy purses and messenger bags— apparently backpacks are no longer cool. Moms start to arrive in cabs, cell phones start ringing incessantly. It is clearly time to bring this conversation to a close.

  “So when will all this stop?” I ask them. “Will it get easier as you get older?”

  Kaya shakes her head and says simply, “Freshman fifteen.”

  Rachel hasn’t heard of it. “What? What’s that?”

  Ella explains, “It is this thing where every freshman girl in college gains fifteen pounds because of all the cafeteria food. I’ve honestly cried thinking about it.”

  “So it never stops?” I ask, still trying to understand how they see their obsession playing out in the long run.

  Ella levels with me. “If I’m not thinking about my body or calories, I’m probably sleeping or dead. I don’t see that changing anytime soon.”

  “Nope,” Kaya concludes, “this is just being a girl.”

  5. Sex as a Cookie: Growing Up Hungry

  Something happens to some girls at a certain age, a kind of madness, as if their own bodies were too powerful or too busy or too changeable; they are appalled. They indulge peculiar hungers; they want to stick their noses, their tongues into the filth of the world, maybe to reassure themselves that it doesn’t all come from themselves.

  —Mary Gordon

  All of these are about emptiness, about misdirected attempts to fill internal voids, and all of them tend to spring from the same dark pool of feeling: a suspicion among many women that hungers themselves are somehow invalid or wrong, that indulgences must be earned and paid for, that the satisfaction of appetites often comes with a bill.

  —Caroline Knapp

  Entering the current world of teenage angst prompted a flood of memories of my own tumultuous years “behind the bedroom door.” Our bodies had the capacity to attract the attention we were all so desperate for. In this way, they were our weapons against mediocrity, against invisibility. But when one of my acquaintances got pregnant at seventeen, my worst suspicions were confirmed—our bodies were also capable of great betrayal. In this way, they were our enemies. I felt like my own body was about to explode at any moment—like it was a time bomb waiting to go off.

  Sex, like food, was infused with wildly inflated me
aning. Our struggles with one mirrored our struggles with the other: I should, I shouldn’t, I should, I shouldn’t. We were equally naïve and uninformed about both—miseducated by the alarmist sex Q&As in teen magazines and the manipulative diet ads beside them. Aspiring perfect girls spent much energy trying to curb and manipulate physical hunger and sexual drive to our advantage.

  In retrospect, I realize that my friends and I were on an alarmingly fast track when it came to sex and all its adult consequences. No one was on a faster track than Jen, my best friend since sixth grade.

  I walk through the automatic doors leading to the passenger pickup at Denver International Airport and nervously look around at the cars parked along the curb. I don’t even know what kind of car Jen drives anymore, whether her hair will be long or short, natural brown or bottle blond, whether she will be frail, as she was the last time I saw her, a couple of years ago at a neighborhood Christmas party, or the way I remember her from high school—scarred shins, strong, thick thighs, big breasts, and all.

  As if on cue, a white Acura pulls up, and though there is a glare on the windshield, I can see Jen’s narrow face beaming inside. She bounds out and skips around to my side of the car, giving me a big hug before I can even put down my bag. I breathe deeply as I wrap my arms around her waist—she is herself again: flat, wide stomach perched atop strong soccer-player thighs, breasts spilling out of her skimpy tank top, long, tangled hair.

  As we wind our way around the tangle of airport exit roads and head for I-25, we launch into a feverish exchange about the impending wedding of our other childhood best friend. We will be on the road to Utah, where Katie is tying the knot, for eight hours, long enough to reminisce about who we were and tell each other about who we have become. As we drifted apart after high school, the space between us became more than the miles that separate Boulder, Colorado, where she lives, and New York City, where I do.