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

by Courtney E. Martin

  I feel a knot of guilt in my guts. “This is the time,” I remember as we drive west on I-80, “when you just stopped calling me back, right?”

  “Yeah,” Jen confirms. “I didn’t pick up a phone for months. Literally. I didn’t do anything.”

  As I sit next to Jen through the last miles of Wyoming, a silence possible only between intimates sets in. I gnaw on some beef jerky and ask myself, Why wasn’t I there for her? I reflect on what happened to our friendship.

  In high school, we shared the kind of bond that only hormonal, confused, and bright girls do—it was messy, scattered with shared boyfriends, secrets, jealousies, complete and utter adoration. Jen was everything I was not. I was everything she was not. And somehow, we still shared the same sensibility about the world. When college hit, we cried buckets and swore our allegiance to each other, swore we wouldn’t forget. Jen wrote me beautiful letters, made me mix CDs, called me weekly, and told me gory stories about making out with lacrosse players in frat house bathrooms. I was grateful. I had, as of yet, no stories of my own. I spent most of my freshman year huddled over astronomy textbooks and The New York Times Book Review, wishing I had gone to a school where the parties didn’t take place in private apartments inhabited by much cooler, much more cynical juniors and seniors.

  When I came back home that summer, I had gained the requisite “freshman fifteen,” and so had Jen, but we still recognized each other’s bodies—I was tall and dark, she was small and had dyed her hair a dramatic blond. Everything was as it should be.

  But as college wore on, we separated physically, mentally, and morally. We talked less on the phone. She stopped sending me letters or mix CDs. I didn’t go to Boulder and visit. When we did see each other at the neighborhood Christmas party, it was like running into a stranger who wore a mask of my former best friend. By junior year, Jen had shrunk. She was a fraction of her former size, manic, inauthentic. I would ask her how she was doing, how she was really doing, and she would bounce around and shriek, “Awesome! Jack* and I are moving to Minnesota! Everything’s awesome!”

  And I hated her. I hated this wisp of a girl who had taken over the strong, explosive body of my best friend. I hated that she was syrupy and sweet. I hated that I knew she was lying, even if she didn’t. I hated . . .

  Jen breaks the silence by launching into her story again. “So let’s just get this over with, shall we?” she asks playfully.

  “Shoot.”

  Running Away

  “I stopped being depressed because I fell in love with Jack ... and Adderall,” she launches in.

  Jack was a happy-go-lucky, athletic kid from a wealthy background. He had an Elmo key chain, an adorable puppy, and he had adored Jen since first meeting her. When she felt at her worst, Jack made her forget, because of both his optimistic nature and his access to the prescription drug Adderall.†

  Jack had been diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Jen had not. Both realized that if they took the drug he had been prescribed by the CU Health Center before going out, and again in the morning, they could party all night and still go to school the next day. They started spending hours in the library together, popping pills and discussing each other’s readings. Jen was so absorbed in Jack that she did his reading instead of her own most days. They would take smoke breaks every half hour to mull over his latest assignment, talking a million miles a minute, congratulating each other on how brilliant they sounded.

  The drug helped Jen forget about a lot of things—the friends she no longer spoke to, her ambition to go to graduate school, the HPV, the rape. It also helped her forget to eat. She was no longer hungry, physically or otherwise. She had what she needed—acceptance, distraction, maybe even love. She would go for days at a time eating only what Jack insisted on—cheese and crackers at midnight, a shared burrito on the way home from drinking. When they did eat real meals, Jen didn’t worry, because she knew that as soon as she popped another pill, she could make up for it by abstaining for as long as she needed to feel empty again.

  In essence, Adderall put Jen in control again. Her mind was no longer the slave to her erratic and compulsive tyrant of a body. Instead, she was intellectually overstimulated and corporeally mute. She had no hunger pangs, no more sex drive, no exhaustion. She was a satisfying blend between an Energizer and a Playboy bunny—hot, thin, and unstoppable.

  But of course, all was not well. In the middle of Jack’s finals, he ran out of Adderall because Jen had been taking so much. He decided to fake a prescription to get more. Jen remembers sitting outside the health center waiting for him to appear with the new bottle: “I’m sitting there in his car, and all of a sudden I see the place get surrounded by police and I know Jack is getting arrested.”

  Jack’s parents, a venture capitalist and a doctor from Minnesota, got him a good lawyer, and he was released with a slap on the wrist. In retrospect, Jen can’t believe that she and Jack didn’t realize how serious it was: “The ironic thing is that, in order to get him off with a lesser sentence, the lawyer claimed that Jack was addicted. We thought it was hilarious at the time—we still didn’t get that we both needed the drug.”

  When Jack’s parents offered to help them both settle in Minnesota after graduation, they jumped at the chance to get out of Boulder—romanticizing their new life far away. They bought a house they couldn’t afford. Jack started working in his dad’s company. Jen languished all day in bed, taking Adderall, admiring her body in the mirror, painting the rooms in colors to match her moods: deep purples and pinks, greens, blues, yellows, and oranges. She remembers, “That’s when I really stopped eating. I started to be very, very conscious of the fact that I wasn’t eating, and it became a big game. How long can you go, how little can you eat, how much weight can you lose?” She got so thin that she couldn’t lift the groceries out of the car and carry them into the house.

  Eventually Jack decided enough was enough. He realized that he couldn’t get through a workday without taking an excessive amount of Adderall and that Jen was totally incapacitated and addicted. (At her worst, Jen was taking sixty to eighty milligrams a day. The average person with diagnosed ADHD takes five to twenty.) “We have to stop,” he told her. They had two days’ worth left.

  “Then we have to move back to Colorado,” Jen answered. “I hate it here.”

  “Agreed,” he said.

  Jen was scared shitless. All she could think about was gaining weight—she was afraid that without Adderall, she would spin completely out of control, start bingeing again. At the time, she could imagine nothing worse.

  Jack and Jen got themselves off Adderall without telling anyone about their addiction. Sometimes it was frightening—like when Jack abandoned his car on the highway and started running, fueled by a manic sense that he had to go somewhere as fast as he possibly could. Jen weaned herself off more slowly, pleasantly surprised that her appetite didn’t come back, at least not right away. What did return was her ability to experience emotions. She remembers: “I literally hadn’t felt anything for over a year. The first time I cried, I was so happy.”

  They did make it back to Boulder eventually and decided to go their separate ways. Jack moved to Chicago and started working for a Web-design company. Jen bartends at Chili’s—she drinks often, hooks up less, and is in the process of piecing her life back together. “It feels like I am just completely rebuilding my life,” she explains, “one puzzle piece at a time. First I got off the drug. Now I am trying to develop a healthy relationship with my body again.”

  Her appetite did come back, and it scared the hell out of Jen. She hadn’t made choices about eating sober for so many months that at first she wasn’t sure she remembered how. But now she tries to eat whatever she feels like eating—which includes a lot of fattening Chili’s cheese dip and milk shakes—and stay very active. She also journals frequently and pays a lot of attention to her self-talk.

  “I used to look in the mirror and think, Oh my God, I’m gross. I nee
d to lose some weight, and then drop it,” Jen explains. “But now if I catch myself saying something like that, I counter it with Whoa, clear your plate for the night, because you have some work to do. Start writing. Go for a walk. You know where this leads.”

  As we pull into Salt Lake, I am feeling overwhelmed and a bit hopeless. I am struck by how little I understood, at thirteen and seventeen and even twenty-one, about the wide variability of sex drive—that neither my lack of it nor Jen’s abundance should have been cause for such shame. This business of growing up a girl—developing a woman’s body and interpreting what it means, its capacity to give pleasure followed by such pain, its vulnerability to pregnancy, to disease, to violation, to self-hate—is so incredibly complicated. It feels like a ten-ton weight is handed to every girl at the age of twelve, and then she is invited to mount the tightrope of adolescence. It is as if we look at these spindly-legged, ponytailed girls, fresh out of sixth grade, and say, “Now you will be grown. You will be watched. You will fight every day of your life to be respected—by yourself and others. You will have to read between the lines, protect your reputation, be wary of your best friends. You will have myriad hungers. You will need to control these constantly.”

  It’s too much for any one girl, and yet it never changes. I ask Jen if there is anything she feels she could have done differently, anything her friends or her family could have done to prevent all the pain she endured growing up. “I needed someone to help me internalize self-respect,” she reflects. “No one ever told me that you could do what you wanted sexually and still respect yourself. If there was someone I could have talked to who was more like me, someone who could have said, ‘I know everyone in your whole life worries about you—your parents, your friends—everyone wants to know why you are doing this with so many guys. But this is okay. It doesn’t mean you’re bad, and it doesn’t mean you hate yourself. It might . . . but it doesn’t have to.’ ”

  As Jen says this, her voice lowers a bit, her eyes darken, and she transforms into the woman that she needed—a roughshod, experienced, wiser, and softer her. She is taking the GREs soon, and I secretly wish that she will apply to become a social worker or a sex educator, that she won’t forget.

  I turn off the voice recorder I’ve clipped to Jen’s collar, lean back in my seat, and sigh. As we get further away from adolescence, the cacophony between our minds and bodies quiets, but we still try to understand who we are as sexual people. It is amazing to me that I am still, at twenty-five, filled with so many questions. When the judgment of the outside world and the assumptions about what is normal and abnormal are turned down, what do we hear? When the layers of fear and loneliness are stripped away, what do we truly crave underneath? How can we accept our bodies, even appreciate them, as the seats of this craving?

  Katie, our third musketeer, gets married against the backdrop of a breathtaking mountain. A creek runs nearby, the late-afternoon sun burns the bare shoulders of spaghetti-strap-dress-wearing friends and family. Jen and I sit side by side. Jen wears a skimpy tank top that shows off her reclaimed breasts and a short skirt with tall heels. I am in a more modest calf-length halter dress that shows off my upper back, one of the only parts of my body I feel unequivocally good about. We turn to see as the music indicates Katie’s descent from the ski lodge stairs above and squeeze each other’s hands.

  And there she is in a white strapless dress with a train, a string of pearls, hair coiffed underneath a traditional gauzy veil—the works. I flash back to a night in her dad’s Suburban, shouting out the lyrics to the Lost Boyz, making dinner in her parents’ house for our boyfriends before homecoming (or, technically, picking up steaks from Outback), skidding away in my Accord when a house party got violent, defending at a school board meeting our right to publish a story about a lesbian alumna in our campus newspaper, drinking too much, laughing too loud, loving so desperately.

  I feel like Katie is playing dress-up, like we are back in my attic, trunk top hanging off, red polyester dress and boas spilling over the sides. Part of me wants to shout, “Take that off before people take you seriously!” The other part is awed by how much more mature she seems than teary-eyed Jen and me. Jen leans over to me and whispers, “Wow.”

  “I know, wow,” I respond, then squeeze Jen’s hand.

  6. The Revolution Still Will Not Be Televised: Pop, Hip-hop, Race, and the Media

  The body has become the primary canvas on which girls express their identities, insecurities, ambitions, and struggles.

  —Lauren Greenfield

  Anyone naïve enough to believe that the Madonna-whore dynamic Jen and I played out in our teenage years has run its course need only look at the career of one Britney Spears to be convinced otherwise. She is the virgin-slut myth personified, a swinging pendulum of virtue and vice. She began her career in pigtails and a Catholic school uniform, complete with public promises about her sacred virginity. Just three years later, she gyrated and sweated her way back into the spotlight with songs such as “I’m a Slave 4 U,” in which she confirmed that she was, after all, sexual and not prudish. Before long she was swinging back in the other direction: making babies and putting on her best—okay, not that convincing—performance of a virtuous mother. A couple kids and a divorce later, she’s back to clubbing it up with her friend Paris—playing the sexy card once again.

  On MTV and BET, every pop icon flips the script before today’s watchers get a chance to read it. For us eighties and nineties gals, Madonna was just a slut, straight up, no take-backs. She was like a virgin, very clearly not one. (That, of course, was before she and Britney kissed on the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards—confirming every teenage girl’s lurking suspicion that, unless she kissed girls for boys’ enjoyment, she was uptight.)

  In the wasteland of corporate rap, a teenage girl can also find a virtual smorgasbord of female archetypes: video ho (bad girl), boo (good girl), or momma. Fall down the slippery slope from rap to porn— thanks to BET After Dark and Snoop Dogg’s pair of porn videos—and there is a gaggle of naked, submissive, and horny women with fake tits and incessant moans to emulate. The visual variety of female bodies to which the average girl is exposed through television, movies, the Internet, and music is, to put it mildly, severely limited.

  The thin, gyrating female body is the visual standard; the aural standard is silence. Older women may have carved out a little space in the public sphere to chat (all-knowing, all-seeing Oprah, tell-it-like-it-is Meredith Vieira, classy Diane Sawyer, barrier-breaking Katie Couric), but young women continue to be largely mute on any and all subjects beyond fashion and their fiancés. We are not featured on panels or interviewed about political issues. We rarely get serious news anchor positions or the chance to smirk and sass on faux-news shows.

  Instead, you can find young women paying homage to their dress designers on the runway, blushing about their latest flings, or singing clichéd lyrics on entertainment television. Even if a token young woman does get a minute of airtime, you can bet that she will be rail-thin, undeniably attractive, and usually horrifically unhealthy. Case in point: The seventeenth season of The Real World featured twenty-four-year-old Paula Meronek, who not only suffered from anorexia and bulimia but also had an abusive boyfriend and an addiction to alcohol. The show tried to paint a “happily ever after” picture of Paula’s “recovery”—supposedly thanks to the support of her roommates—but to date she admits to still taking diet pills as she travels the country hitting bars for paid appearances at a gaunt size. She is back together with the boy who beat her so badly she had to be hospitalized.

  Girls learn that, while their voices may not be heard, their bodies speak volumes.

  Icon Dolls

  Let me just admit this up front: I love Christina Aguilera. When I first saw her video about being stuck in a bottle—containable, waiting, passive—I wasn’t impressed. That stick-thin blonde with bad hair, writhing on the beach, struck me as horribly ordinary and pathetic. But once Christina changed from those saddleb
acks to some serious stilettos, she changed my mind. Her tiny little body was made fierce in black chaps, and I liked that she reclaimed the idea of being “dirty.” Once the mean-spirited whisper in a junior high hallway, it seemed powerful and proud when she screamed the word, ass in the air, boxing gloves ready. When she did the video where she stood in a big line with a bunch of girls from her crew and pointed a water hose between her legs at some disrespectful guys, I was way past smitten.

  For a few months I pruned in the shower while belting out her song “Beautiful” at the top of my lungs. Christina doesn’t seem savvy, necessarily, but she seems real. Quirky, raw, and unapologetic, Christina thinks that we all deserve to feel beautiful.

  I have the same secret love for Kelly Clarkson. She didn’t “disappear” the moment she became famous, and she continues to act surprisingly human and endearingly excited about her career. When she rocks out, she isn’t worried about a little belly sticking out or a bump in her ponytail. Her hit single “Since You’ve Been Gone” is the jump-with-fist-in-the-air-inducing “I Will Survive” of my generation.

  I don’t get the same feeling from the other leading ladies on the Top 40. Whereas Christina is using her sappy but touching lyrics, her hose, her crazy voice, and her little body as tools of her own fierce expression, her counterparts seem unarmed and horrifically mute. Whereas Kelly has an authentic personality and a refreshingly “average” physique, other young stars seem like automatons without fault. They may be toned and expensively dressed, and sometimes they even sing words out of their painted lips, but for all intents and purposes, they are mute. Their power comes not from their sassy declarations in nine octaves but from their toothpick necks and good hair.

  The Olsen twins appear repeatedly dumbstruck on the streets of the West Village, with coffee cups and layers of ill-fitting skirts to hide their disappearing bodies. Once full-cheeked, Lindsay Lohan completely denied that her overnight transformation into a skeleton was the result of an eating disorder. She evaded questions about her lifestyle, preferring to puff on her cigarette. Multiple hospitalizations and a Saturday Night Live intervention later, she admitted to Vanity Fair that she struggled with bulimia (though she has yet to turn her struggle into any sort of treatment). The miraculously disappearing Nicole Richie became a fashion icon overnight, thanks in large part to Rachel Zoe, the stylist who also aided Lohan’s career boost. The Los Angeles Times reports, “Fashion insiders have whispered privately that she [Zoe] is single-handedly bringing anorexia back.” Like it was ever out.