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

by Courtney E. Martin

  Mariana pulls out another sleeve, this one with Monie Love on the front in an orange coat, big white socks, black Timberlands, and a giant pink bow in her unstraightened black hair. It is her 1993 Prince-produced Born 2 B.R.E.E.D. Lest you worry that the title indicates a barbaric message, she translates the righteous acronym for you: “Build relationships where education and enlightenment dominate.”

  Mariana and I bemoan the contrast between these fierce women and the skinnier, objectified tokens we have today. Foxy Brown is not much more than a glorified video ho, delivering uninteresting and depersonalized lyrics when she’s not defending herself in court for assault charges. Lil’ Kim, after what appears to be way too much plastic surgery, looks as white and objectified as your average boy-band backup dancer. Even Lauryn Hill, the great hope for girls in hip-hop, went down in a blaze of preaching and politicking. There are still a few reasons to cling to the dream that hip-hop could be a home for female fast-talkers: Lady Sovereign, Medusa, Jean Grae, but these women tend to stay outside of mainstream hip-hop.†

  Corporate rap, as entertaining as it may be, isn’t much more than a succession of macho braggarts throwing clichés over hot beats while being gyrated upon by practically naked women. Women are objectified not just in the videos but often in the lyrics as well. The notorious R. Kelly, for example, compares his female prospect to a car in one of his recent songs. I’d quote the lyrics, but I don’t want to pay R. Kelly so I can publicize his already overexposed misogyny.

  Not exactly the enlightenment that Monie Love, or the rest of hip-hop’s female fan base, was hoping for. Today’s rap voice has gotten even more misogynistic and less creative than it was when I was leaning an ear toward the high school house-party ciphers. R. Kelly’s car metaphor looks almost charming next to some of his other lines, such as “I like the crotch on you.” Others are just flat-out offensive. Obie Trice, a Detroit rapper signed to Eminem’s Shady Records, urges fat women to hide their “blubber” so as not to offend him while he scours the crowd for thin girls.

  Women around my age have learned that our place in hip-hop is as comic relief or status symbols. We are encouraged to buy the albums, laugh off the offensive lyrics, and dance to the good beats in the club. The most accessible and least risky way to be involved in the culture of hip-hop is to cultivate the image of a female fan. Shell out hard-earned money on the music’s favorite brands or imitations, and keep your mouth shut. Rely on your body and the requisite leather bags, designer shoes, gold chains as your only forms of expression.

  The message is being sent to young women rap fans that their role is to consume and costume: Nelly swipes a credit card down the ass crack of one of his dancers, White Chocolate, in the video for his hit song “Tip Drill.” (Don’t worry, because of the video’s nearly X-rated content, it is played only on after-hours programs in America, such as BET Uncut, when all of the parents have gone to bed.) The video was the last straw for black feminists at Spelman College, who hosted a series of public discussions on corporate rap and misogyny in March 2006, followed by a promise that they would boycott Nelly’s prearranged appearance there in April. Nelly made no apologies to his outraged female fans; instead, he told FHM: “It’s acting. Halle Berry can go on film and get the dog shit freaked out of her, and she wins an Oscar. I swipe a credit card down the crack of a girl’s butt, and I’m demoralizing women?”†

  Well, yes, Nelly dear. There is a difference between reveling in the objectification of women and creating a piece of art that explores the meaning of loneliness.

  Nelly is obviously a few gold teeth short of a mouthful, but when speaking with MSNBC.com about female complicity, he made a little more sense: “This is a grown woman that told me, ‘Go ahead, do it.’ I never forced any of these girls to do anything. This is a job, they agreed to do it, they knew everything that was into it and these girls would be doing it whether Nelly was shooting a video or not.”

  He’s got a point. What about the women in these videos? Aren’t they willingly contributing to a culture that emphasizes only their capacity to buy and bootie-dance? Don’t they have a message? Don’t they want their voices to be heard? In fact, White Chocolate has made a cottage industry out of her swipe of fame and now hosts parties where attendees are invited to swipe their own credit cards down her infamous crack. So apparently there is a new role for women in hip-hop—that of hired-out ass crack. White Chocolate told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: “I’m not representing anybody but myself. No one is exploiting me. No one is making me do anything I don’t want to do. . . . I’ve been in about twenty-seven music videos doing my thing. I’ve got a five-bedroom house on a half-acre of land. Drive a Jag. If anything, hip-hop has been very, very good to this woman right here.”

  The bottom line, as so many rappers tell us, is “the Benjamins.” Corporate rap is based on hot beats and Nelly-style objectification, and women such as White Chocolate make good money buying in. Akiba Solomon, a hip-hop critic and feminist, explains: “These girls are smart entrepreneurs. They are capitalists.” Hip-hop may have begun as a free-form cultural expression with liberating potential for all, but it has become an industry made up of generic hit factories—built on the bodies of women, mostly black.

  Unfortunately, money also flows in the other direction. A Gucci bag, a gym membership, a new CD all drain already paltry bank accounts. Debt is rampant among the underemployed and overenthused female fan base of hip-hop. Even if they can’t rap, they want to look like they could dance for the rapper. Even if they can’t afford the name brands in the latest videos, they want to appear as if they can. As Anya Kamenetz, the Village Voice writer behind the Generation Debt series, writes: “Hip-hop culture is the 800-pound gorilla of youth marketing.”

  Girls like Mariana, like Bonita, like White Chocolate learn early on that they are welcome to consume hip-hop to their hearts’ content, but their contributions will be limited. Mariana found a loophole. Bonita is hitting the gym and gathering diet tips from female family members. White Chocolate decided that her chances of carving out a hip-hop identity with her clothes on were slim to none.

  Where the answer is money, the question is usually power.

  Naked Power

  In Female Chauvinist Pigs, Ariel Levy argues that girls today have misconstrued the feminist message about power through liberation. Instead of understanding the previous generation’s conviction that power and freedom come through critiquing society’s rigid sexual stereotypes, we show our tits. Female chauvinist pigs (FCPs), she argues, essentially equate promiscuity with power. Despite what the Girls Gone Wild empire or Maxim would have us believe, Levy maintains, acting like horny dudes does not liberated women make.

  But in a world that communicates through every click on the remote and every turn of the page that female bodies get attention and money (and words do not), is it any wonder that girls willingly shed their clothes and pose in the pursuit of power? Is it any wonder that we obsess over every little thing we put in our mouths in anticipation of this future unveiling—whether it be for a video camera or just for a cute boy? Is it any wonder that we are a generation dead set on carving our bodies into monuments of the power we so want to possess?

  The answer, of course, is no, and Levy recognizes it: “Adolescents are not inventing this culture of exhibitionism and conformity with their own fledgling creative powers. Teens are reflecting back our slobbering culture in miniature.” FCPs watch the latest music videos where the woman topping the charts is the same one mounting a greasy male dancer. They watch America’s richest twenty-somethings gallivanting off to lavish parties in a poverty of clothing. They don’t hear these women asserting liberation philosophy; they listen to their moans and giggles in leaked sex tapes. Feigning stupidity and starving, not feminism, seems to be the most direct route to fame and fortune.

  Levy hints at her understanding that beneath the bare breasts of the average FCP is a girl with a heart hungry for attention (the juvenile version of power): “Proving
that you are hot, worthy of lust, and necessarily that you seek to provoke lust is still exclusively women’s work. It is not enough to be successful, rich, and accomplished.” It is not enough to get straight A’s or win a national debate award. It is not enough to devote your Saturdays to the soup kitchen and your Sundays to planting trees. It is not enough to be a great artist or a great scientist or a great writer. All of these things may make you successful, but power is another matter entirely.

  Popularity is powerful. Beauty is powerful. Confidence is powerful. Being smart, outspoken, dedicated, and/or college-bound is potentially powerful but also potentially disempowering in the slick social world of high school. If you are considered tense, for example, you lose power. If you talk too much, become too emotional, or “take things too seriously,” you lose power. If you “make a big deal” out of age-old traditions of female objectification, you lose power. As Levy writes, “Raunch culture, then, isn’t an entertainment option, it’s a litmus test of female uptightness.”

  In Spanish class in eighth grade, a boy whose attention I coveted used to throw his pencil a few feet in front of his desk and ask me to retrieve it. I knew what was going on. I’d heard my hip-hop-culture-inspired nickname—“Ghetto booty. Hey, bend over, ghetto booty”— whispered as I made my way down the hallway with a gaggle of girlfriends. I had seen the quizzes scrawled in bad-boy handwriting on notes passed in class: “Who has the best butt in the 8th grade?” There was no question about it: It wasn’t my straight A’s or my big heart that the boys noticed, it was my shapely butt.

  Most of the time I would tell this dark-eyed boy to go get his own pencil, that I wasn’t his servant, but I would be sure to punctuate my go-girl message with a coquettish laugh. Every few times, I would summon up the courage to get up from my desk, saunter over to the chewed pencil, bend over, and pick it up with a flourish. The boy in question would swoon. I felt a little bad, but I also felt undeniably powerful.

  In that same year, I won the schoolwide spelling bee. I remember being horrified when my name was announced over the loudspeaker— as if the small bit of coolness I had collected through months of self-conscious nonchalance and detached ambivalence had suddenly morphed into a steaming, stinking pile of lame. I picked up the pencil with exaggerated flair twice that day, trying to make my crush forget my p’s and q’s.

  I have heard this sentiment repeated by the women I have interviewed. Smart, accomplished, and thoughtful, they know that none of this is as instantaneously powerful as their appearances. They make an effort to resist this truth by cultivating their minds, bulking up their bank accounts, saving the world at every turn, but it is thrown in their faces over and over again. Flirtation, a hot bod, and sultry sophistication are all immediately powerful. The rest is slow redemption. Our frustration with this situation seems to do nothing but make us less effective at dealing with it.

  Truth is, many perfect girls indulge the power we possess through our looks—we may flirt with the boss, take a free drink, ask for a higher grade with a low-cut shirt on. We chase away the guilt with the excuse that we are just taking advantage of our disadvantage, subverting the system, reclaiming our right to equality. But deep inside, we know it is an act of desperation—a flailing grab for a log in level-five rapids. We bet on our bodies in the exchange of power because we fear we have no more powerful currency in the real world. Sadly, we are often right.

  7. What Men Want: The Truth About Attraction, Porn, and the Pursuit

  It is 2:00 A.M. at one of those “it” bars in the Meatpacking District of Manhattan. The place is packed wall to wall with women who are too little and men who are too much. Thin blondes in backless, sleeveless, braless outfits wobble on knee-high stiletto boots and hold pink cosmopolitans precariously balanced between two dainty fingers. Men lean in toward their tiny necks, trying too hard over the loud music, their one extra spray of cologne making the women cough as they giggle. The men’s tabs will be left open too long, the women will hobble around on those three-inch heels all night despite blisters—symbols of their twin determination.

  I go outside to get a breath of fresh air and huddle near the giant heat lamp by the heavy metal doors. The wind comes off the Hudson River in violent bursts, sending a wave of foot stomping and arm rubbing through the long line of those waiting impatiently to get in. They remain steadfast, imagining a utopia of beautiful people free from hang-ups and loaded with cash inside.

  The bouncer fulfills every stereotype—linebacker body, black, gruff, and unimpressed with the twiggy women who bat their eyelashes at him, dropping the names of bartenders who no longer work there. At one point, he reaches for the velvet rope to let in a busboy who went on an emergency lime run, and a couple of girls in miniskirts and faux fur coats lunge for the inside. The busboy slips in, and the bouncer replaces the velvet rope just in time for the two girls to clothesline themselves. Some guys in tight sweaters and designer jeans smoking next to me barely muffle their laughter and holler, “Oh, poor ladies! I’d let you in.” One of the girls smooths her hair back into place and tilts her head to the side, as if to say, “Aren’t I cute and helpless?” while the other reapplies her lipstick. I feel like puking, and it’s not because I’m drunk.

  Just an average Friday night between the sexes.

  The dating scene is a meat market—still the hunters and the hunted, the stalkers and the prey, the fine pieces of flesh and those who want to “kill it.” Sure, men and women now trade roles more freely—sometimes the hunted is a doe-eyed guy and the hunter a fierce woman ready to lead—but the dance is still the same. The only reason I can get into this particular spot, given that I am physically incapable of three-inch heels and am a disaster with a mascara wand, is that my friend Pete really is the bartender. He is the one who mixes the strong drinks for the hopeful young lads and lasses early in the night and mixes the weak ones two hours later, when they are drunk with disappointment and debt, or sloppily licking each other’s faces in momentary triumph, hoping like hell that the gin doesn’t wear off.

  So why, night after night, tab after tab, blister after blister, do we repeat this strange and usually unsatisfying mating ritual?

  We want to have fun. We want to dance. We want to relieve stress. We want to be young and reckless. We want to meet people who don’t bore us with the same predictable stories. We want to believe in the magic of chemistry. We want to earn bragging rights about the posh club we got into. We want to feel lusted after and to lust. We want to numb, forget, fuck.

  The truest answer is that we want to be seen and we want to be loved.

  To Be Seen

  All of that TV watching and magazine reading provides us with a dangerously narrow and boring definition of “hot” when we are young, and little material to broaden that definition as we get older. The yesteryear posters of teenage heartthrobs tacked on bedroom walls from Sacramento to St. Louis—Alyssa Milano, Jason Priestley—and those of today—Jessica Alba, Chad Michael Murray—are emblematic of what both boys and girls think beauty will look like when they are old enough to embody or entrap it. Twenty-eight-year-old Brian of Colorado Springs, Colorado, believes his apple-pie definition of beauty was born in front of the “almighty MTV” and hasn’t changed much since. He lists his favorite attributes: “Pretty face, small ass, little body fat. Blond or brown hair. Give me head cheerleader over exotic beauty any day.” The color of the hair seems to be the only element up for interpretation.

  Dimitriy, a Russian-born twenty-year-old, unemotionally explains: “Pornography, pop music, and hip-hop videos influence me to look at every single imperfection of a female.” In the next breath, he expresses that he thinks girls should “be taught to love their bodies by parents and through school.” What role could he play in this? I ask. He just shakes his head. “I don’t know what I can personally do, because I am not affected.” But when I push him to consider whether he feels pressured to look a certain way, he answers, “Girls are just as shallow as guys, so there is a constant
need to look your best.”

  Another of my students, twenty-two and Dominican, admits, “I feel pressure to be fit, and it comes from going to clubs and other social gatherings where a lot of men obviously spend a lot of time on their bodies, as far as working out. Because of this, I allot an hour a day for four days a week. That way I don’t go overboard with the pressure.”

  Sadly, the only thing modern about the modern meat-market scene, besides the occasional reversal of roles, is that men are starting to feel as pressured as women to conform to a cookie-cutter mold of what is attractive. Every guy who responded to my official survey and every guy I informally surveyed over a beer or a long walk confirmed that he feels pressure to be fit. Brian admits to caring a lot about looking good. He explains, “If I’m not having sex with quality girls, I start to feel pressure.” He adds without a hint of sarcasm, “Sometimes I wish I could have an eating disorder that I could control. It would be great to be able to puke after eating too much pizza some night or not eat at all for a couple of days. My genetics fucked me. I work hard just to be in average shape.”

  Part of this new pressure can be attributed to the popularization of magazines—sometimes called “lad mags”—such as Maxim, FHM, Stuff, Details, GQ, and Men’s Health. Though they are notorious for featuring half-naked women with thin, taut bodies—an old story— they also introduce a modern message: six-pack-abs exercises, fashion trends, and sex tips for guys. Men’s Health is filled from cover to cover with ways to make men as neurotic as women about their bodies: “Flip the Fat Switch,” “Transform Yourself,” and “Lose a Pound Per Week!” On the fleeting—thank God—FX sitcom Starved, which made light of eating disorders for a few laughs, three of the four afflicted main characters were men.