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

by Courtney E. Martin

  Even if the answer is “You look great, are you crazy?,” only fleeting appeasement is possible. These are not moments conducive to what we really need—confirmation of our whole and lasting beauty. For that night, you may feel okay again, maybe even beautiful, but the nagging feeling that you are inadequate will come back, and you will have no deeper answer to fall back on.

  Men and women, like fathers and daughters, need to strain to have genuine conversations about bodies and beauty. Talk about your fears on days when you feel most safe. Bring up your worries when you are carefree and capable of going wherever that conversation might lead.

  One young woman, just about to graduate from high school, told me the following story:

  I dated my boyfriend almost all of high school, and we had never had a real balls-to-the-wall conversation about my body insecurities or his preferred body types or anything like that. I was paranoid because the one girl he dated before me was skinnier and just looked totally different. I used to think about that and wonder which of us was his real type, but I would never say anything because I was afraid of what the answer might be.

  Finally, right near prom, I just blurted out this question: “Do you think I’m pretty?” I felt stupid right away. I mean, I knew he thought I was pretty, at least to a point, or he wouldn’t be with me. But then he just started talking about how beautiful he thought I was, not in a fake way but, like, real, important things about me that he noticed that, like, no one else would notice. I felt great, so I asked him to tell me, honestly, what guys say about their girlfriends’ bodies or the girls’ bodies that they hook up with. He said that there was pressure to be funny and that usually meant being critical, and that he had, honestly, fallen into that sometimes just because he wasn’t thinking. But he also said that he was sick of it, just focusing on certain parts or whatever, and that one of the things he was looking forward to about college was hoping that guys might be cooler about girls. I felt so relieved, like a ten-ton weight had been lifted from my shoulders.

  By speaking honestly about his attractions and experiences, her boyfriend provides a counterexample to the usual “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy of most young couples. By contrast, the story he tells about his interactions with other guys about women’s bodies is, sadly, quite common; in the traditional men’s world—sports bars, locker rooms, corporate bathrooms—the significance of women’s weight is overemphasized, perhaps as much as it is avoided in coed conversations. As Colin, a sound engineer and DJ from Oakland, wisely explains, “Men are taught to avoid speaking about women’s weight with women and then taught to overexaggerate women’s weight with men. I think it’s important to do neither . . . and instead just try to be thoughtful and honest on the issue.”

  We cannot expect men to be truthful if we communicate, even nonverbally, that we don’t really want their truth. Yet we will never trust them if they aren’t truthful; we are too smart to believe their halfhearted reassurances. We will never destroy our inaccurate assumptions about physical attraction if we don’t have the heavy blunt objects of truth to knock them out.

  When Todd* started dating Mary,* he was totally enchanted by her— physically and otherwise. She was in law school, loved the same kind of music he did, challenged him intellectually, and talked about how stupid she thought it was that girls obsessed about their weight. Todd had dated his share of weight-obsessed women and was really ready to have a relationship in which he wasn’t forced to reassure his girlfriend that she wasn’t fat ten times a day. Mary seemed perfect because it seemed like she understood the futility of trying to be perfect.

  But as their relationship grew, so did her honesty about her own body issues. It turned out that Mary had battled bulimia in high school and still clung to some of her “diseased” thinking. Todd first noticed it when they would go out drinking and Mary would insist on stopping by their favorite all-night diner on the way home. She would order pancakes, milk shakes, french fries, bacon, and donuts all at one sitting and then look exhausted and act really unhappy by the time her food came, eating feverishly or not at all. At first Todd thought it was kind of fun—that Mary really was spontaneous and completely unlike the restricting women he had dated previously. But the more he experienced the poorly hidden battle inside her brain, the less he felt at ease. He realized that what had seemed like spontaneity was actually residual self-hate.

  It wasn’t that she was throwing up. In fact, she never relapsed even once during their yearlong relationship. But the ghost of her disease haunted them both. Todd remembers, “It didn’t matter that she wasn’t technically bulimic, she still thought about herself in a really critical way, and that was enough to make her severely unhappy.” Six months into the relationship, Mary started talking more candidly with Todd about her self-image. She thought she was fat, ugly, unworthy of his love. In truth, all of her self-confidence was a surface-level act. Deep down she was convinced that she was still unacceptable.

  Todd did everything he could to convince her otherwise. He patiently talked her through hard times, outlining her irrationality step by step until she was laughing at herself. He paid careful attention to the way he complimented her, focusing on what he found unconventionally gorgeous about her. He talked to his mom and sisters about Mary’s struggle, asking them for advice on how he could convince her of her beauty.

  Eventually, though, Todd’s efforts exhausted him. He was sick of spending the first two hours of every Friday night convincing her that she looked great so they could go out with friends. It was like their relationship was a broken record, and he finally refused to put the needle on the vinyl ever again. They broke up, despite their otherwise rich connection. Both were devastated. Mary felt incapable of believing Todd’s words, and Todd felt incapable of using them any longer. In the end, it was Mary’s disbelief in the beauty of her body, not her body itself, that held her back from love.

  Guys are seriously affected by their “better halves’” body issues. Almost every time I told a man—young or old—that I was exploring these issues in my writing, he would immediately respond with a knowing look and a story about a woman he had loved who suffered from an eating disorder. In almost all these cases, the disorder became a force too great for the relationship to survive. These men spoke the words bulimia and anorexia as if they were the names of cruel and devious men who had stolen their love away. They looked so powerless during the telling of these stories, so abandoned. It was as if each man had a picture in his mind of how beautiful this woman was, a picture that she refused to look at, and he was left feeling betrayed, overlooked, beaten.

  These men could not have cured their girlfriends’ eating disorders with their words, but their honest affection does have real power. If women and men could speak more freely more often about the nature of physical attraction, the truth might be hard, but the results could be liberating.

  To Be Loved

  Despite the Venus and Mars psychobabble, we are both, women and men, from the same lonely planet. We are not, in truth, the hunters and the hunted; we are all just sweet, big-eyed animals looking for someone to love and be loved by. Underneath our worries about our boyfriends’ porn consumption or our misguided notion that if we were thinner, we’d have more dates is a fundamental insecurity that we aren’t worthy of love. Underneath his hot-girl hedonism and his hesitation to talk with you about attraction is his desire to find something that makes him feel full. We all need connection that fortifies us, that makes us feel that we belong somewhere with someone, that we are more beautiful and important than we ever imagined.

  I’m not talking about romance or the diamond big enough to require its own airplane seat or the trip to Aruba. I’m not talking about the perfect couple with the perfect relationship and the perfect little house in the perfect neighborhood, decorated floor to ceiling in Crate & Barrel. I’m talking about love—messy, raw, frightening, hilarious, hard, and deeply satisfying.

  We have been duped into thinking that love is a logical ext
ension of animal attraction, when really it is more closely related to friendship. We have been misled to put such emphasis on our looks, to consider our ability to attract a guy or a girl in a bar as a predictor of the rest of our lives—happily ever after or very much alone. The truth is that your ability to attract a guy or a girl in a bar predicts nothing but your ability to attract a guy or a girl in a bar. The classic stories of falling in love amid the chaos of this crazy world feature two strangers stuck somewhere as a result of a freak snowstorm more often than they do straight-up hotness. How many happily married couples do you know who first met at a bar? I rest my case.

  Being thin may get you noticed, but it will not get you seen, and it will never get you truly, fiercely loved. Only all four dimensions of your beauty—spirit, soul, mind, and, yes, body—will get you that. Both men and women are trapped in this maze of self-scrutiny, weight or shape preoccupation, preening and primping, searching and spending. But love doesn’t dwell at the end of this maze, even if you do find your way through. Love can’t be won like the lottery or hunted down like an animal. Love is much more elusive and complex. In fact, it is not something outside of us, waiting for us to find it. It is already inside, sometimes taking long, languid naps, sometimes watching, all the time waiting to be woken up by a resonant voice.

  There is no one-size-fits-all beauty, no perfect girl, no ideal guy. There is only a fit, plain and simple and miraculous.

  8. All-or-Nothing Nation: Diets, Extreme Makeovers, and the Obesity Epidemic

  The slender girl in our culture is not the healthy antithesis of the pathological fat woman, but is in fact her sister—the kinship forged by the emotional attitudes that find expression through the body but remain otherwise mute, unknown and unexamined.

  —Kim Chernin

  This is a culture where we seesaw madly, hair flying and eyes alight, between crazed and constant consumption, where the insatiable hunger is near universal, as is the fanatical belief in the moral superiority of self-denial and self-control. Culturally, we would be diagnosed as bulimic not anorexic, daily veering back and forth between two extreme points, bingeing and purging. The frenzied adoration of the anorexic body, and the violent hatred of fat, on ourselves and on others, reveals not that anorexia is beautiful, nor that fat is particularly despicable, but that we ourselves are intolerably torn.

  —Marya Hornbacher

  Susan* drags herself out of bed, despite a serious urge to stay buried under the covers, and pulls on her tights and fleece jacket. She quietly slips out the front door of her shared house and heads to the park, where she will walk the loop—three miles—as she does every morning. Her latest alt country infatuation blares in her earphones and helps her keep pace.

  When she gets home, she showers quickly, inhales some instant oatmeal, and rushes to her car so she can get to work at her usual fifteen-minutes-late mark. As she pulls into the parking lot, she sees her boss wrestling with the sun visor on her windshield. Susan rushes in and plops down at her desk just in time.

  The day passes as most days do at the marketing firm where she works, uneventfully. She is still in a lower-level position, so she doesn’t get much responsibility. She spends most of her time instant messaging coworkers, “window-shopping” online, and doing the occasional faxing, copying, collating job.

  Lunch hour is in the corporate cafeteria, where stir-fry with brown rice is her unbroken routine. She refuses the cookies that her coworker brings in to share—giving the excuse that she is allergic to walnuts. She isn’t, but ever since college she has been trying hard not to eat sweets. She knows she will think about the cookie for the rest of the day.

  The afternoon actually moves fairly quickly because she is invited into a brainstorming meeting for a new account. She snacks on some carrots, trying to remind herself that the more small meals you eat throughout the day, the more weight you can lose. It feels nonsensical, like she is cheating.

  On her way home, she stops by the grocery store to pick up some fresh ingredients for the chili she wants to make that night. She loves cooking—is constantly thumbing through the latest cookbook, drooling over the eight-by-ten glossies of her favorite recipes as if they were porn centerfolds. The chili turns out well, and she begs her roommate to eat some with her. She hates eating alone.

  They spoon up the black beans and spicy corn as they sit in front of their favorite TV show, Gilmore Girls. Susan, too tired to clean up afterward, puts the dishes in the sink and crawls into bed. She recounts everything she ate that day—the oatmeal, the stir-fry, the carrots, the chili—and feels satisfied. Then she recounts everything she didn’t eat—the cookie, the candy bar she saw as she was waiting in the checkout line, the cupcakes someone brought to the marketing meeting, her roommate’s ice cream, calling to her in the freezer. The thought of those foods makes her stomach feel hollow and her heart deprived. She turns over on her side and curls up into a little ball, reminding herself that this feeling is far preferable to the gluttonous bloat she used to experience.

  Gareth wakes up at 6:00 A.M., drags herself out of bed, pulls on her sweats, sports bra, and a tank top, and heads to the YMCA just a few blocks from her house. After offering her membership card and a smile at the door, she heads upstairs and gets on one of the last available elliptical machines. She puts her iPod buds in her ears and starts rocking out.

  After a solid forty-five minutes of churning away, she goes back home, showers, throws on some new duds from Old Navy, drinks an ungodly amount of coffee, and grabs a Luna bar as she heads out the door. She rides the subway with a coworker. They share dreams from the night before, laugh about their supervisors’ incompetence, answer hipster boys’ winks with a few of their own.

  Work flies by because Gareth is insanely busy. She files briefs, makes a mountain of copies, exchanges the occasional inside joke with a cubicle mate over IM, checks her e-mail a thousand and one times, until finally it is lunch and she heads outside.

  She is practically blinded by the sun as she goes to a nearby park. She sits on a bench, cracks open her signature Diet Coke and a Tupperware filled with egg noodles, broccoli, and chicken—leftovers from the night before—and sings to herself quietly. The meal is good. The sun is too hot. She heads in after buying an apple from her favorite fruit vendor.

  The rest of the day is a bit sluggish. Sometimes Gareth wonders if she isn’t too efficient in the mornings. She can’t stand being bored. She passes the time updating her profile on Friendster (she has a new boyfriend she met online), writing an entry in a private blog she shares with three friends, and researching graduate schools; she wants to go back to school for a master’s in social work. She walks by the receptionist’s bowl of candies a few times and each time successfully resists her urge to grab a few. She is trying not to eat sweets.

  Five o’clock hits none too soon. She heads back onto the subway, busying herself during the trip home with her latest crochet project, a scarf for her cousin’s new baby.

  After climbing the five flights of stairs to her apartment, she is greeted by squeals and shrieks when she walks in the door. Her two roommates—one an elementary school teacher, the other a nursing student—are laughing at a sitcom on UPN. She plops down next to one of them on the hand-me-down couch and lets out a sigh. After agonizing a bit over what she should eat for dinner—I’ve been so good all day; I wish I had the energy to make a big salad—she succumbs to ordering in. She eats her favorite Thai dish, panang, while cracking up over her roommates’ impressions of Lorelai and Rory on Gilmore Girls.

  Afterward she feels the urge to go into the bathroom, to do what she never believed she would do, but she resists by distracting herself with a long phone call with her best friend—an investment banker who is constantly seeking her advice on his love life—then crashes into bed. After reading some Tom Robbins, one of her favorite authors, she turns off the light and lies awake, composing her meals for the next day. Eventually she drifts off to sleep.

  So which one of these pe
rfect girls is fat and which one is thin?

  The obesity and eating disorder epidemics are not separate issues but, in fact, flip sides of the same coin. Both conditions stem from our inability to think of health and well-being in terms of balance, what Buddhists call “the middle path.” Just as we are a white and black society, a rich and poor society, an us and them society, we are a thin and fat society. There is no middle ground. There is all and there is nothing.

  We are also a society of extreme makeovers and fantastical notions of physical transformation. We have no sense of body types or what health professionals call the “set point.” Dr. Susan Albers, author of Eating Mindfully: How to End Mindless Eating and Enjoy a Balanced Relationship with Food, explains: “According to the ‘set point’ theory . . . your body has a genetically predetermined weight range. Your body tries to keep your weight within that range and will automatically adjust your metabolism and food storage capacity to keep you from losing or gaining weight outside of that range or set point.” Far from having a set point, most of the girls I spoke with have a cut-and-paste idea of their own bodies—as if they could transform themselves into anything if they had enough time, money, and self-control.

  In my mother’s day, you could be “stringy” or “pear-shaped” or “sturdy.” Now you are either thin or fat. Perfect or not. Worthy of praise or deserving of scorn. In more than one hundred interviews, I met few women who actually had a realistic sense of what their bodies were capable of. In the age of extreme makeover, it is no surprise when a young woman weighing 250 pounds at five feet nine leans over her cup of coffee and says in a furtive whisper, “I’ve always thought I would eventually be a size five.”

  Another describes how her college roommate would slip out of their dorm room in the wee hours of the morning, then, later in the afternoon, nonchalantly ask, “Do you want to go to the gym? I haven’t been yet.” This deceptive, Herculean effort (because let’s face it, getting up that early in college is nothing short of Herculean) wasn’t about losing a few pounds or toning her triceps. “She wanted to change her entire body type,” her roommate explains. “She was short and stocky, and dreamed of being sinewy and tall. She really believed that could happen if she just went to the gym enough.” Even sadder than her delusion was her misplaced time and energy.