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

by Courtney E. Martin

  Perfect girls who are politically opposed (i.e., hate getting up early, dressing up, or taking orders) to the corporate work model, like me, are so convinced of our capacity to make it on our own that we pursue freelance journalism careers, start our own businesses, decide to dive into that abyss of freedom and, too often, poverty vaguely labeled “consulting.” (This approach often leads to a feverish and compulsive graduate school application process.) We may not be trapped in a taupe cage, but we have the same obstacles keeping us from becoming well known for our brilliance and accountability and getting lots of gigs and spending cash. Unlike our corporate peers, the self-employed have absolutely no chance of affirmation or reinforcement, unless you count being offered an opportunity to write a two-thousand-word article “for the experience” (i.e., no money) as a pat on the back.

  When we young women hit the real world, we aren’t accustomed to the idea of climbing the career ladder one rung at a time. We don’t plan on paying our dues in dead-end jobs. Perfect girls are impatient; we dream big and fall hard. Efficiency, not resiliency, is our strong suit. We’re in the market for fireworks, record breakers, unprecedented success. We are running, full force, without time to consider where the finish line might be.

  Sara Shandler had more reason than most to believe that she would bypass the drudgery of assistant jobs and head straight to prestige when she graduated from Wesleyan. At just eighteen years old, she edited an angst-filled response to Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia, cleverly titled Ophelia Speaks, in which she recruited girls to write about their experiences of adolescence. By her first year in college, she was crisscrossing the country on speaking engagements. Suddenly, just after having crawled out of the cesspool of adolescence herself, she was scrawling on the inside of her book “It’s hard and it gets better!” for thousands of teary-eyed teenagers who attended her book signings.

  Three years after the real peak of her book’s hype had died down, Sara was feeling confident as she moved to New York and started looking for senior jobs at magazines. The qualifications for some of the jobs she wanted were lofty: five years’ experience minimum. No problem, she reasoned. She’d started her book at seventeen, so that should count as five years of writing-editing experience. So what if it wasn’t with a big-name magazine? She even got a few interviews, all of which ended with a puzzled look and an admission: “You really are great, Sara, but you are just so young. You have virtually no experience.”

  Sara was crushed. After having bared her soul in her book, spoken at colleges across the country, appeared on talk shows, and been interviewed by journalists galore, she had no experience! It seemed that her age was not just a number, that the media world was just as tied to traditional notions of career development as other industries, that she would have to sit down at an assistant’s desk just like everyone else. After some crying jags and a few calls home, Sara accepted a job at Seventeen magazine, where she would write some articles, although she would also be organizing the table of contents and handling the occasional package that needed to be messengered.

  And thus began Sara’s long journey with a condition she dubbed “Desk Ass.” She explains, “I guess at the crux of it was this transition from my senior year of college, where I really had a handle on my whole life—good grades, professors who thought I was smart and interesting, terrific friends, and, yes, a body I felt good about—to living in New York and paying my dues, working long hours at my first real job for people who didn’t think I was anything special . . . and then my reward was this new, bigger, wider, flatter, dimpled ass. The ass of inactivity. Desk Ass.”

  Sara’s only solace was shopping at lunchtime and the occasional boredom-induced candy-bar run. When she got to leave the office and meet up with friends, she wanted to have lots of fun, indulge herself, taste something good if she couldn’t feel something good. “Cellulite was like the irreversible icing on this new life that I felt like I had no control over,” she jokes.

  Sara had been moving through life, up until that point, with a goal always on the horizon—as she describes it, a mentality in which she always knew “I want X.” First X was getting into a good college. She took the necessary steps to do that and got into Wesleyan. Then X became putting together Ophelia Speaks. She solicited writing tirelessly, edited, anthologized, and publicized. In college, when she wanted to lose a few pounds, she limited herself in the dining hall, cooked a couple of tofu dogs, and dipped them in some mustard for dinner. Done.

  But now, sitting behind a desk all day, vulnerable to the commands of more senior editors and part of a world that generally believes in the virtue of “paying dues,” she realized that she couldn’t execute in the same way. Her life no longer fit into six-month spurts of goal setting, pursuing, and achieving. Her success as a journalist depended on her own efforts, but also on time, the whims of her supervisors, the economy—chance.

  “Eventually,” Sara reflects, “I accepted it [Desk Ass], or learned to overlook it, at least, which was huge, since that was about being okay with not being totally in control of everything in my life. All sorts of factors were getting in the way of my being as controlling as I like to be, but . . . so be it. My ass was bigger, my boss didn’t fawn over me, my bank account balance was dismal. But oh well. Eventually I just sort of gave myself permission to figure those things out in time, and things slowly came together. Job, recognition, apartment. I even think my ass is better now. Not college-ass good, but totally respectable.”

  Sara’s story points to an important lesson for perfect girls. There is a fine line between having outlandish, dangerous expectations and believing in your own capacity to do great things. Maintaining a healthy, steady self-image is based on achievable goals and states of being that are independent of the market or your managers. Sara came to understand that time and patience, not rapid tenacity, were what she needed in order to survive the inevitably rocky post-college period. She had to have faith in her goodness as a well-intentioned, intelligent, and kind person beyond the front-page bylines she had hoped for or the promotions she had thought her potential promised. It was not her thinness or her killer commitment that would make her happy, it was her acceptance of the present—albeit confusing, sometimes disappointing, and occasionally boring—moment.

  Humble Pie, Anyone?

  This giant slice of humble pie is served to the best of us. Girls across the country have told me still-painful stories about their falls from the precipice of post-college fantasy to the pit of unpaid bills, bad coffee, and uncomfortable shoes.

  Jennifer, a minister’s daughter from Houston, was an executive assistant at a Yiddish theater company right out of college. When she answered the phone her first day on the job—“Jennifer speaking”—an old man on the other end screamed, “Jennifer? Jennifer? That sounds like a shiksa name! You aren’t Jewish, are you?” The daily abuse continued from there.

  Lissa,* a New York native, actually abandoned her first job as a CBS page and headed west to fulfill her romantic dreams of doing hands-on film work. When she was hired by two documentary filmmakers in their forties, she was thrilled. They were energetic, passionate, and, it turned out, lesbian partners. Which was fine until one day when half of the partnership raised her eyebrow over a burrito and said, “Lissa, I’ve really enjoyed working with you. I am really attracted to you.” It took Lissa five days to drive straight back to New York.

  Lee* worked for a nonprofit that had UN contracts, a huge endowment, and a huge creep as the supervisor. On business trips, he would ask Lee to come to his room so he could dictate his reflections on the day’s meetings. When she arrived, he would be wearing a spandex swimsuit and doing push-ups. In between action items, he told her about his Asian fetish and his recent Botox injections, and urged her to “loosen up.”

  Dawn* had to take an office job at a company she was morally opposed to, make copies and create spreadsheets late into the night, and then endure her supervisor’s weekly freak-outs about her boyfriend’s reluctance to g
et married. Sometimes the CEO would call Dawn to sit in on a board meeting, seemingly giving her an opportunity to learn something, only to call her “sweetie” and ask for coffee, light and sweet.

  Turns out, none of us is special. Yeah, yeah, we are all as unique as beautiful snowflakes. Each of us has a distinct blend of gifts to give the world. But when it is 9:00 P.M. and your boss still hasn’t given you the fax he so desperately needs you to send before you leave (and God forbid he learn to use the fax machine himself), you feel a few meltdowns short of a beautiful snowflake. You feel like a what’s-her-name. You feel, for all intents and purposes, invisible. Momma actually didn’t say there would be days like this.

  Dr. Robin Stern, psychologist and feminist author, has seen many women at this disappointing moment in their lives shuffle into her office dejected, tears welling up in their eyes. She says, “Sometimes there is so much disparity between what young women are told to expect and what actually happens that they get disillusioned. The ones who blame themselves tend to get depressed. If they aren’t good at managing their tough feelings, sometimes they get stuck exercising massive amounts of control in order to just keep going, or worst-case scenario, they back off from the ladder altogether and give up the climb. It is all much worse if they grew up seeing themselves as special or precious.”

  Part of this attitude, of course, is about privilege. Plenty of perfect girls were raised in households where they didn’t learn to delay gratification. We were conditioned to articulate our goals and then get help to make them happen. Sure, we had to do our schoolwork, and there is no shortcut around the track during practice. But in general, perfect girls have resources, networks, open doors, and encouragement—safety nets they never expected to fall into. Our whole lives, we leapt as high as we wanted and evaded sobering falls. When I didn’t get the editor-in-chief position of my high school newspaper, I cried a little, then quickly convinced myself that I liked commentary better anyway. When I didn’t get into Harvard or Yale, I cried a lot, then started spouting statistics about the value of an all-female college. But distraction is not so easy post-college. Hard work, patience, depersonalization, unwavering self-confidence, and resilience are all necessary skills to get to the top. There is no leaping, only radical humility. Turns out we must climb the ladder like mere mortals. This is a deflating realization, but accepting it is ultimately healthy for mind and body, and also can be a great relief.

  Jane’s job at the agency was a complete disaster. Calvin turned out to be a nightmare—instantly confessing his deepest, darkest secrets to Jane despite the professional setting and vast difference in age. The office got messier and the work less intriguing—she was scheduling meetings not for Augusten Burroughs but for a security guard writing a trashy tell-all. She developed chronic migraines—at her worst four or five a week—and worked through the pain. When she thought about quitting, she could only imagine the disappointment on her mother’s face, the endless hours of job searching, the potentially violent fit that Calvin would throw.

  Jane started doing what so many young women do when they feel fooled and out of control—she started bingeing. She ate entire boxes of Entenmann’s mini-cookies or pints of Ben & Jerry’s. Sometimes she binged on healthy cereals, such as Kashi, somehow justifying bowls and bowls of it with the low calorie count. When she was feeling really hopeless and far from home, she made herself throw up afterward. “I’ve never had a full-blown eating disorder,” Jane tells me during our first interview, “but I do have a bingeing and purging tendency. If I eat something that I consider unhealthy or bad, that has any sort of stigma to it, then I consider purging it. Usually I don’t.”

  “What keeps you from doing it?” I ask.

  “I have this one friend who can’t get pregnant because she was bulimic, and for me having children is the greatest thing a woman has to look forward to. As much as I want to be thin and successful, I don’t want to deprive myself of that. Had I not had a friend like that, I don’t know . . .”

  Eating disorders can greatly impair women’s ability to have children. Dr. Brenda Woods of Remuda Ranch attests that “the medical community doesn’t even consider eating disorders as a cause of infertility because patient lab work usually comes back normal,” though one study showed that nearly one in five patients at an infertility clinic had eating disorders. Even if women with eating disorders manage to get pregnant, their disease can cause devastating consequences for their babies; pregnant women with eating disorders have a higher incidence of first-trimester miscarriages, stillbirths, low infant birth weights, breech babies, and congenital malformations. They are also more likely to suffer from postpartum depression and have more problems breast-feeding.

  Though Jane scared herself out of vomiting with the threat of this kind of fate, she certainly wasn’t freed from her body issues. She didn’t have the energy to use her newly purchased gym membership. She didn’t have time to prepare healthy foods. She was lonely, disappointed, and hungry for something, anything that would make her feel better. In a matter of months, she gained sixty pounds.

  Grasping for Control

  After one has swallowed the giant slice of humble pie, a stomachache and a sense of helplessness set in. The average post-college flunky has no control over her work and, therefore, no control over her time. She feels at the mercy of others—her landlord, her boss, the jerk buying her a drink at the bar. When the rest of the world feels chaotic, a diet is something finite and tidy. If your roommate, your coworker, or your best friend is insensitive, food feels comforting. You may not be able to choose what hours you work, what neighborhood you live in, or how much money you make, but at least you can determine what you eat for lunch. Your sphere of influence shrinks post-college, but your body is still at your mercy.

  As a result, a lot of young women resort to rigid control of their appetites and their fitness regimens. Like children of divorce, many perfect girls experiencing the disappointment, chaos, and false promises of the real world blame themselves for what is happening. Refusing to indulge in foods they crave is a form of self-punishment. I don’t deserve that ice cream. I have nothing to show for myself. I don’t make enough money to spend so frivolously. Tiny portions at lunch make them feel superior to their coworkers who always claim to be on diets but don’t have the self-control to avoid the leftover sandwiches from the board meeting.

  Likewise, when a perfect girl can’t excel in the boardroom, she can always excel in the weight room. I will work out longer, faster, harder. I may have a meaningless job, but I’m not lazy. You sit around all day long, now move! These girls are the ones who actually get their money’s worth for their gym memberships, clinging to sleep-depriving routines of going before and after work to run on the treadmill, to take yoga, Pilates, aerobics, and spinning classes. They like the instructors who are the most maniacal, the ones who yell at them and call them lazy (matching the voices inside their heads). They try to outshine, outstretch, outspin the other girls in the class. Not surprisingly, a lot of the girls who go this route were once high school or college athletes. The dedication is familiar; the obsession takes hold quickly.

  One recent college grad I spoke with worked as a paralegal in a law firm and had recently discovered that she had no interest in law. To cope with the monotony of the copying and collating, she started running eight miles a day, every day. She leaned over her cup of tea and admitted to me, “I’ve decided to train for a marathon because I think that will help me ease up a bit on the running. There are days when you are supposed to run just a few miles or not run at all. I think that would be good for me.”

  I responded calmly, but my inner radar was blaring. Run a marathon in order to run less? I could barely get myself around the three-mile loop at Prospect Park without Kanye West blaring in my ears and the temperature just right—too hot and I got tired, too cold and I got cranky.

  After further investigation, I found out that she had indeed suffered from a bout of anorexia, what she called “a weird p
hase,” while studying in London. After she shrank dramatically, her parents forced her to stay home before heading back to school to start her fall term. She would sneak out before they woke up to go on long runs in the dark. She recounted this time in her life as if it were a part of her distant past, a silly, childish phase like mall bangs or a belly button ring.

  A few months later, still waiting for her response to some follow-up questions, I got back in touch. We shot a few quick e-mails back and forth:

  Haven’t head from you. Is everything okay?

  Sorry, I’m working on getting back to you. Life has been pretty crazy—I got a stress fracture in my foot.

  Oh no! Were you running? When is it supposed to be healed?

  Yeah, I have no idea when it’s going to be better. I’m totally freaking out about it, actually. I’ve been stripped of my vice! I feel like I have no way to deal with any sort of stress. I can’t work out at all, which is impossibly hard for me, and I probably won’t be able to run the marathon either . . .

  She never responded to my follow-up questions.

  Starving for Guidance

  Perfect girls, flailing and fresh in the real world, need mentors. Women who have dealt with the uncertainty of a new career and navigated the maze of corporate cubicles all the way to the corner office should have insight on setting realistic expectations, striving but also self-protection, stamina in a slow-moving corporation. A mentor can offer positive feedback at a time when there is none, a shoulder to cry on when criticism creeps in, a free lunch now and again.