The price of perfection

Apologies for the blogging hiatus but I was busy doing my part for the tourist industry by exoticizing the other in Central America. There’s nothing like taking some light reading with you to the beach, so I brought on vacation with me a newly acquired copy of Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body. Published last year, it was written by Courtney E. Martin (co-blogger on Feministing) at age 25.

This book hit me like a ton of bricks. I was expecting yet another preachy text on The Negative Effects of Media on Girls’ Self Esteem (yawn). Instead, this book is an incredibly honest and eye-opening examination of the bizarre new forms of gendered self-hatred that have sprung to life in a post-feminist culture.

This is how she describes the new generation of “perfect girls”:

We get into good colleges but are angry if we don’t get into every college we applied to. We are the captains of the basketball teams, the soccer stars, the swimming state champs with boxes full of blue ribbons. We win scholarships galore, science fairs and knowledge bowls, spelling bees and mock trial debates. We are the girls with anxiety disorders, filled appointment books, five-year plans.

We take ourselves very, very seriously. We are the peacemakers, the do-gooders, the givers, the savers. We are on time, overly prepared, well read, and witty, intellectually curious, always moving…

We are relentless, judgmental with ourselves, and forgiving to others…. We carry the old world of guilt – center of families, keeper of relationships, caretaker of friends – with the new world of control/ambition – rich, independent, powerful. We are the daughters of feminists who said “You can be anything” and we heard “You have to be everything.”

We must get A’s. We must make money. We must save the world. We must be thin. We must be unflappable. We must be beautiful. We are the anorectics, the bulimics, the overexercisers, the overeaters. We must be perfect. We must make it look effortless.

Martin sees perfectionism as the driving force behind a generation of women who were brought up on girl power and Title IX, but are in no way exempt from the cultural imperative to beauty and thinness, try to do it all. The problem is, within every perfect girl is a starving daughter full of insecurity and self-doubt. The more we try to deny her, the more attention she demands. Our bodies quite literally become the territory upon which we battle ourselves.

I don’t know how many girls actually fit into this mold, but I couldn’t help feeling like she was talking directly to me and my friends. It can’t be a coincidence that some of the fiercest, smartest, funniest, most talented women I know are the same ones who only eat two bites of their dinner, or train endlessly for marathons, or schedule their life around spin class and weight watchers meetings.

And it wasn’t an accident that I packed this book in with my bikinis before vacation. As we are so constantly reminded by every advertisement we see, summer is no longer the carefree world of slip ‘n slides and popsicles we enjoyed as kids. Now it’s all about slimming, firming, tanning and toning for the much-dreaded swimsuit season.

I’d like to say that as a media-literate self-conscious feminist, I’m above it all. And yeah, I’m not doing a hundred crunches every night in hopes that I’ll wake up one day with a magical six pack. I’m not subsisting on carrot sticks and diet soda, and I’m not throwing up every other meal. I think Jennifer Love Hewitt looks WAY better in a swimsuit than say, Nicole Richie, and I think Jennifer Hudson looks even better than JLH.

But despite my best feminist intentions, I’m not immune to the enormous social pressure that is exerted on women to make us hate our bodies. A slim build and high metabolism may have saved me from an all-out eating disorder in high school and college but that didn’t mean I couldn’t find a million other flaws to obsess over. And in some ways post-college life has been even harder, as I’ve adjusted to the stress of living in a city where image is everything and working for a company where even the guys are on the Zone diet. It took reading this book for me to finally confess (first to my best friend, then my therapist) that for the past year I have been keeping a detailed list of everything I eat. What started out as a general effort to eat healthier and get more exercise quickly spiraled into obsessive calorie counting, food restricting, and guilt complexes for inevitably failing to adhere to my 1200 calorie goal. When I found myself sticking my finger down my throat in order to get rid of the “stomachache” I got from eating too many cookies, or French fries, or Italian food, I knew it had gone too far.

So, I took this book as my wake up call and after some stern advice from my therapist, I stopped. No more counting, no more purging. Of course, old habits die hard. I still know exactly how many calories are in my bowl of Shredded Wheat and soy milk, even if I’m not writing it down. I still couldn’t bring myself to order the Eggs Benedict at brunch so I settled for granola and yogurt. Honestly, I doubt my eating habits will change significantly, especially since if I’m not restricting certain foods I’ll be less likely to demolish entire chocolate bars in moments of weakness. But the main difference I notice is that I no longer spend all my time thinking about food –planning what to eat, thinking about what I ate, and calculating how much more I’m allowed to eat that day.

Martin estimates that if each of us spends the equivalent of an hour each day thinking about food, exercise, and what’s wrong with our bodies, by the time we’re 85 we will have wasted three years of our lives. Three fucking years. All I can say is thank god I came to my senses before it got any worse.

There’s a trade-off, though. Since I stopped counting calories, I have become less stressed out about food, but more stressed out about everything else in my life. Whereas I used to obsess about whether or not to get cream cheese on my bagel, now all of a sudden I’m freaking out about my career, my relationship, my future. I realized that I had been using my food obsession as an escape from the things that actually matter – when you feel like so many aspects of your life are out of your hands, it’s easier to focus on the little things you can control, like what you put in your mouth.

Until now, I didn’t fully understand what eating disorders are all about. It’s not about low self esteem, or the media, or your mom. Those things obviously contribute, but they fail to explain why so many smart thoughtful girls who “should know better” still fall into the trap. Fundamentally, disordered eating is about our fight to control our own bodies and our own lives. In a society that expects so much of us, yet gives us so few tools for autonomy and self-determination, is it such a surprise that we are battling ourselves?

I’ve recently come to realize that I’m not the only one who is struggling with the sense of being out of control. The quarter-life crisis may be a real phenomenon after all. Especially for us perfect girls – having been told all our lives that we can be anything, we suddenly find ourselves three years out of college and we still don’t seem anywhere close to becoming the famous writer/artist/actress/filmmaker/dancer that we wanted to be. Never mind that we are working full time, going to school, working part time, freelancing, volunteering, blogging, rehearsing, campaigning, performing, and all the while living in a place where something as simple as getting to work can turn into a full-blown MTA nightmare. But instead of appreciating the simple act of just being, all we feel is a nagging sense that we’re not good enough.

What makes it worse, though, is that we all feel so alone; since it's obviously not cool to admit that you are scared and insecure and unsure of yourself, instead we put on a brave perfect girl face and try to hide the starving daughter inside. This story by a dear friend of mine brings it home: each of us is busy comparing ourselves to our “perfect” friends who seem to have it all, without realizing that they are in the exact same boat as we are.

But one thing we have outgrown is the catty backbiting of adolescence; when it comes to our friends we are incredibly supportive and understanding. If we could only show ourselves the same compassion, maybe we could finally be comfortable in our own skins.