Hugo Schwyzer

It’s been a smoky week here in Southern California. Two places I know well have been burning: Griffith Park and Catalina Island. I know almost all the trails in the former; the latter hosts one of my favorite dirt marathons, which I last did in 2004. I’m thinking this morning about the people who’ve been displaced, the firefighters who have worked so hard, and about all the countless animals who’ve been terrified, hurt, or worse.

In comparison, all I’ve faced is a little tightness in my chest from running hard in this poor air we’ve got, with a little stinging around the eyes. Not much to worry about by comparison. Some friends and I did the 8.6 mile Mt. Wilson trail early this morning, and coming down we could see the brown haze of smoke and other pollutants sitting on top of the entire L.A. basin.

So, last night I finished Courtney Martin’s Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating your Body It’s a powerful book, even as it revisits familiar ground. This is a long post, so the rest will be below the fold.

Courtney was born in 1979; when I started teaching women’s history, she was a sophomore in high school. Now she’s a professor herself. And while I’m determined not to make this post into another rumination on ageing, there’s a sobering component to reading Courtney’s work. When I taught my first women’s history class in the spring of 1995, I made body image and dysmorphia a central component of the class. I knew enough to know that women who are distracted by hunger, focused on self-loathing or self-denial, don’t need to devote their blossoming feminist focus solely on larger issues like pay equity or the plight of their Third World sisters. That’s not to say that a singular focus on body image issues is appropriate; academic feminism has an obligation to cast a wide net, taking in global as well as intensely personal issues. But I noticed in 1995, and still notice today, that many of my students have a hard time connecting their own intense self-absorbtion (often bordering on self-hatred) with a larger cultural hatred of women’s bodies. And dealing with weight and body image issues is not discretional for any introductory course in feminism; it’s mandatory.

In the mid-1990s, I was much more likely to be told by my students that anorexia was a “white girl’s disease”; in the first Clinton Administration, some still were convinced that African-American and Hispanic culture were more accepting of curvier bodies. One of the best aspects of Courtney Martin’s book is that she does a very good job of showing just how global and cross-cultural disordered eating and self-hatred have become. With each passing year, the number of my “students of color” (80% of our campus is non-white) who self-report body image issues in their journals rises. Though I still encounter a few people who insist that anorexia and bulimia are primarily found in middle-class white girls, those who still make this claim are invariably either non-white men or older white women. More than once, I’ve had a young black man angrily tell a classroom that in “his” community, they “appreciate” a woman with more “meat”, and that as a consequence, “real sisters” don’t have eating disorders. Usually at this point, I let a young woman of color — one of the “sisters” — take him publicly to the woodshed and burst his bubble (to mix a metaphor or two.) Bottom line, those of us who work with college students and high schoolers now know that body image issues are equally serious for young women in Compton and Calabasas, Palos Verdes and Paramount, Bradbury and Boyle Heights.

Courtney’s book is very rooted in the cultural present: references to Paris Hilton, Lindsey Lohan, and 50 Cent abound. The drawback to writing with so many allusions to pop culture is that the book will seem very dated in a decade. The advantage to writing with those allusions is that this book will, for the next few years, have a vital immediacy for the young women who pick it up. Courtney is about a decade older than my youngest students today, old enough to have a broader view than they do, young enough to still be conversant in their even-evolving lingo. Her description of early 21st century American society’s view of women’s bodies is devastating; her careful use of her own story and those of her high school friends is balanced with interviews with a remarkably diverse group of young women who give credence (as if it were needed) to the claim that millions upon millions of young women are exhausted and made miserable by the relentless pursuit of personal perfection.

I wrote my “fourteen Marthas, not one Mary” post before I read Courtney’s book, but I note that we come to more or less the same conclusion. I wrote in March:

The parents (of my youth groupers) have told them all their lives that they can “be anything they want to be”, which sounds great — until the girls are forced to excel at virtually everything they do in every facet of their lives so as “not to miss out” on any opportunity to succeed. The superwomen complex is alive and well in girls so young that some were born after Bill Clinton became president…

Courtney wrote:

We are the daughters of feminists who said, “You can be anything” and we heard “You have to be everything.”

When I first read that line as part of an excerpt from Martin’s book, I posted about it, concerned that Courtney was — in part — blaming feminism for the debilitating social, academic, and aesthetic pressures young women face. I’m glad to say that after actually reading the whole book, I can say she does nothing of the kind. I had misinterpeted the line, I’m glad to say. Feminism is not her target; rather, Courtney takes careful note of how many women of her mother’s generation preached empowerment and possibility to their daughters while simultaneously making it obvious how uncomfortable they were in their own skin. She pays due attention to the role of both mothers and fathers in shaping daughters attitudes towards their bodies.

I learned a long time ago that when working with young women with eating disorders, one of the first and most important questions to ask is “How did your mother feel about her body?” Another question worth asking: “How did your father respond to you when you began to go through puberty?” Too often the answer to the first question is “My mom was always on a diet” and the answer to the second is “My Dad pulled away a bit, he hugged me less, he seemed more guarded.” Courtney makes it refreshingly clear that the broader culture is not solely to blame for all this misery. Parents do have a vital role to play. She writes:

Most mothers do the best they can so that they do not pass on their pathologies to their daughters and sons. Even the moms who say one thing but model another are hoping that their children won’t discern the difference… Yet we soaked up what they did and how they felt. Fifty years of attachment theory — the psychology of the unique physiological and emotional bonding that goes on between mother and child — confirm that no connection is more intimate than that between a mother and a daughter, no bond of bodies more tangled and powerful.

Word.

I’ve worked with a lot of young women with serious eating disorders, both at the college and in my youth group. And time and again, I’ve seen anxious parents hovering, wondering what to do to get their beautiful, clever, anorexic or bulimic daughter to love herself. And sometimes, though I’m a childless man who’s battled an eating disorder of my own, I give them the advice they ask me for. And though I know all the local places to refer to, I also gently point out that they (parents) need to consider their own attitudes. A mother who lavishes praise on her daughter while making self-deprecating remarks about her own ageing body, or a father who is uncomfortable with his daughter’s growing breasts and hips and communicates that discomfort through even the slightest reduction in affection — these parents are trying to put out a fire with gasoline. It’s good — very good — that Courtney’s book makes that point plainly.

Of course, the trickiest thing with a book like this is the indispensable “what ought to be done” section that must come at the end. Sobering and skillful analysis of the problem, detailed accounts of the cause of all of this misery — all that is necessary and good. But what to offer young women in the throes of perfectionism? To her credit, Courtney doesn’t propose instant panaceas:

There are no total and instantaneous solutions to a problem so intractable, so cultural, so institutional; there are only individual choices made each day that add up to change.

That’s right, even if it’s not the miraculous answer for which so many clamor. (And no, my fellow Christian brothers and sisters, let’s be honest and admit that a great relationship with the Lord doesn’t solve the problem right away either. Let’s look at our churches — how many women serving Christ and walking with Him daily are suffering from the exact same anxieties, the exact same crushing perfectionism, the exact same body dysmorphia as their unchurched sisters? Telling our daughter to “pray more” is a piss-poor solution.) Courtney tells us how she got started on her journey to letting go, even as she reminds us that she doesn’t yet have all the answers for herself. In the struggle against perfectionism and eating disorders, the best role models for recovery are themselves very publicly imperfect. They are just a little further up the trail, a little more inclined to self-forgiveness, to self-love, to self-acceptance. And they have a story to share about how they got there. Courtney’s is one such story, and she tells it well.

This is a rich and important book that touches on an extraordinary number of issues, from the absence of women in hip-hop to internet pornography to Title IX to the “post-college blues” that so often prove so crushing to young women in the first two to three years after graduation. Inevitably, Courtney can’t cover all of these influences exhaustively, and a reader familiar with these issues may be hungry for more than this book can offer. But as an overall introduction to the scope of the contemporary problem, and as a catalyst for discussion about long-term solutions, Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters is a tremendous success.