Archive for the 'The Martha Complex: perfectionism in adolescent girls' Category

On “Warrior Girls”, knee injuries, and the tangible costs of adolescent perfectionism: some thoughts on Michael Sokolove’s article

Published
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Hugo Schwyzer
on May 8, 2008
in Athletics and Fitness, Body, Favorite Posts 2008, Mentoring, Sports, The Martha Complex: perfectionism in adolescent girls and Youth
. 13 Comments

The New York Times has a preview up today of a long article coming out on Sunday in their magazine: The Uneven Playing Field. It’s by Michael Sokolove, and based on his forthcoming book Warrior Girls: Protecting our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women’s Sports. (I’ve pre-ordered the book, and will review it this summer when it comes out.)

In this lengthy adaptation on the Times website, Sokolove writes about what he sees as the extraordinary number of knee (ACL) injuries that are being sustained by female athletes, soccer players in particular. His thesis:

(the epidemic is) part of a national trend in the wake of Title IX and the explosion of sports participation among girls and young women. From travel teams up through some of the signature programs in women’s college sports, women are suffering injuries that take them off the field for weeks or seasons at a time, or sometimes forever.

Girls and boys diverge in their physical abilities as they enter puberty and move through adolescence. Higher levels of testosterone allow boys to add muscle and, even without much effort on their part, get stronger. In turn, they become less flexible. Girls, as their estrogen levels increase, tend to add fat rather than muscle. They must train rigorously to get significantly stronger. The influence of estrogen makes girls’ ligaments lax, and they outperform boys in tests of overall body flexibility — a performance advantage in many sports, but also an injury risk when not accompanied by sufficient muscle to keep joints in stable, safe positions. Girls tend to run differently than boys — in a less-flexed, more-upright posture — which may put them at greater risk when changing directions and landing from jumps. Because of their wider hips, they are more likely to be knock-kneed — yet another suspected risk factor.

The rate (of ACL injury) for women’s soccer is 0.25 per 1,000, or 1 in 4,000, compared with 0.10 for male soccer players. The rate for women’s basketball is 0.24, more than three times the rate of 0.07 for the men. The A.C.L. injury rate for girls may be higher — perhaps much higher — than it is for college-age women because of a spike that seems to occur as girls hit puberty.

At this point, my heart was sinking. Was this going to be anti-feminist ideology dressed up as professed concern for the health of young women? Was Sokolove trying to scare parents into pulling their daughters out of competitive sports? I even wondered if Sokolove was some sort of shill for the anti-Title IX crowd, trying a new tactic in their never-ending crusade to roll back a policy of equal funding for women’s sports. As a passionate sports fan, married to a former club soccer star, I have a deep and abiding commitment to women’s athletics — particularly the “beautiful game” of what the rest of the world calls football.

Happily, reading the article to the end (it is ten pages long) makes it at least fairly apparent that Sokolove is committed to women’s sports. Rather than imploring parents to pull their daughters off soccer teams, he writes sensibly and knowledgeably about the causes of what is undeniably a common problem: catastrophic ACL injuries among young female soccer players. The chief culprits have nothing to do with inherent feminine weakness. Rather, they are two-fold: poor bio-mechanics and the exhausting “club” system in high school and college that leaves many talented girls playing a demanding sport literally year-round. Continue reading ‘On “Warrior Girls”, knee injuries, and the tangible costs of adolescent perfectionism: some thoughts on Michael Sokolove’s article’

A long and enthusiastic review of “Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 11, 2007
in Books, Eating disorders, Feminism and The Martha Complex: perfectionism in adolescent girls
. 9 Comments

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. Continue reading ‘A long and enthusiastic review of “Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters”’

More on young women and perfectionism, people-pleasing, and the enduring fear of the “slut”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 25, 2007
in Favorite posts 2007, Feminism, Sexuality, Teaching, The Martha Complex: perfectionism in adolescent girls and Youth
. 15 Comments

It’s a busy day here, and the great disappointment of the next few hours is that I won’t get to see any of the Liverpool-Chelsea Champions League semifinal.

I saw Courtney Martin on MSNBC this morning, talking about her book. I’ve got her book, and Jessica Valenti’s new one, both coming in the mail. I look forward to reviewing them both on this blog. Based on excerpts that appeared here, I had some comments here and here about the Martin tome.

I am so glad that a larger discussion of women’s perfectionism and people-pleasing is really taking off in the blogosphere. Of all the posts I’ve put up this year, my Fourteen Marthas, not one Mary is perhaps the one of which I am most proud. And I was delighted to read an outstanding take on this same subject, also inspired by the Martin book, from Amanda Marcotte. Read the whole post, but this insight is key:

My theory is that perfectionism is the tribute that women with opportunities pay to sexism.

Read the rest of the post to see that idea fleshed out.

One of Amanda’s commenters got me thinking, asking:

Any thoughts, Amanda, on the connection between perfectionism and purity? I sometimes feel as if perfectionism is the new purity, or the traditional demand for female purity in new clothes, or women’s response to still-current demands for female purity, but I’m wondering if you see this connection as well.

Amanda hasn’t answered yet, but I’ve been mulling it this morning.

One aspect of perfectionism and people-pleasing that I haven’t touched on is related to the “purity” obsession, and that’s the tendency I’ve noticed in many young women for perfectionism (and compulsive dieting) to be closely connected to sexual guilt. Bear with me, as I’m musing here — this is a theory in process of being developed, but it’s grounded in years of teaching and youth work.

A disturbing number of young women still seem profoundly conflicted about sex. Statistics tell us — and my own experience as a pro-feminist gender studies professor and longtime youth leader tells me as well — that a great many teenage girls and college-aged women are “having sex.” Some of them come from conservative backgrounds in which pre-marital sex is seen as immoral and sinful, and some come from more liberal environments where “safety” rather than “purity” is emphasized. Some speak (and write in their journals) enthusiastically and positively about their sexual decision-making, while others seem tormented by ambivalence, anxiety, and guilt.

It’s remarkable how persistent the notion that “good girls don’t” has proven. Young women born in the last two decades, a generation after the sexual revolution, and raised in tolerant, even feminist households, still sometimes quietly report (and again, folks, this is all anecdotal based on my teaching and mentoring experience) guilt and conflict over their sexual choices. Even when they didn’t absorb the “True Love Waits” message from parents or pastors or peers, they couldn’t help but pick up the romantic ideal of “waiting ’till marriage” from somewhere in the broader culture. Though Disney movies never explicitly reference virginity before marriage, the girls I work with “assume” that the “princesses are all virgins.” And the number of high school and college-aged young women whose views were partly shaped by the “princess” culture — which is surely part of the “purity” culture” — is stunningly high.

Again, all anecdotal: I think there is a connection between guilt (or at least ambivalence) over pre-marital sex and an intensified perfectionism. Far too many of our little sisters, far too many of my students, still internalize the message that having sex too early makes them into “bad girls” and “sluts.” And whether or not they articulate that sense of undeserved shame, it seems to me that many of them overcompensate by trying all the harder to be “perfect and pure” in other areas. The desire to mold the body to more closely meet an unobtainable ideal often seems to intensify once a young woman becomes sexually active, and I don’t think it’s always because of an anxiety about pleasing a boyfriend. It seems at least partially linked to a desire to prove that “even if I’m having sex, I’m still a ‘good girl’, and I prove my ‘goodness’ through self-denial, through exercise, through even more of an effort to live up to a societal ideal.”

Even in our own relatively liberated era, pre-marital virginity remains an explicit ideal for many and an implicit ideal for many more. Many of my students talk boldly and confidently about their sexual decision-making in one breath, and express occasional wistfulness about “a white wedding” and “waiting until then” in the other. (Some, of course, are completely unconflicted, and I don’t mean to diminish them. Then again, there are some young women who don’t feel tortured by the ideal of slenderness either. Would that their numbers were greater!) Many of them seem to feel as if by choosing to become sexually active, they’ve fallen short. And some of these seem to compensate for their own perceived failure in this one area by redoubling their efforts in another. Call it the “if I’m earning straight As and I’m volunteering 20 hours a week and I’m on this committee and president of that club and playing this position on that team and keeping my body at that weight, then I can’t possibly be the bad girl that somewhere inside of me I’m afraid that I am” syndrome.

Some of my secular feminist allies may doubt that this guilt (and the concomitant compensation with perfectionism) is linked as closely to sex as I suggest. My conservative friends may embrace the theory as further “evidence” that pre-marital sex is bad, particularly for young women. If even women who weren’t pressured to “wait” by their families still seem sometimes to feel conflicted about their sexual choices, my right-wing buddies will no doubt argue, isn’t this evidence that pre-marital sexual activity violates some natural desire on the part of all women to save themselves for their husbands? I am reluctant to give that old canard any credence at all, and I fear that I may be doing so here. (After all, it’s obvious that chastity is no prophylaxis against anxiety or people-pleasing; spend time in any conservative evangelical community, and you’ll run into lots of exhausted, weight-obsessed virgins.)

I write as a professor and a mentor who has been teaching classes on gender and sexuality for well over a decade; I’ve read countless student journals and led innumerable small group discussions with both college and high-school women. I am convinced, as Courtney Martin is convinced, that guilt, perfectionism, anorexia, and people-pleasing are epidemic among young women today, and that that epidemic extends to every strata of American society. I am worried that despite generations of progress to create a more egalitarian society, many young women today still feel a crushing pressure to live up to unobtainable ideals. The shame and guilt they struggle with is different, perhaps, from that with which their grandmothers wrestled, but it is no less debilitating. And I am at least somewhat convinced that the ancient, ugly, lingering stigma of the “slut” and the “dirty girl” plays a considerable part in the “perfection projects” of a great many young women today.

Some thoughts on Courtney Martin, young women’s exhaustion, “if/then” thinking and the corporate appropriation of feminist language

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 23, 2007
in Feminism, The Martha Complex: perfectionism in adolescent girls and Youth
. 21 Comments

Since I posted yesterday on this excerpt from Courtney Martin’s new book, I’ve been thinking more about this one phrase of hers that troubled me:

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

On the one hand, I recognize the truth here — so many young women do hear the first message as the second. And Martin is right that for a particular generation of feminists — those raised in the 1960s and 1970s, the mothers of today’s young perfectionists — the “you can be anything” message was absolute gospel. But (and I say this not having read the entire book yet, only this excerpt) I’m worried that casual readers might come away with the impression that organized feminism is somehow chiefly to blame for the crushing, exhausting burdens our little sisters now carry in their hearts and in their bodies.

I worry about this interpretation because it’s one I sometimes hear from my more conservative students in my women’s studies course. These young women are keenly aware of the pressure to be thin and beautiful, independent and multi-faceted. Like their sisters, they are often raw and tired and frustrated. But somehow they’ve picked up the impression that feminism is to blame for their exhaustion. They come into the course with a sense of the past (picked up from both the mainstream and conservative media) that is idealized and sanitized. And their sense is that not so long ago (usually, they point to the supposed halcyon days of the 1950s), women had fewer pressures. One young woman wrote in her journal a year or two ago (I remember her words fairly vividly, though this is surely a paraphrase):

I wish I lived fifty years ago. I would then only have to be a wife and a mother. I could be curvy, like Marilyn, instead of super-thin. I wouldn’t have to worry about both a relationship and a career. I wouldn’t have to cope with the mixed message of “love is all you need to be happy” and “don’t rely on a man, stay single and free.” I wouldn’t feel so much pressure to please everybody, instead I could just focus on pleasing my husband and my children. Yes, I would have much less freedom to do things, but I would have so much more freedom from pressure. And maybe this course will prove me wrong, but it seems to me that feminism, by asking us to do everything men do as well as what women do, has made things worse for us.

(By the way, perhaps in honor of FDR, I often talk about “freedom from” and “freedom to” in the context of feminist history. That dyad comes up early in the course, and my students get sick of hearing about it.)

My student — and perhaps Courtney Martin, though I can’t gauge the latter’s intent until I read the whole darned book — makes a serious and common mistake. On the one hand, many young women today have no authentic sense of just how rigid, stifling, and fundamentally unsatisfying domesticity was for millions of American women two generations ago. I give them excerpts from The Feminine Mystique, but many of them remain captivated by the fantasy that a good marriage and healthy children (perhaps with a nice house, white picket fence, and so forth) is all that any woman needs for deep and enduring happiness. While they admit to considerable cynicism about the chances of finding “a good guy”, many of them speak wistfully and nostalgically of a golden age when women could be softer, rounder, and less pressured to perform in the classroom and the boardroom. Trying to convince them that that “golden age” existed only for a privileged and fortunate few is sometimes hard work. Some folks just don’t want their bubbles burst.

I call these students my “if/then” kids, because so many of them say something like “IF I met the right guy, THEN I would consider getting married and staying home with the kids. It’s what I’d really like to do, but I just don’t think I’m likely to find someone. But if I did, then…” If/then thinking depresses me no end, because it seems to suggest that women’s pursuit of independence is only a response to the lack of honorable, decent, reliable men. If/then thinking suggests that “if only more men were reliable and willing to settle down and stay committed, then feminism wouldn’t be necessary.” It suggests that the goals of the women’s movement were developed entirely in response to bad male behavior, and though there is some historic truth to this, the “if/then” analysis completely underestimates what many feminists (including this one) argue is the healthy and perfectly natural desire for women to be self-determining agents in every aspect of their lives.

So back to the point about feminism and pressure. It’s absolutely true that feminists have told young women “You can be whatever you want to be.” It is absolutely true that the feminist movement has opened up extraordinary possibilities for women, possibilities that simply would not otherwise have existed. And it is true that with more choices there comes the inevitable pressure to make a choice; that’s part and parcel of growing up But no feminist I know now or in the past forty years has pushed the “superwoman” complex onto her daughters! That complex is pushed by a variety of decidedly non-feminist forces (big media, the consumer products industry, big fashion) which realized that women’s spending patterns are heavily driven by insecurity. A woman who is happy in her own skin is inclined, all things considered, to spend a good deal less on clothes, make-up, accessories, diet pills, and so forth. Women’s anxiety and corporate profits are clearly, almost inextricably linked at this point.

Feminists did, as Martin says, tell their daughters “You can be all that you want to be.” But it was Vogue and Elle, MTV and the WB that told those same young women, “yes, you can be anything you like, but here’s our narrowly defined, elusive, unobtainable ideal. Come chase it!” The magazines and the televison programs learned that cloaking their marketing in a thin veneer of feminist rhetoric made it exciting, edgy, palatable. And not surprisingly, many young women today feel alienated by the language of female empowerment because for as long as they’ve been alive, that language has been used to sell them something else that is “indispensable”. They confuse authentic feminism, which is desperately concerned with women’s happiness and self-determination, with a corporate culture that skillfully appropriated that language of personal fulfillment merely to increase its own profits. They don’t fully trust the message because the message has been stolen.

It is undeniable that young women are under colossal emotional pressure these days. The guilt about food, the guilt about failing to people-please, the guilt about letting down everyone around them; it’s all crushing. And it’s true that many of these overworked and anxious young women wouldn’t have the same pressure to succeed if there hadn’t been a feminist movement. But the anxiety they feel isn’t rooted in women’s liberation, it’s rooted in young women’s susceptability to the overwhelming pressure from media and market forces, forces that see a bottomless gold mine in the increased buying power of women. But that buying power will only lead to corporate profits if young women can be kept anxious, unsatisfied, and filled with self-loathing.

Fourteen Marthas, not one Mary: a retreat report and a long meditation on girls, pressure, parents, and people-pleasing

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 12, 2007
in All Saints Pasadena, Christianity, Faith, Favorite posts 2007, Feminism, The Martha Complex: perfectionism in adolescent girls, Youth and Youth ministry
. 23 Comments

I’m in my office, just before 8:00 on a Monday morning. Daylight Savings Time has arrived early, as almost everyone knows, and I am happy. (Even if getting up this morning at five for my boxing session felt particularly challenging.)

I had a wonderful time once again with the All Saints confirmation class this weekend on our retreat in the San Bernardino mountains. (I’ve written about past retreats on this blog: here are the 2005 and 2006 reports.). I was a bit disappointed by the abnormally warm weather and the nearly complete absence of snow, despite the fact that we were up in the mountains three weeks earlier than usual.

Though in 2005 we had more boys than girls in our confirmation class, this year our gender ratio was wildly skewed. After a couple of cancellations, we ended up taking fourteen girls and one boy up to Big Bear for the weekend retreat. (The boy, a very outgoing and relaxed kid, was more than delighted at his unique status.) In our intimate and emotional discussions Friday night and Saturday, one clear pattern emerged in the stories these young women were telling about their lives.

After years and years of teaching confirmation classes, I’ve noticed that each class has a slightly different “feel.” The 2007 “Seekers” confirmation class is not merely notable for being overwhelmingly female; this year’s crop is also marked by an often frantic desire to live up to the expectations of the outside world. Never have I gone on retreat with so many young women who were so completely exhausted! I’m not talking about temporarily underslept; I’m talking about girls who are 14-16 years old whose daily schedules are as demanding as that of a young Japanese businessman trying to climb the ladder at Sony.

Never have the youth leaders had to work so hard to convince so many kids to take a weekend away! These girls weren’t worried about missing dances or parties. They were worried about missing speech tournaments, SAT prep classes, and biology homework. They were worried about not being able to exercise and stay fit for their various team sport commitments. Many begged to be allowed to bring some books to study from “in our free time.” (We have a fairly strict “no homework” policy; the kids know about this weekend six months in advance.) And the thought of spending forty-eight hours away from their elaborately programmed schedules and responsibilities was terrifying for many of them.

Before a retreat, I always joke with the other youth leaders about “packing plenty of Kleenex”. We expect a lot of tears as we go through our emotional, spirit-filled weekend. But rarely have we had as many sniffles and wet eyes as we did these past few days. On Friday night, as we “checked in” with our fourteen girls and one boy about their lives and their faith journey, it was as if a massive dam had suddenly broken. One after another, they broke down. Some were angry at themselves, others angry at God, many confessed feeling utterly overwhelmed by pressure and expectations. The most common phrase I heard all night was one I don’t always anticipate to be the most common: “I feel so guilty.” These girls had guilt and shame weighing them down. I could see it in the slump of their shoulders, in the puffiness of their eyes.

The specific pressures vary. We have one girl who’s a dancer, a very good one; she’s trying to get ready to audition for professional companies at the same time that she’s carrying a full load of advanced placement classes as a sophomore. Another girl is captain of her debate team and active in student government at her school. Her days begin at five and end at midnight. She does three to four hours of homework a night, tutors underprivileged kids, prepares for speech tournaments and is gearing up to run for class president for next year. She’s a tenth-grader, but her anxiety about not “getting into a good school” and “letting everyone down” is so palpable that when she tries to relax she ends up sitting and shaking rather like a wet chihuahua.

As a feminist and a Christian, the desperate “people-pleasing” of so many of these young women troubles me. Many of them acknowledge carrying the double burden familiar to so many modern women: these girls know that they are expected to live up to traditional feminine standards of behavior and looks, at least much of the time. (Three girls talked quietly about their struggles with disordered eating and body self-loathing.) But in addition to the cultural expectation to be bright-eyed, cheerful, virginal and pleasing, they also feel pressured to be intellectually, athletically, and professionally successful. They all volunteer (often as part of school-mandated community service). Their parents 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! That breaks my heart.

As we wrapped up our first session Friday night, I pulled out the Bible. I read two sections. From Matthew, I read my beloved 10:37:

Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves his son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.

Honestly, it’s often twice as hard to get young women, raised since birth to please and to perform, to grasp this than young men. We are so much more tolerant of male rebellion; we are more tolerant of young men who “take time to find themselves” or who “are going through a slacker phase.” And to put it more simply, more young men seem to have an easier time daring to disappoint their parents. (Of course, there are plenty of boys near collapse from trying to meet other’s expectations. But their numbers are fewer.)

What I wanted the girls to grasp from this passage is that a real relationship with Christ is one that comes unmediated by parents or peers. To live in Christ means to follow Him with the very likely expectation that His plan for your life is not the same as your parent’s hopes. That doesn’t mean that Jesus is an excuse for narcissistic rebellion. But it does mean that if you put pleasing others, especially your parents, ahead of discerning God’s unique plan for your life, then you have missed the point. I made it clear to “my kids”: Christ comes to set captives free, and sometimes the jailers are the very people who love you most.

After praying silently for quick inspiration, I felt called to read Luke 10:38-42:

As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”

“Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”

Earlier, as our fourteen girls shared, I had realized that I was sitting in a room filled to the rafters with Marthas, with nary a Mary to be found! Like Martha, they are “worried and upset about many things”. They don’t know how to rest; they are “distracted by all the preparations that (have) to be made.” These Marthas — my dear, beautiful, brave, overachieving, anxious, exhausted girls — live lives that are governed by an endless series of “to do lists”. They wake up with “have to’s” and go to bed with “ought to have’s” and spend their days thinking about their “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts.” But only one thing is needed, and that is to sit at the foot of God.

It says in Kings, “after the earthquake there was a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.” The earthquakes and fires in these girls’ lives are all that they hear; they hear only noise, only storm and fury. As I said to them, that “gentle whisper” (what the KJV famously calls the “still small voice”) can’t be heard until you learn to press the mute button at your peers, at your coaches, at your teachers, at Facebook, at Youtube, at Jane Magazine, and yes, at your parents. Martha is too busy to hear the gentle whisper. She worries too much, fearing what will happen if she stops to rest, fearing who she’ll be if she stops her endless motion, her endless people-pleasing. Choosing “what is better” is about placing one’s own spiritual growth ahead of everything else. Choosing Mary’s part over Martha’s is to risk the wrath of some who love and care for you; it is to risk disappointing those who raised you and nurtured you. It is to risk having to confront your own fear of not doing enough. And if you want joy, if you want fulfillment, if you want rest, it’s what you absolutely gotta do.

Thanks to the remarkable success of several waves of American feminism, the girls I work with today have more opportunities than virtually any generation before them. Though they have to confront a misogynistic backlash that has taken root in many aspects of our dominant culture, they have the chance to achieve more and do more and enjoy more than their mothers and grandmothers. But we’ve made the terrible mistake of turning opportunity into obligation. We’ve sucked the joy right out of their over-programmed, over-monitored, over-achieving little lives. True feminism and true Christian faith are absolutely congruent in their mutual opposition to the idea that young women ought to live up to an ever-more demanding set of duties and commitments.

As a feminist and a Christian, I want to see “my girls” becoming more like Mary, less like Martha. And if that means that some of the boys need to go and spend a few minutes taking over Martha’s duties so she can take a break, then they damned well can step up and do it.

UPDATE: My dear mother, long a defender of Martha, writes me today to remind me that many traditions say that Martha ended up in Tarascon, France, where she may well have slain a dragon. It’s a happy thought.