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

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

Courtney E. Martin

Language: English

Pages: 352

ISBN: 0743287967

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Why does every one of my friends have an eating disorder, or, at the very least, a screwed-up approach to food and fitness? writes journalist Courtney E. Martin. The new world culture of eating disorders and food and body issues affects virtually all -- not just a rare few -- of today's young women. They are your sisters, friends, and colleagues -- a generation told that they could "be anything," who instead heard that they had to "be everything." Driven by a relentless quest for perfection, they are on the verge of a breakdown, exhausted from overexercising, binging, purging, and depriving themselves to attain an unhealthy ideal.

An emerging new talent, Courtney E. Martin is the voice of a young generation so obsessed with being thin that their consciousness is always focused inward, to the detriment of their careers and relationships. Health and wellness, joy and love have come to seem ancillary compared to the desire for a perfect body. Even though eating disorders first became generally known about twenty-five years ago, they have burgeoned, worsened, become more difficult to treat and more fatal (50 percent of anorexics who do not respond to treatment die within ten years). Consider these statistics:

  • Ten million Americans suffer from eating disorders.
  • Seventy million people worldwide suffer from eating disorders.
  • More than half of American women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five would pre fer to be run over by a truck or die young than be fat.
  • More than two-thirds would rather be mean or stupid.
  • Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any psychological disease.

In Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, Martin offers original research from the front lines of the eating disorders battlefield. Drawn from more than a hundred interviews with sufferers, psychologists, nutritionists, sociocultural experts, and others, her exposé reveals a new generation of "perfect girls" who are obsessive-compulsive, overachieving, and self-sacrificing in multiple -- and often dangerous -- new ways. Young women are "told over and over again," Martin notes, "that we can be anything. But in those affirmations, assurances, and assertions was a concealed pressure, an unintended message: You are special. You are worth something. But you need to be perfect to live up to that specialness."

With its vivid and often heartbreaking personal stories, Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters has the power both to shock and to educate. It is a true call to action and cannot be missed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

their minds. As Kate, Barnard alumna and Jane contributor, puts it, “In college, like no other time in my life, I was just so in my head all the time. I could go two weeks at a time without really feeling like I occupied my own body.” Christina agrees: “There was a classic split between body and soul—one was always waning while the other was growing.” This nasty disassociation cuts a college girl in half—part perfect girl, part starving daughter. She is driving toward success with her brain while

relationship with, 116-18 journal of, 118 at Katie’s wedding, 119, 120 as perfect girl, 103 rape of, 111-12, 113 reflections of, 119 self-image of, 104 and sex, 98-104, 105-6, 107-12, 113-16 Johnson, Craig, 192, 202-3 Joplin, Janis, 36, 124 Jost, Stephan, 214 Kelly, Joe, 63 Kelly, R., 139 Kilbourne, Jean, 9, 126, 223 Kimberly, 199-202 Knapp, Caroline, 8, 98, 217, 217n, 281 Kramenetz, Anya, 140 Krissik, Keri, 212 “lad mags,” 146-47, 150 Lady Sovereign, 138, 138n Latina women,

girls who knew what to do but hadn’t had a lot of experience. The captain of the team also wanted to have sex, but he wanted to have it with a sweet girl from a good family who hadn’t had sex with anyone before (despite his own history). On Monday morning in the echoing hallways of Palmer High School, your weekend’s adventures were fair game, and consequently, your reputation always hung perilously in the balance. I played the game—smiled coyly at the boys who thought of me as desirable and

porch, dressing up and going to the one underage club—the Metro—that was part of a strip mall and had shootings once a month or so. But we were also perfect girls. We both got nearly straight A’s, both took all of the AP classes that were offered at our big, underfunded public school, and were both on the newspaper staff. “Remember when you wrote that column with the lead line ‘I am a virgin’ in tenth grade and totally blew your boyfriend’s spot because he’d told everyone on the football team

Natalie Angier writes: “Despite the non-denominational nature of fat . . . in many cases, obesity is inversely proportional to socioeconomic status—that is, the higher your station in life, the lower your weight.” If we admit that obesity is linked to incest, then we have to look at a long-standing taboo discussed only on Oprah and in banned books. Dr. Michael Myers, a physician who has been treating obese women for over twenty-five years, estimates that 40 percent of his patients have been

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