I have an article on Campus Progress today, about the new book, Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, the Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body. Here’s a sneak preview:
Despite the increased consciousness of eating disorders in American culture, rates of teen plastic surgery are rising, anorexia seems to be afflicting an increasing number of young celebrities, and this year’s Victoria’s Secret models looked like they were craving food more than sex. Luckily, a new book by 27-year-old journalist Courtney E. Martin, titled Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: the Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body, is shaping up to be a force that can push young women in the right direction—toward a healthy body image.
Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters is a treatise on the destructive force of body image disorders, but it is also Martin’s memoir of growing up female and encountering unrealistic media representations of women. As a teenager, Martin disdained feminism. But watching friends and family suffer from eating disorders incited her to consider women’s ingrained self-loathing and embrace feminism as the catalyst for women’s political and personal empowerment.
In addition to her personal reflections, Martin includes interviews with numerous women and girls and the results of her “informal survey of over 100 young women” regarding eating disorders, food, and fitness. What is most striking about their confessions is the sacrifices many women make for thinness: Martin writes about low-income women who spend their precious pennies on tummy tucks, teens who go a day without eating to atone for snacking on junk food, and women who traded study and fun during their college years for obsession over food.
What makes the book so significant is fairly simple: Unlike the countless purveyors of diet and work-out tomes targeted at self-loathing young women, Martin actually asserts that hating your body is not okay. Some of Martin’s most poignant and convincing arguments lie in the way she exposes what young people have accepted as normal. A Barnard College dining hall named Hewitt, for example, is unofficially called “Spewitt” by students casually alluding to the tendency of some young women to purge after meals.
1 response so far ↓
1 Jamia // Jun 4, 2007 at 11:41 am
Thanks so much for writing about this. I am so glad Courtney wrote this book for us… We’re all struggling with issues because we are under attack from a beauty, film, and fashion industry that benefits financially from exploiting our insecurities and fears. I was discussing this with my boyfriend the other day when I was self-deprecating about my body and some feelings I have around seeing my body change as a result of being 25 and going into another phase of my development. When I brought up some insecurities about the new hips that have emerged in the past few years or the prominence of my breasts, he affirmed me by stating that my very softness is one of the things he found most beautiful… I think what the magazines tell us is beautiful is most often not really what those who love us want to see, feel, or embrace.
Instead of focusing on the fact that I am no longer a size zero like I was in college, I am choosing to shift my focus to the fact that I have never been happier, stronger, more solid in who i am, confident, and loved. I am focusing on the things my body does rather than how it looks. I am focusing on surrounding myself with diverse and beautiful people to remind myself how my diversity compliments me and makes me unique and beautiful. Food is NOT the enemy. it is fuel. it is fuel that helps us make change in the world, keeps us alert and vibrant, and gives us the strength to move our bodies to work, dance, make love, and LIVE. life is precious and the focus should be on thriving, not taking away energy to accomodate an impossible beauty standard and ideal that means nothing.
We must accept ourselves. We must love ourselves. We must focus on the things that help us to LIVE and help others.
Leave a Comment