So many are suffering from food and fitness obsessions

That is a phrase by Courtney E. Martin, from her book Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body, and in her Huffington Post entry.

Here is more of her writing:

At age twenty-five, far from the gluttony of college and even further from the angst of adolescence, I suspected I might finally be rid of the gagging noises echoing in dorm bathrooms and the scrape of plates sliding against Formica tables.

I thought I might be able to feign ignorance about the next wave of thirteen-year-old girls discovering the ritual language of self-hatred — fat, disgusting, weak, worthless.

But then my best friend — one of the few girls I had ever been close to who had not had an eating disorder — looked at me, eyes wet with tears, and admitted that she had been making herself throw up after meals. I felt the hope leak out of me, like air out of a punctured balloon.

Then my small-town cousin came to visit me in the big city, and as we wandered the echoing halls of the Met, she admitted that she felt, as I had in college, often on the edge of an eating disorder. I felt rage.

Over coffee and some history homework, a fourteen-year-old girl I mentor told me that her friends thought about nothing so much as their weight. I felt dread.

My students at Hunter College, working-class, first-generation American, ethnically diverse, shocked me by standing up in front of the class and admitting to struggling with undiagnosed eating disorders for years and watching their mothers take out loans for tummy tucks.

It wasn’t just my private world either. Though few talked about it, Terri Schiavo was suspected to have had a heart attack and gone into a coma as a result of her battle with bulimia.

Lindsay Lohan and Nicole Richie shrank down to nothing in plain view. Anorexic fashion models in Uruguay and Brazil, both in their early twenties, died. On websites, girls from all over the country pledged their devotion to Ana (aka anorexia) and Mia (aka bulimia) — sharing starvation tips with anyone old enough to type in a URL.

So many are suffering from food and fitness obsessions — the victims are becoming younger and younger, older and older, male, gay, lesbian, and transgender. In order to explore even a fraction of this terrain with any clarity, I had to construct limits (however artificial), and so focus on the ways in which young, heterosexual women feel and fear. What they believe men find “hot” feeds their obsessions with food and fitness.

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Perfect Girls ["Do you feel that pressure to be thin?"]

Lindsay Lohan : “Sometimes. But people I admire like Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn and Ann-Margret, had beautiful figures.” [Interview mag., June 2004]

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Related Talent Development Resources pages:
Body image
Self-esteem / self concept

My related article: The Dark Side of Beauty

| 06.14.07 | Share This