Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters

I read a book that I tore through in a weekend, it was so captivating. Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating your Body by Courtney Martin explores disordered eating, its epidemic proportions, and its relationship to overachievement.

I strongly recommend this book! She interviews young women, and writes beautifully, describing this need for control as a symptom of societal shifts and spiritual emptiness. It is this last claim that strikes me as particularly interesting; I didn't read it as a "young people need religion" claim, but something more like Putnam's Bowling Alone, or Affluenza, inquiries into the ways that suburbanization and other socioeconomic forces have shaped the contemporary American personality.

There has to be something going on, that disordered eating is so pervasive.

Young women who were told "you can be anything" by our Second Wave feminist mothers interpreted that as "you have to be everything." Martin captures the paralysis, the drivenness and paralysis that plagues so many young women and drives them to end up stuck - some in eating too much, some fixated on not eating at all, overexercising.

But this isn't the central claim of the book, and it is not a condemnation of 60s and 70s feminism, that is not the point.

She makes an interesting claim about this black hole (in the intergalactic sense) that absorbs all the energy of perfect girls, the insatiable drive for perfection, for something - she claims it is spiritual, in the sense of unrootedness, disconnectedness, disembodied floating, critically self aware and socially self conscious selves.

That's the part that interests me most. She is spot on about the ways that my generation of women think, how overdriven or paralyzed we can sometimes get. I certainly can relate, to the paralysis I mean.

More than that, she is attuned to the scattered selves, the searching, the trying so hard trying to be everything. She talks about "Control and ambition....we must get As, we must make money, we must save the world...we must be perfect, we must make it look effortless"

Inside the perfect girl is a starving daughter: