Tag Archives: Eating disorders

Pushing Back Against the Real/Fake Trope

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Today’s Genderal Interest column at Jezebel: Real Women Have… Bodies. It begins:

Last week, the UK lingerie chain Ann Summers launched a new campaign using what the company claims are “real women” from across England as its models. Theirs is the latest example of authenticity advertising, a trend that dates back to 2004, when Dove launched its iconic “Real Beauty” campaign. In the 21st century, “realness” is now a marketing mainstay. But it’s also become a divisive concept, as those who fall short of what’s “real” are inevitably derided as “fake.”

It’s been nearly a decade since the release of 2002′s Real Women Have Curves, the film that made America Ferrera a star and served as likely inspiration for what Dove would soon develop. As charming as the movie was, the darker implication of the phrase was hard to miss: if real women have curves, then perhaps women who don’t are “less real.” A new double-bind for women was born: those who met the skinny ideal could now be labeled “unreal,” and those who were still shamed for being heavy were now encouraged to take some sort of comfort in being more “legitimate” than their slender sisters. As a result, the real/fake dichotomy became as common — and in some ways, as toxic — as the old virgin/whore dynamic.

Read the whole thing.

Status Updates, Thinspo, Fitspo and bragging about pizza: social media and self-esteem

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My Thursday column at Healthy is the New Skinny looks at the impact of social media on young women’s body image; check out Status Updates and “Thinspo”. Excerpt:

How often do the people you know on Facebook “check in” at the gym? How often do they share how far they ran? Or how they’re doing on their diet, or on their “Insanity” workout plan? When I asked for stories on Facebook, dozens of young people wrote me to share their experiences reading their friends’ food-and-diet updates. Some wrote that seeing other people working out was “inspiring”, while others wrote it was “depressing” or “triggering”. One of my former students wrote “I can’t stand getting on Facebook in the morning and hearing about all the exercise my friends have already done before I’ve even brushed my teeth. It makes me feel like a failure.”

Several wrote of a common phenomenon: the girls who seemed most likely to update about the delicious, fattening foods that they’d eaten or were planning to eat were the girls whose bodies were already close to the idea. “Amber” wrote: “It seems like only skinny and pretty girls get to talk about the burgers and Pizookies they’ve eaten. It’s like they’re showing off that they can pig out and get away with it. They get all these comments that say things like ‘You’re so lucky to be able to eat like that and still look great.’ It’s like they’re fishing for compliments in a weird roundabout way. Amber, who has struggled with bulimia and describes herself as a size 14, remarks, “I’m not angry at the girls who write about food all the time. But it definitely bothers me, as I don’t think I could write about what I’ve eaten and get away with it.”

Others I heard from talked about the way in which positive reinforcement on photos or status updates could be triggering. “Mandy” said that when she lost a lot of weight and put up new, flattering photos, she got a huge outpouring of compliments. “Everytime someone told me how great I looked, it made me more fearful of gaining the weight back. Instead of making me feel good, the compliments pushed me to diet more to make sure I stayed skinny.” Mandy, like most young people, carefully chose flattering photos for Facebook. She got the praise she wanted, but instead of providing reassurance it just pushed her to more unhealthy dieting.

Read the whole thing.

And check out a similar take from Rachel Simmons, author of “Odd Girl Out”.

“I used to have an eating disorder”: food, shame, perfectionism and the rapid recovery narrative

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“I used to be bulimic. But I’m better now.”

I read that phrase in an email from a student last week, and thought about how many times I’ve read or heard something similar. And I was reminded that in our therapeutic culture, it’s perfectly acceptable to have a past history of addiction or illness — as long as one claims to be working on it, or to have recovered.

As experts on eating disorders will tell you, there are few compulsions that are more difficult to overcome than bulimia, anorexia, and the other diseases that surround food. Though the number of men who suffer from eating disorders has risen since the 1980s, the overwhelming majority of sufferers remain women. And though not all those who are afflicted are young, teenagers and 20 somethings are especially vulnerable.

One of the most unhelpful ways to talk about the struggle against poor body image is to describe it as a temporary developmental phase. A 16 year-old girl tells us that she hates her body, and too many adults make soothing noises saying “it’s something most girls go through” or simply “it gets better.” Of course, “it” can get better. But it rarely does so on its own. Self-loathing is not a natural biological phase through which girls must pass; it’s not a developmental trait that comes along with breasts and body hair and menstruation. Self-hatred is socially constructed — and the work to undo the damage done by peers, parents, and the media is often a long and challenging one.

Many young women I work with feel genuine guilt for not having recovered swiftly enough from an eating disorder. One said to me recently: “It was bad enough when I was a freshman in high school. But that was four years ago, and I’m still struggling with this. I hate my body but I also feel like I’ve used up my allotted time to get help.”

What she and others like her end up with is a classic double bind. On the one hand, they’re still struggling to reach an unattainable ideal, coping often as well with the physical triggers that can drive and sustain bulimia or anorexia. On the other hand, they’re keenly aware of our societal longing for quick recovery narratives of the sort one sees on TV: girl hits puberty, girl develops eating disorder, girl gets help, girl gets better, all in the space of a one-hour program.

The winding road of recovery, replete with often multiple relapses, is much longer and more complex. And while recovery from any compulsion or disorder is rarely rapid, it is especially prolonged and enduring for those with eating disorders.

Many young women have an initial recovery after treatment, and then go “public” (at least to family and friends) about what they’ve been through. They then often get showered with love and attention and praise; parents are grateful that their daughters are “better now.” But so often, when a relationship goes south or the academic pressure builds, or sometimes just “because”, a young woman slips back into an old pattern. Except it’s worse, because now she gets to cope with the shame of relapse. Young women with eating disorders are usually people-pleasers; they’re keenly aware of how worried and disappointed others might be if their initial recovery isn’t sustained.

She feels as if she’s letting everyone down. Continue reading →

“Mean” Boys: a note on whose words do more harm

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My regular Thursday piece is up at Healthy is the New Skinny: Mean Guys.

Excerpt:

But as sweet as some guys can certainly be, we also raise young women to give guys the benefit of the doubt. Most young women have high expectations of other women – and low expectations of most men. As a result, many girls excuse the really awful things so many boys do and say as just part of the “way guys are.” But the research suggests that excusing away those hurtful remarks doesn’t change the reality that what guys say has the statistically greater impact on young women’s self-esteem…

Read the whole thing here.

And a similar, longer piece of mine from June 2008: Boys, fathers, teasing, and disordered eating: spite more often wears a man’s face

Perfectionism, Libido, and Older Men/Younger Women links, plus a conference

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Different websites have radically different commenting communities. This has been driven home to me in recent months as my pieces have been republished at other places. It’s not that various blogs and magazines have widely divergent rules for commenting; it’s that they often seem to have completely different readers.

For example, my post on the problem of older men sexualizing younger women attracted a storm of male criticism at the Good Men Project. What runs on Tuesday at GMP runs on Thursdays at The Frisky. Though you need to be logged in to read responses at the latter site, the largely female readership at The Frisky offered a starkly different take. Though the responses were more positive, as one might expect, many young women who are in relationships with older men were strongly critical of what they saw as my refusal to differentiate between teens and early twenty-somethings.

Jezebel kindly reprints my post on the Damaging Expectation of Higher Male Desire. It got only a handful of responses here, but about 80 so far (and counting) at their place.

And I’m very grateful to Chloe at Feministing for driving some Friday traffic to yesterday’s post “If I Were Thinner, I’d Have the Right to Expect More”: on perfectionism and the scarcity model.

And I’ll be speaking (and moderating) at the Applied Women’s Studies Conference at Claremont Graduate University tomorrow morning. The panel I’m chairing is on Feminist Masculinities, and I’ll be sharing the dais with some terrific activist men. Here’s a link to the program; come on out today (or tomorrow)!

“If I Were Thinner, I’d Have the Right to Expect More”: on perfectionism and the scarcity model

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This topic came up in my Men and Masculinity course yesterday, and an earlier version of this post appeared at Healthy is the New Skinny this morning:

It’s not news that girls are feeling more pressure than ever to be perfect. As I’ve written before in my posts on the Martha Complex, this generation of teen girls is more stressed about, well, everything, than any generation of women before them.* The pressure to do well in school, the pressure to please parents and peers, and the pressure to live up to an impossible ideal of physical perfection is crushing.

Tweens and teens grow up comparing themselves to models and tv stars. Few girls feel as pretty, as sexy, as skinny as the women they see in the media. As a result, many young women conclude that happiness is something that you only get when you get to your goal weight. And even more troublingly, when it comes to relationships, lots of straight girls think that if their own bodies aren’t perfect, they have no right to expect too much from guys.

Working with high school and college-aged young women, I’ve heard the same thing more and more often in recent years. These smart and amazing young women have somehow gotten the idea that in order to be treated with respect and love, they have to be damn near perfect. One student said to me last year, “If I were fifteen pounds thinner, I think my boyfriend would stop looking at other girls.” She didn’t feel like she had the right to ask her guy to stop checking out other women in public. “You have to be gorgeous for a man to want to be with you and only you. I’m not, so I can’t expect that.”

A mentee of mine has a boyfriend who uses porn regularly and plays video games for hours. “Sometimes he’ll just forget to call or text because he’s gaming”, she says. “I’m lucky to get a few minutes alone with him a week when we’re not doing something sexual. But this is the way boys are — unless you’re like freakin’ Megan Fox, you can’t expect a guy’s complete attention.”

Another girl told me that she doesn’t feel like she can have a boyfriend – because she’s not pretty enough. She has a lot of hook-ups instead. “I’m the girl you get with for a blowjob”, she said; “I’m not the hot girl you hold hands with in public.” (For more on the connection between perfectionism and promiscuity, see Kerry Cohen’s forthcoming Dirty Little Secrets, to be published later this year.)

Words like these break my heart, because these bright and beautiful girls are blinded to their own worth. They don’t see that they have the right to demand respect; that they have the right to set good boundaries; that they have the right to pursue a real relationship (if they want one). Believing that only women who meet an unattainable standard of perfection “deserve” to be happy sets girls up to settle for second-best in one area where they should never compromise.

This perfectionism dovetails dangerously with another theme in young women’s lives: the “good guys are hard to find” narrative. This belief that reliable and loving young men are rare reinforces the pursuit of skinny, sexy, beauty: the fewer decent lads out there, the more “choice” those guys have. And even the decent ones, so the culture tells us, will make relationship decisions based on women’s appearance. For some, that means all the more reason to compete — and for others, all the more reason to opt out and “settle” for what they’ve been told is the best they can reasonably hope for.

We need to see how the pressure to be perfect — a pressure that is nearly omnipresent in young women’s lives, even the lives of those who don’t seem to be pursuing an ideal — is rooted in a false scarcity model. There won’t be enough for you, the culture says, unless you try harder. And if in your own eyes, you’re well short of that ideal, then you need to be realistic and settle gratefully for the crumbs.

Young women often tell stories about their girlfriends, whom they often describe as amazing and wonderful. “It’s so sad”, Jessica will say, “Amy doesn’t see what we all see. She’s so pretty and smart, but she keeps dating these losers. She doesn’t know her value.” Of course, half the time, Amy is saying the same thing about Jessica. Teen girls are almost invariably fonts of great wisdom for their peers — but lousy at taking their own advice to heart. The truth is, of course, even the young women who most closely match the rigid beauty standards are bitterly aware of how they “fall short of the mark”, at least in their own minds.

It’s not a stretch to point out that the “scarcity model” combines with perfectionism to let men off the hook time and again. The less girls believe they deserve, the less they’ll ask for — and the less young men need to provide. Until we ask who benefits from this cruel system, we’re not getting close to solving the problem.

*For more, check out the work of Claire Mysko on Supergirls, as well as the solid books by the aforementioned Kerry Cohen, Stephen Hinshaw, Rachel Simmons, and of course, Courtney Martin’s seminal Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters.

“The Skinny Bitch Discourse”: on mean girls, sexualization, thinness, and the cult of competitive individuality

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UPDATE: This is now also posted at Jezebel, where the comments section is much more active.

In last Friday’s Guardian piece on sexualized rebellion, I briefly touched on the media-driven discourse of “compulsory individuality”. As contradictory — and as familiar — as it sounds, compulsory individuality requires women (and teen girls in particular) to navigate the paradoxical demands to “fit in” while “standing out”. This isn’t novel — but as I wrote last week (following Marjorie Jolles), the ever-more-sexualized nature of compulsory individuality is transforming young women’s self-image, not necessarily in helpful ways.

A related point can be made, of course, about skinniness. It is not new to point out that “thin is in.” The longing to be slender and the obsession with dieting goes back to the 1920s, and is due in part to radical changes in fashion and culture brought on both by World War One and pre-war innovations in style. In the USA, five generations of young women have now come of age surrounded by diet books, and what were once considered problems for middle-class white girls only (poor body-image and eating disorders) are now found in every racial and class demographic.

The key change in the past decade around skinniness is the explicit recognition of thinness as a marker not only of status, but of proud isolation from other women. Adolescent girls whose bodies come close to the fashion ideal have long been aware that they are, at least at times, the object of other young women’s resentment. “You’re so thin… I hate you!” is a phrase that many slender women have heard, with the only variation being the degree to which the second part of the statement is said with genuine loathing as opposed to mild, teasing envy. Lots of thin girls grow up being called “anorexic”, regardless of the presence or absence of an eating disorder. The mix of jealousy and resentment and pity often includes the refusal to believe tha a “skinny girl” has any problems about which to complain. (Think about what often happens when the most slender young woman in a room remarks that she “feels fat”.)

In the past decade, we’ve seen the appearance of what we might call the “mean girl narrative”. In addition to the now canonical (for millenials, anyway) Lindsay Lohan film, books like Queen Bees and Wannabees, Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, and the newest media darling, Twisted Sisterhood: Unraveling the Dark Legacy of Female Friendships all make the popular case that girls are, well, mean — meaner, certainly, in ways that boys simply could never be. It seems likely that this “discourse of female cruelty” works in tandem with the narrative of compulsory individuality to suggest to young women that theirs is a hyper-competitive world where success is a solitary and sexualized pursuit. Whether it’s chasing grades or getting guys, even your sisters are nothing more than “frenemies” at best.

The positing of thinness as a competitive tactic shows up in books like Rory Freedman’s Skinny Bitch. Freedman’s title reflects (or, one suspects, subtly reinforces) the reality that achieving the ideal body will invariably invite animosity from other women. It is taken for granted that it is better to be envied than to be liked. One imagines that the subtitle could have been this brutal but unmistakably powerful false dichotomy: “Would you rather be fat and liked or skinny and hated? Is that even a question?” Freedman uses this discourse of inter-female hostility to market a plan for success in this brutal, mean-girl world. (I like Freedman’s emphasis on a plant-based diet. But as a vegan, I’m not interested in using women’s fear of fat in order to transition people away from animal protein.)

The latest manifestation of the marriage of women’s enforced competitiveness and the cruel dictates of fashion comes from Bethenny Frankel, like Freedman a chef and animal-rights advocate and now a reality-tv sensation. Frankel, whose marketing term is “Skinny Girl” (slightly less confrontational than Freedman’s) just introduced a onesie for infants with the slogan “Future Skinny Girl” emblazoned across it. Frankel wanted it for her own daughter, and in a statement, insisted that she was motivated by concern for her little Bryn’s health. The pushback has been obvious and expected, and all of it drives attention to Frankel’s books and merchandise. Continue reading →

“Anorexia rewired my brain”: on the Maura Kelly debacle

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On Monday, Marie Claire posted this short piece from Maura Kelly: Should “Fatties” Get a Room? (Even on TV?) Superficially a review of the new CBS sitcom Mike and Molly (which features two overweight actors in the title roles), the article was a festival of fat-loathing and body-shaming. Because it may well be triggering for someone to read, the rest of this post is all below the fold. Continue reading →