Puppets of Fear...
Columbia University psychologist Barbara Von Bulow co-runs a day-treatment program in Manhattan for eating disordered students who have been sent home on leave, asked by their out-of-town colleges to take time off for treatment. So competitive are the women about their weight-control strategies that the program has had to separate the bulimics from the anorexics.
"It's difficult to treat anorexics if they don't see themselves as unhealthy," Von Bulow observes. "Yet the bulimics look at the anorexics as successes because they are so thin." On the other hand, the anorexics "are terrified when they look at the bulimics, most of whom are normal weight. They see them as failed anorexics."
In reality, as in the dictionary, anorexia comes before bulimia; about 50 percent of the time, restrictive eating begets binge eating. Candice Sombrero, 19, a sophomore at Babson College outside Boston, endured six months of anorexia while a student at the prestigious Iolani School in Honolulu, where she grew up. "I'd grab coffee at home and tell my parents I'd get breakfast at school, which I never did. For lunch I prided myself on sipping an extra-large Diet Coke." The endless hunger made her preoccupied with food. "Once you get your hands on food, you stuff yourself. Then you feel physically uncomfortable and guilty for eating, so you start to purge." For the next year and a half, she was "stuck in the bulimic cycle, throwing up eight to 10 times a day."
Bulimia testifies to the difficulty of the restrictive eating that defines anorexia. On the other hand, not every girl can make herself throw up. Katy Palmer is one of the latter.
At 17, she was at the top of her high school class in Atlanta, looking at colleges and locked into competition with another girl for class valedictorian. "We knew each other's GPA down to the hundredth of a point," she recalls. The academic pressure was intense. That year her grandfather died, and suddenly family life was dominated by grieving. "I didn't have control over the college application process and I couldn't make any school accept me; I knew it was an arbitrary process. I didn't have control over what was happening in my family. Eating became the least complicated thing I could do that was under my control. I read an article in Self magazine all about calories. Cause and effect were clear: Fewer calories equal less weight."
Gradually, she shriveled into her five-foot-10-inch frame, until she weighed 115 pounds. "I was always in a bad mood. I stopped having a personality. I stopped thinking about boys. All I thought about was food. Everything had to be carefully portioned. Any spread of food, any open box, was dangerous waters. I was always hungry. My dreams were nightmares about eating too much."
But people told her she looked great. And her parents never picked up on her calorie restriction. In fact, she became locked into competition with her mother, a true peer in weight obsession. "She'd say, 'Your thighs are skinnier than mine; let's get out the tape measure.' We never actually did, but we did feed off each other. We talked about how good it feels to be hungry. She told me she wouldn't be attracted to my father if he were overweight.
"Initially it's a choice," she says now. "You start dieting to be in control. But then it veers out of control. Anorexia is so dictated by fear. You're just a puppet of fear." That sleight of slight is likely accomplished through an array of cognitive changes, purely the effects of starvation on the brain.
...But Perfect on Paper
Fear is the dark heart of contemporary girl culture. Courtney Martin, an instructor at Barnard College and author of Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body, contends that a whole generation of young women was told that they could be anything. What they heard was slightly different: "We have to be everything." And that's terrifying. The pre-college emphasis on achievement leads them "to compose the self as perfect, with a perfect resume and a perfect body," since they were socialized to believe they can look any way they want if they just try hard enough. Unfortunately, it's hard to create a sustainable self-image without a sense of self.
The pursuit of perfection is always self-consuming, and it locks young women into a vicious cycle. The struggle to achieve so much in so many different areas overwhelms them with anxiety, and anxiety generates constant comparison, which only makes them see themselves more negatively, which pressures them to try harder.
Martin regards the rising rate of suicide among girls 10 to 14 as alarming proof that girls today increasingly lack the inner resources to disarm the anxiety of achievement pressure and fat fear. "Neither parents nor schools are nurturing kids' well-being," she says, "because they themselves are caught up in the anxiety dance."
Psychologist Janell Mensinger views it as fallout of the Superwoman Syndrome. Head of health research at Reading Hospital in Pennsylvania, Mensinger has been looking at eating disorders among girls for over a decade. In a recent study reported in the journal Sex Roles, she and her colleagues found that the more adolescent girls perceived behavioral commands for excellence in academics, appearance, and dating, the more they subscribed to the superwoman ideal and the more disordered their eating became.
What's more, in surveying 1,200 students in 11 schools in New York City and Philadelphia, she found that the all-girls schools fostered greater competitiveness on appearance-related issues than did the coed schools. "Girls at single-sex schools appear to be at a disadvantage in that they are more dissatisfied with their bodies," she reports.
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