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When I was in high school, I read Kim Chernin's now classic manifesto The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness. Chernin's argument—at least the piece of her argument that leapt out at and stayed with me—was that our culture's insistence that white women should be thin is, in fact, infantilizing. Women are asked to look pre-pubescent, dieting away their thighs and breasts, sliming down to boyishness, so that they might not become, or act like, adults.
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I recommended The Obsession to all my friends, for we were all obsessed. To the best of my knowledge, none of us ever developed a full-blown eating disorder. We just thought about what we ate all the time. We constantly discussed eating and dieting. We would eat nothing but yogurt for a week, and then we'd go back to eating bologna sandwiches and chicken breasts and chips and slurpees and fruit, and then we'd hate ourselves, and we'd write about it in our diaries, and then we'd go back to yogurt.
In Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, a breezy but insightful journalistic foray into young women's eating, Courtney Martin says it's only gotten worse since I was in high school. In 1995, 34 percent of American high school girls thought they were overweight. Now, 90 percent do. That statistic encompasses a wide range of women, from those who eat healthy, normal meals and feel awful about it to those who suffer from bulimia or anorexia to those who actually are overweight. (Martin says obesity is not wholly different from anorexia; both reflect a distorted sense of food's meaning.) "Colleges are breeding grounds for eating disorders and unhealthy obsession with food," Martin observes. After their second trip of the day to the gym, zealous college dieters head to the cafeteria, where they linger over the mac-and-cheese and then choose the salad bar. They mask their weight-loss intention by claiming they're vegan, or inventing a lactose intolerance.
Martin argues that this bodily self-loathing not only imperils girls' health but also robs them of time and energy. She estimates that many women spend about 100 minutes a day scrutinizing their bodies and their caloric intake. That's 100 minutes a day they could be "admiring … the width of their hips … celebrating their creativity
… reading an amazing book, feeling grateful for family and friends, memorizing a poem, considering concepts of God, or taking action against global warming." If a woman obsesses for 100 minutes a day, every day, from age 12 to age 85, she will have devoted three years of her life to the negative caloric value of celery sticks.
Martin's alarming—but not, I think, alarmist—account is limited by its ahistoricism. A fascinating history of young women's diets can be found in Margaret A. Lowe's Looking Good: College Women and Body Image, 1875-1930. This engrossing monograph argues that in the late 19th century, educators and social scientists who wanted to keep women out of higher education justified their position by arguing that women would be weakened and made sick by too much studying. Mental exertions would drain away energy from women's reproductive capacities and, in the phrase of one 1905 article, lead to "race suicide." Defenders of women's education pointed to students' healthy glow and "robust physique[s]" as proof that women could write term papers and remain healthy, and college administrators who were committed to women's education became deeply invested in making sure that women students ate well, exercised, and even gained weight.
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