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Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body By Courtney E. Martin ( Free Press )
Release Date: 2007-04-17
Average Customer Rating:
List Price: $25.00
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Product Description
"Why does every one of my friends have an eating disorder, or, at the very least, a screwed-up approach to food and fitness?" writes journalist Courtney E. Martin. The new world culture of eating disorders and food and body issues affects virtually all -- not just a rare few -- of today's young women. They are your sisters, friends, and colleagues -- a generation told that they could "be anything," who instead heard that they had to "be everything." Driven by a relentless quest for perfection, they are on the verge of a breakdown, exhausted from overexercising, binging, purging, and depriving themselves to attain an unhealthy ideal.An emerging new talent, Courtney E. Martin is the voice of a young generation so obsessed with being thin that their consciousness is always focused inward, to the detriment of their careers and relationships. Health and wellness, joy and love have come to seem ancillary compared to the desire for a perfect body. Even though eating disorders first became generally known about twenty-five years ago, they have burgeoned, worsened, become more difficult to treat and more fatal (50 percent of anorexics who do not respond to treatment die within ten years). Consider these statistics: - Ten million Americans suffer from eating disorders.
- Seventy million people worldwide suffer from eating disorders.
- More than half of American women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five would pre fer to be run over by a truck or die young than be fat.
- More than two-thirds would rather be mean or stupid.
- Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any psychological disease.
In Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, Martin offers original research from the front lines of the eating disorders battlefield. Drawn from more than a hundred interviews with sufferers, psychologists, nutritionists, sociocultural experts, and others, her exposé reveals a new generation of "perfect girls" who are obsessive-compulsive, overachieving, and self-sacrificing in multiple -- and often dangerous -- new ways. Young women are "told over and over again," Martin notes, "that we can be anything. But in those affirmations, assurances, and assertions was a concealed pressure, an unintended message: You are special. You are worth something. But you need to be perfect to live up to that specialness." With its vivid and often heartbreaking personal stories, Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters has the power both to shock and to educate. It is a true call to action and cannot be missed.
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 to say the least .... ( eflapinskas )
the writer and this book are dillusional. This book would appeal to anyone who wants to live in their own little world. If you read - get it from a library.
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Deluded and dangerous
This book is not only false and misleading on so many levels, it's actually dangerous. Books like these now directly influence public policy and legislation and when the victims will not only be middle-aged men paying for the patriarchal sins of their forefathers, but also children and young people, then its time to read with a little more critical sobriety.
No matter the exaggerated number, but very real tragedy, of young women suffering from eating disorders - they have complex psychological causes. What is more, obesity clearly represents a far greater and urgent health problem facing our young people. Many American tourists come to my city and I have to say that I have never spotted an anorexic amongst them. I would, however, say that around half the young American females I see are unhealthily obese - by any reasonable definition. It therefore strikes me as utterly obscene for an American author to pretend that anorexia (a terrible psychological illness though it is) is in any way comparable to the threat posed by obesity to the health and well being of our young people today.
And yet, the author has the audacity to claim (with no sound argument) that obesity itself is simply another eating disorder resulting from the evil objectification of the female body by men. Does obesity really have nothing to do with the junk food culture or the failure of parents to teach children responsible eating habits? Or, indeed, that so many females now DON'T care about living up to traditional ideas of femininity and grace? If we ban images of slim women (as the French have recently done) would we not simply be guilty of encouraging obesity and therefore of abusing our children...even if middle-aged feminists no longer feel jealous rage whenever they watch a bikini model in a beer commercial or threatened by a slim teenage girl turning the heads of their husbands (they will all be over 18 stone soon before they even hit puberty).
Actually, it would be far better for the physical health of young Americans (if not the psychological health of middle-aged feminists) for young girls to be given compulsory beauty classes at college. Wanting too much to be attractive to the opposite sex appears to be the last thing on the average American girl's mind.
Of course, no mention is made of the millions of young American males who are now force feeding themselves daily with steroids in order to be sexually acceptable to the opposite sex, knowing that they will likely be dead at 40 through liver disease or some other consequence.
I wonder what does the author really want men to do and what would be the consequences for us if we did it? Are we really to feel guilt and self-hatred at finding slim females attractive? Should we start cutting ourselves in shame and guilt every time an image of Maria Shaparova enters our heads instead of a 20 stone Russian shot putter (or feminist)?
And why no public discussion of the grotesque female sexual fetishisation of black urban gangsta culture? Something that increasingly turns our young men into violent brutes willing to kill each other in a warped and tragic desire to seek validation from their female peers?
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 Blessed that this book exists ( mattokc )
First, let me qualify myself: I am an LCSW working in a clinical hospital setting conducting groups for adults in partial hospitalization mental health treatment. My primary treatment specialties are domestic and sexual violence, PTSD, self-injury, and ED. I want to directly, assertively strike against the review that calls this book "deluded" and "dangerous." It is neither.
Courtney Martin's writing is marinated in wisdom, and her insights are eloquent. I have read stacks and stacks of books on body image, eating disorders, perfectionism, and feminist theory, and this book is THE TOP of my list of all of them. Martin nails it. She is wise enough to see body image as more than a pounds-and-ounces issue; more than skinny-and-fat bipolar beauty; more than "blame it on magazines" superficialities. No, Martin takes a remarkably broad, and well-informed, view: eating disorders are one of the products of a matrix of cultural, familial, spiritual, and physical influences on young women's development.
Martin doesn't present herself as an expert, and she wisely defers to doctors and clinicians for treatment information. What she does present skillfully is her insight into how women are conditioned--and then condition one another--to translate impossible concepts of "perfect" into impossible concepts of "body." By "perfect," Martin doesn't settle for the narrow definition of "perfect beauty." She posits that "perfection" in this context is a larger and more oppressive ideology of performance, achievement, being seen and loved, finding existential meaning, avoiding rejection, and transferring internal crisis into external body recomposition. This isn't some vague, tenuous connection she's making, either; Courtney hits the bulls-eye over and over until the reader has a profoundly expanded understanding of women, bodies, and culture.
I kept waiting for some flaw to appear: "surely she'll treat men in a two-dimensional stereotyped way!" Nope; she approach the topic of men's role (as fathers and partners) very maturely. "Surely she'll elaborate on the problem and skimp on solutions!" Nope; she ends her book with a manifesto of hope--a "new story", she calls it. "Surely she'll employ an exaggerated feminist paradigm to ED, so that the issue fits her beliefs." Nope; she is heartbreakingly honest about her own struggles, and the importance--and shortcomings--of feminism in exploring them.
Courtney, if you read this, THANK YOU. As a male reader, I am so blessed to have been given these insights. I hope you will continue to write, and I have a personal list of topics I wish a writer with your skill and word power would take on for us. It's a shame this book isn't a widespread classic; it's my new "Revising [sic] Ophelia."
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fantastic book
This is an amazing book. Written from the heart of every college girl, a must-read for girls in high school and beyond, or anyone trying to understand the world of girls today. Fantastic author, passionate about her work, comes across as very authentic.
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A Perfect 10.
This could quite possibly be the greatest book on body image I've ever read. Courtney has a way of writing that informs, intrigues, and most of all, causes us to dig deeper within ourselves to find what we believe to be true for our own bodies and what society has influenced upon them. As a "feminist" woman in my mid-twenties, who has realized the grotesque influence the media, social habits, and most of all, our own "starving daughter" can have on our personal psyche, Martin's book was extremely refreshing. It makes us realize that we are not alone and that it is time to break the cycle. Bottom line: I laughed out loud, I cried, and enjoyed every page.
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