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chloegomez1's review
1.0
wanted to read this based on its description, but the language is definitely reflective of its time in the worst ways. it focuses solely on the perspective of white women in the US, iirc the author says that it’s because it is the perspective she is most familiar with? she converses with friends and others with similar experiences, so I don’t know why she couldn’t discuss with people outside of her specific identity. plus, her comments on women in the media at the time was harsh, especially for someone discussing body image and self esteem. DNF for these reasons
bridge_enginerd's review
1.0
I wanted this book to be more than it was. It needs more research and better editing.
riotgrrl's review
4.0
While I had a hard time getting into the book, from a certain point on I really got fascinated. Martin is at her best when she recounts the life stories of friends and women she interviews. A lot of interesting connections pop up between eating disorders, parents behaviour (mothers AND fathers), female role models in media and so on. It's all not really sorted, but when you continue reading things just fall in place.
nyssahhhh's review
3.0
Overall, I thought this book had some interesting insights, but it definitely faltered. I felt that the author was torn between chronicling interviews and doing research, but also trying to create a personal narrative with beautiful prose. The struggle seemed to be one of voice, which distorted the message for me and made it difficult to follow her points. I found myself more interested in the quotes from other researchers than what the author was writing. (My reading this book follows up reading [b:Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution|20613624|Unspeakable Things Sex, Lies and Revolution|Laurie Penny|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1405924555s/20613624.jpg|39894983] by [a:Laurie Penny|4719213|Laurie Penny|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1412727681p2/4719213.jpg], which was a better take on the overarching effects of pressures on women.)
Still, I found some great passages.
p. 30: Beneath that evidence lie more women who are harder to diagnose but who show evidence of wide-spread shame, guilt, self-hate, obsession, and deprivation. This borderline behavior is what I am most committed to talking about in this book. I want you to see it for what it is —not a normal part of being a girl, not an acceptable way of moving through the world, but a destructive pathology that is stripping us of our potential.
p. 34: My generation did not strive for goodness or politeness, blindly ascribe to our parents' values, or muffle our opposition to their rules. In stark contrast, most of us were brazenly vocal, sometimes antagonistic. We were "perfect girls," composing our picture of the perfect female life—well educated, daring, unsentimental, and of course, thin. ... We are not our mothers, not "good girls." we are "perfect girls," obsessed with appearing ideal. WE aren't worried about doing things "right." We are worried about doing things "impeccably."
p. 45: The daughters of baby boomers have driven straight on past equality to dominance when it comes to achievement—academic or otherwise. Unlike our brothers and boyfriends, who settle for being great at certain things and uninterested in others—a style borrowed perhaps from their fathers—we desire, like our mothers, to do it all and do it all near perfectly. Mediocrity is for sissies, and as inheritors of Title IX and "go-girl" feminism, we despise nothing more than weakness (except perhaps fatness, which we equate with weakness).
p. 54: I am looking for third-wave feminism to be a plank that I can smack down over the abyss between my intellect—bodies come in all shapes and sizes, I don't have to be good at everything, there is time—and my behavior—eating neurotically, wanting more all the time, immediately. I don't want to grow bitter, frustrated, and even sick as a result of a superwoman lifestyle. ... We still can't seem to eradicate the idea that a woman must be physically perfect, in addition to being liberated, brilliant funny, stylish, and capable—all effortlessly.
p. 108: Lots of guys in college who hooked up with lots of girls were still known for other things: their premed rigidness, their interest in the Middle East conflict, their brilliant sarcasm. But the girls I knew who hooked up a lot became known mostly for that quality alone. A guy can be a "slut" and a sweetie, a jock, a dreamer, a joker. When a girl is labeled a "slut," the rest of her identity seems to fall away. When that happens, her entire worth gets tied up in her ability to hook up with guys and, therefore, her ability to look beautiful, thin, and desirable, to be fun, to dance on the bar. She doesn't have the opportunity to be taken seriously once she has garnered the "easy" label.
p. 113: Women wade through a cesspool of self-doubt—they replay the event, or what they can remember of it, in their heads and blame themselves for not being more assertive. Eventually they find some anger buried deep inside and try to climb on it to get out of their self-hate.
p. 118: This business of growing up a girl—developing a woman's body and interpreting what it means, its capacity to give pleasure followed by such pain, its vulnerability to pregnancy, to disease, to violation, to self hate—is so incredibly complicated. It feels alike a ten-ton weight is handed to every girl at the age of twelve, and then she is invited to mount the tightrope of adolescence. It is as if we look at these spindly-legged, pony-tailed girls, fresh out of sixth grade, and say, "Now you will be grown. You will be watched. You will fight every day of your life to be respected—by yourself and others. You will have to read between the lines, protect your reputation, be wary of your best friends. You will have myriad hungers. You will need to control these constantly."
p. 122: Girls learn that, while their voices may not be heard, their bodies speak volumes.
p. 134: "Girls feel we have to look good and perform well, not look silly or dumb. I think that's part of the perfectionism—maintaining an image."
p. 141: "Proving that you are hot, worthy, of lust, and necessarily that you seek to provoke lust is still exclusively women's work. It is not enough to be successful, rich, and accomplished."
p. 142: Being smart, outspoken, dedicated, and/or college-bound is potentially powerful but also potentially disempowering in the slick social world of high school. If you are considered tense, for example, you lose power. If you talk too much, become too emotional, or "take things too seriously," you lose power. If you "make a big deal" out of age-old traditions of female objectification, you lose power. As Levy writes, "Raunch culture, then, isn't an entertainment option, it's a litmus test of female uptightness."
p. 150: Being noticed is ordinary, fleeting, and impersonal. Being seen is extraordinary, lasting, and intimate. Being noticed is common and only skin-deep. Being seen is rare and profound. .. Being seen is rarely about physical beauty. ... Being noticed, by contrast, is easy. It is par for the course for most young women, especially young, to be noticed, a deeply engrained ritual of our culture. Men watch. Women are watched.
p. 159: A girl who loves herself is very attractive. If they're convinced, I'm convinced.
p. 166: There is no one-size-fits-all beauty, no perfect girl, no ideal guy. There is only a fit, plain and simple and miraculous.
p. 180: "someday" soothes insecurities, and numbs discomfort, and keeps perfect girls running obediently in the hamster wheel of weight preoccupation. Someday we will be thin. Translation: someday we will be happy, loved, and powerful.
p. 184: True health is "the middle path," along which control is sometimes lost, sometimes won, without much fanfare. There are unexpected and delightful detours along the way. There is no "good" or "bad," only "right now"—tastes, moods, the occasional craving, like different kinds of weather, all welcomed and satisfied without judgment. True health is balance. Balance is freedom.
p. 223: "...I have a tendency to believe that everything comes down to self-discipline—if I fail at something, be it not doing well on an exam or eating too much at a meal, then that represents a breakdown of self-control." In the next breath she admits: "I hate being this way; I dislike that I am associating myself with the superficial, diet-obsessed women I scoff at. I am often shocked and frustrated with myself that, despite being an insightful,, self-aware feminist, I feel bad when I eat a freaking bagel."
p. 233: Perfect girls like to move full steam ahead, climb the ladder of success two rungs at a time, run rather than walk. Perfect girls are planners. Most like to set short-term goals and then take the appropriates steps to reach them as quickly and efficiently as possible. If there is a spot/boy/job at a team/bar/company that we desire, we are usually petty adept at doing whatever it takes. This tendency—to stick to a goal under any and all duress—makes us especially vulnerable to eating disorders.
p. 234: When we young women hit the real world, we aren't accustomed to the idea of climbing the career ladder one rung at a time. We don't plan on paying our dues in dead-end jobs. Perfect girls are impatient; we dream big and fall hard. Efficiency, not resiliency, is our strong suit. We're in the market for fireworks, record breakers, unprecedented success. We are running, full force, without time to consider where the finish line might be.
p. 236: Her life no longer fit into six-month spurts of goal setting, pursuing, and achieving. Her success as a journalist depended on her own efforts, but also on time, the whims of her supervisors, the economy—chance.
...
Maintaining a healthy, steady self-image is based on achievable goals and states of being that are independent of the market or your managers. Sara came to understand that time and patience, not rapid tenacity, were what she needed in order to survive the inevitably rocky post-college period. She had to have faith in her goodness as a well-intentioned, intelligent, and kind person beyond the front-page bylines she had hoped for or the promotions she thought her potential promised. It was not her thinness or her killer commitment that would make her happy, it was her acceptance of the present—albeit confusing, sometimes disappointing, and occasionally boring—moment.
p. 238: "Sometimes there is so much disparity between what young women are told to expect and what actually happens that they get disillusioned. The ones who blame themselves tend to get depressed. If they aren't good at managing their tough feelings, sometimes they get stuck exercising massive amounts of control in order to just keep going, or worst-case scenario, they back off from the ladder altogether and give up the climb. It is all much worse if they grew up seeing themselves as special or precious."
...
Hard work, patience, depersonaliztion, unwavering self-confidence, and resilience are all necessary skills to get to the top. There is no leaping, only radical humility. Turns out we must climb the ladder like mere mortals. This is a deflating realization, but accepting it is ultimately healthy for mind and body, and also can be a great relief.
p. 249: "If you have been perfect all your life and have managed to meet all the expectations of your family, your friends, your community, your society, chances are excellent that there will be a black hole where that core ought to be."
p. 258: In those moments, it was not her religion textbook or her feminist reader that she most longed for. It was self-acceptance. It was comfort. It was faith in the beauty of her body regardless of its size. These things don't come from the intellect alone. They come from the soul. You can rationalize until you are blue in the face, but you are never going to believe that you are beautiful unless you believe it in the regions below your brain.
...
Spirituality requires that perfect girls stop thinking, planning, judging, and start sensing. It requires that we start listening to the quiet but insistent starving daughter within us— the part that cries and wants and hungers so voraciously when ignored or when fed paltry substitutes for what it craves.
It also requires us to embrace the possibility that the most basic of our needs and desires, the most average of everyday life, will have to feed us. Perhaps true spirituality is found not in our grandparents' tall-steeple religions but in the joy of a walk in the snow on a Sunday afternoon or the warmth of a bowl of split pea soup. Perhaps the very thing we are trying to run from—our ordinariness, the ordinariness of everyday life—is where divinity dwells.
p. 262: The women whom my generation looks up to seem to fly above the messiness of life, their bodies like well-crafted statements of who they are. But any woman who appears to be effortlessly perfect is spending hours a day sweating and grunting in a gym, or undergoing messy cosmetic surgery.
When "real" women try to get to perfection by transcending the messiness of life, they get in trouble. They get sick. They get sad. They get, as Heather did, split in two. They spend so much energy denying their sensible hungers and cravings that their inner starving daughters start asserting themselves in big, aggressive ways. Instead of escalating the mundanities of earthly existence, they become ravaged by them.
p. 269: Ultimately you cannot organize a soul or a life. You cannot achieve well-being. You can only move toward wellness and peace of mind and happiness with a humble, transparent intention. You can only admit your smallness in a large and overwhelming world, and then be surprised by the power of that smallness. You can only see your body for what it is—a miracle of coordination, curves, resiliency, a partner in your life's journey.
p. 282: The fast is pull of angst-inducing memories. Once you've eaten something, you've eaten it. Stop remembering that you've eaten it. Stop evaluating whether it was good or bad that you ate it. Don't reward yourself. Don't chastise yourself. Forget about it. It happened. It's over. No big deal.
There is no measure of a life well lived. You have to create joy and not push away sadness. Don't weigh yourself. The number is irrelevant. How do you feel? Stop being a perfect girl and start enjoying your life's little wonderful things.
p. 283: Quirks can push people head over heels into love. A set of formidable hips can make a man swoon. It is our strangeness, not our sameness, that attracts people to us.
...
You know what is really, powerfully sexy? A sense of humor. A taste for adventure. A healthy glow. Hips to grab on to. Openness. Confidence. Humility. Appetite. Intuition. A girl who makes the world seem bigger and more interesting. A girl who can rap. A loud laugh that comes from her belly. Smart-ass comebacks. Presence. A quick wit. ... A woman who realizes how beautiful she is.
p. 284: Don't worship women who make it all look easy. Seek out mentors who are wise and generous and evolved most of the time and amusingly flawed the rest, women who are honest about the hard work and small and profound rewards—such as getting to know a young woman like you.
p. 287: I am not superwoman. I did not stick to my plan. I won't burn as many calories. I am not even in great shape. But I am not a hypocrite. I am not in pain. I am not in a mental arm-wrestle with myself. I am breathing deeply. I am moving, I am seeing the world around me. I am healthy. I am not perfect, but I am happy. [Describing her stopping during the run after listening to her body.]
Still, I found some great passages.
p. 30: Beneath that evidence lie more women who are harder to diagnose but who show evidence of wide-spread shame, guilt, self-hate, obsession, and deprivation. This borderline behavior is what I am most committed to talking about in this book. I want you to see it for what it is —not a normal part of being a girl, not an acceptable way of moving through the world, but a destructive pathology that is stripping us of our potential.
p. 34: My generation did not strive for goodness or politeness, blindly ascribe to our parents' values, or muffle our opposition to their rules. In stark contrast, most of us were brazenly vocal, sometimes antagonistic. We were "perfect girls," composing our picture of the perfect female life—well educated, daring, unsentimental, and of course, thin. ... We are not our mothers, not "good girls." we are "perfect girls," obsessed with appearing ideal. WE aren't worried about doing things "right." We are worried about doing things "impeccably."
p. 45: The daughters of baby boomers have driven straight on past equality to dominance when it comes to achievement—academic or otherwise. Unlike our brothers and boyfriends, who settle for being great at certain things and uninterested in others—a style borrowed perhaps from their fathers—we desire, like our mothers, to do it all and do it all near perfectly. Mediocrity is for sissies, and as inheritors of Title IX and "go-girl" feminism, we despise nothing more than weakness (except perhaps fatness, which we equate with weakness).
p. 54: I am looking for third-wave feminism to be a plank that I can smack down over the abyss between my intellect—bodies come in all shapes and sizes, I don't have to be good at everything, there is time—and my behavior—eating neurotically, wanting more all the time, immediately. I don't want to grow bitter, frustrated, and even sick as a result of a superwoman lifestyle. ... We still can't seem to eradicate the idea that a woman must be physically perfect, in addition to being liberated, brilliant funny, stylish, and capable—all effortlessly.
p. 108: Lots of guys in college who hooked up with lots of girls were still known for other things: their premed rigidness, their interest in the Middle East conflict, their brilliant sarcasm. But the girls I knew who hooked up a lot became known mostly for that quality alone. A guy can be a "slut" and a sweetie, a jock, a dreamer, a joker. When a girl is labeled a "slut," the rest of her identity seems to fall away. When that happens, her entire worth gets tied up in her ability to hook up with guys and, therefore, her ability to look beautiful, thin, and desirable, to be fun, to dance on the bar. She doesn't have the opportunity to be taken seriously once she has garnered the "easy" label.
p. 113: Women wade through a cesspool of self-doubt—they replay the event, or what they can remember of it, in their heads and blame themselves for not being more assertive. Eventually they find some anger buried deep inside and try to climb on it to get out of their self-hate.
p. 118: This business of growing up a girl—developing a woman's body and interpreting what it means, its capacity to give pleasure followed by such pain, its vulnerability to pregnancy, to disease, to violation, to self hate—is so incredibly complicated. It feels alike a ten-ton weight is handed to every girl at the age of twelve, and then she is invited to mount the tightrope of adolescence. It is as if we look at these spindly-legged, pony-tailed girls, fresh out of sixth grade, and say, "Now you will be grown. You will be watched. You will fight every day of your life to be respected—by yourself and others. You will have to read between the lines, protect your reputation, be wary of your best friends. You will have myriad hungers. You will need to control these constantly."
p. 122: Girls learn that, while their voices may not be heard, their bodies speak volumes.
p. 134: "Girls feel we have to look good and perform well, not look silly or dumb. I think that's part of the perfectionism—maintaining an image."
p. 141: "Proving that you are hot, worthy, of lust, and necessarily that you seek to provoke lust is still exclusively women's work. It is not enough to be successful, rich, and accomplished."
p. 142: Being smart, outspoken, dedicated, and/or college-bound is potentially powerful but also potentially disempowering in the slick social world of high school. If you are considered tense, for example, you lose power. If you talk too much, become too emotional, or "take things too seriously," you lose power. If you "make a big deal" out of age-old traditions of female objectification, you lose power. As Levy writes, "Raunch culture, then, isn't an entertainment option, it's a litmus test of female uptightness."
p. 150: Being noticed is ordinary, fleeting, and impersonal. Being seen is extraordinary, lasting, and intimate. Being noticed is common and only skin-deep. Being seen is rare and profound. .. Being seen is rarely about physical beauty. ... Being noticed, by contrast, is easy. It is par for the course for most young women, especially young, to be noticed, a deeply engrained ritual of our culture. Men watch. Women are watched.
p. 159: A girl who loves herself is very attractive. If they're convinced, I'm convinced.
p. 166: There is no one-size-fits-all beauty, no perfect girl, no ideal guy. There is only a fit, plain and simple and miraculous.
p. 180: "someday" soothes insecurities, and numbs discomfort, and keeps perfect girls running obediently in the hamster wheel of weight preoccupation. Someday we will be thin. Translation: someday we will be happy, loved, and powerful.
p. 184: True health is "the middle path," along which control is sometimes lost, sometimes won, without much fanfare. There are unexpected and delightful detours along the way. There is no "good" or "bad," only "right now"—tastes, moods, the occasional craving, like different kinds of weather, all welcomed and satisfied without judgment. True health is balance. Balance is freedom.
p. 223: "...I have a tendency to believe that everything comes down to self-discipline—if I fail at something, be it not doing well on an exam or eating too much at a meal, then that represents a breakdown of self-control." In the next breath she admits: "I hate being this way; I dislike that I am associating myself with the superficial, diet-obsessed women I scoff at. I am often shocked and frustrated with myself that, despite being an insightful,, self-aware feminist, I feel bad when I eat a freaking bagel."
p. 233: Perfect girls like to move full steam ahead, climb the ladder of success two rungs at a time, run rather than walk. Perfect girls are planners. Most like to set short-term goals and then take the appropriates steps to reach them as quickly and efficiently as possible. If there is a spot/boy/job at a team/bar/company that we desire, we are usually petty adept at doing whatever it takes. This tendency—to stick to a goal under any and all duress—makes us especially vulnerable to eating disorders.
p. 234: When we young women hit the real world, we aren't accustomed to the idea of climbing the career ladder one rung at a time. We don't plan on paying our dues in dead-end jobs. Perfect girls are impatient; we dream big and fall hard. Efficiency, not resiliency, is our strong suit. We're in the market for fireworks, record breakers, unprecedented success. We are running, full force, without time to consider where the finish line might be.
p. 236: Her life no longer fit into six-month spurts of goal setting, pursuing, and achieving. Her success as a journalist depended on her own efforts, but also on time, the whims of her supervisors, the economy—chance.
...
Maintaining a healthy, steady self-image is based on achievable goals and states of being that are independent of the market or your managers. Sara came to understand that time and patience, not rapid tenacity, were what she needed in order to survive the inevitably rocky post-college period. She had to have faith in her goodness as a well-intentioned, intelligent, and kind person beyond the front-page bylines she had hoped for or the promotions she thought her potential promised. It was not her thinness or her killer commitment that would make her happy, it was her acceptance of the present—albeit confusing, sometimes disappointing, and occasionally boring—moment.
p. 238: "Sometimes there is so much disparity between what young women are told to expect and what actually happens that they get disillusioned. The ones who blame themselves tend to get depressed. If they aren't good at managing their tough feelings, sometimes they get stuck exercising massive amounts of control in order to just keep going, or worst-case scenario, they back off from the ladder altogether and give up the climb. It is all much worse if they grew up seeing themselves as special or precious."
...
Hard work, patience, depersonaliztion, unwavering self-confidence, and resilience are all necessary skills to get to the top. There is no leaping, only radical humility. Turns out we must climb the ladder like mere mortals. This is a deflating realization, but accepting it is ultimately healthy for mind and body, and also can be a great relief.
p. 249: "If you have been perfect all your life and have managed to meet all the expectations of your family, your friends, your community, your society, chances are excellent that there will be a black hole where that core ought to be."
p. 258: In those moments, it was not her religion textbook or her feminist reader that she most longed for. It was self-acceptance. It was comfort. It was faith in the beauty of her body regardless of its size. These things don't come from the intellect alone. They come from the soul. You can rationalize until you are blue in the face, but you are never going to believe that you are beautiful unless you believe it in the regions below your brain.
...
Spirituality requires that perfect girls stop thinking, planning, judging, and start sensing. It requires that we start listening to the quiet but insistent starving daughter within us— the part that cries and wants and hungers so voraciously when ignored or when fed paltry substitutes for what it craves.
It also requires us to embrace the possibility that the most basic of our needs and desires, the most average of everyday life, will have to feed us. Perhaps true spirituality is found not in our grandparents' tall-steeple religions but in the joy of a walk in the snow on a Sunday afternoon or the warmth of a bowl of split pea soup. Perhaps the very thing we are trying to run from—our ordinariness, the ordinariness of everyday life—is where divinity dwells.
p. 262: The women whom my generation looks up to seem to fly above the messiness of life, their bodies like well-crafted statements of who they are. But any woman who appears to be effortlessly perfect is spending hours a day sweating and grunting in a gym, or undergoing messy cosmetic surgery.
When "real" women try to get to perfection by transcending the messiness of life, they get in trouble. They get sick. They get sad. They get, as Heather did, split in two. They spend so much energy denying their sensible hungers and cravings that their inner starving daughters start asserting themselves in big, aggressive ways. Instead of escalating the mundanities of earthly existence, they become ravaged by them.
p. 269: Ultimately you cannot organize a soul or a life. You cannot achieve well-being. You can only move toward wellness and peace of mind and happiness with a humble, transparent intention. You can only admit your smallness in a large and overwhelming world, and then be surprised by the power of that smallness. You can only see your body for what it is—a miracle of coordination, curves, resiliency, a partner in your life's journey.
p. 282: The fast is pull of angst-inducing memories. Once you've eaten something, you've eaten it. Stop remembering that you've eaten it. Stop evaluating whether it was good or bad that you ate it. Don't reward yourself. Don't chastise yourself. Forget about it. It happened. It's over. No big deal.
There is no measure of a life well lived. You have to create joy and not push away sadness. Don't weigh yourself. The number is irrelevant. How do you feel? Stop being a perfect girl and start enjoying your life's little wonderful things.
p. 283: Quirks can push people head over heels into love. A set of formidable hips can make a man swoon. It is our strangeness, not our sameness, that attracts people to us.
...
You know what is really, powerfully sexy? A sense of humor. A taste for adventure. A healthy glow. Hips to grab on to. Openness. Confidence. Humility. Appetite. Intuition. A girl who makes the world seem bigger and more interesting. A girl who can rap. A loud laugh that comes from her belly. Smart-ass comebacks. Presence. A quick wit. ... A woman who realizes how beautiful she is.
p. 284: Don't worship women who make it all look easy. Seek out mentors who are wise and generous and evolved most of the time and amusingly flawed the rest, women who are honest about the hard work and small and profound rewards—such as getting to know a young woman like you.
p. 287: I am not superwoman. I did not stick to my plan. I won't burn as many calories. I am not even in great shape. But I am not a hypocrite. I am not in pain. I am not in a mental arm-wrestle with myself. I am breathing deeply. I am moving, I am seeing the world around me. I am healthy. I am not perfect, but I am happy. [Describing her stopping during the run after listening to her body.]
juliaem's review
3.0
Well, I have to say, I liked this book a lot more than I thought I would, plus Martin writes for feministing, my fave feminist blog of all time. (And, since this is going to be wordy, I would recommend it to any female friend, just because the subject matter is SO important and Martin writes well.). I first read an excerpt of it in an issue of Bitch from last summer, and got extremely annoyed when Martin lumped in "hot yoga" as one of the things this new generation of crazily perfectionist girls do as manifestations of their not-quite-full-blown-but-certainly-borderline-disordered-eating. Being a hot yoga teacher, I know from my own experience and those from other women I practice with that, if the owners of the studio and the teachers in it are committed to the authentic practice of yoga (accepting all things, your body included, as they are), then yoga works against the culture of thinness achieved at any cost.
That specific example aside, overall the book was an interesting analysis of body-loathing as our generation (meaning slightly younger than Generation X and Y, I suppose) experiences it. There are some tangents I think she should have skipped; for example, race is not adequately explored in her musings on hip-hop culture, although it is in her discussions of socioeconomic status. On the other hand, I think her exploration of what it meant to have a generation of supermoms raising us who STILL had to do a majority of the housework is incisive and fresh. The father chapter is particularly interesting.
God, this is a long-ass review. My final point, I guess, is not really a criticism per se, because although I wish the book had gone into this in more depth, that it didn't gave me more of a chance to think about my own ideas...maybe it's the yoga, but Martin introduces the idea very early that this drive for perfectionism leaves many talented, smart, motivated young women with emptiness at their core. I immediately thought, "That's because we're lacking in spiritual experiences!", but Martin didn't address that until near the end of the book. I think a lot of what yoga has to offer, as does much of Eastern thinking, practice, and philosophy, is what we lack. At one point Martin talks about a therapist telling her weight-obsessed friend that "you are not your body," but that misses the entire point. Women are a multiplicity of things, certainly, many of which are not visible in the mirror. To say, "I feel fat," however, with the obvious implication that fat = bad, is in fact tantamount to saying, "I feel bad about myself," an ugly sentiment indeed. The parsing and disassociation ("It's not me, it's just my body") makes it even easier for women to mentally segregate, loathe, surgically alter, abuse, and occasionally starve the bodies upon which our earthly existence depends. Instead of denying our critical need to unify mind and body (tellingly, yoga means union in Sanskrit--specifically between the body and mind), the solution lies in compassion, starting first with ourselves. We ARE our bodies, as much as we our brilliant minds, and we need to love our bodies and minds as that--our own precious, impermanent resources in this lonely world.
I'll get off my soapbox now. Read the book.
That specific example aside, overall the book was an interesting analysis of body-loathing as our generation (meaning slightly younger than Generation X and Y, I suppose) experiences it. There are some tangents I think she should have skipped; for example, race is not adequately explored in her musings on hip-hop culture, although it is in her discussions of socioeconomic status. On the other hand, I think her exploration of what it meant to have a generation of supermoms raising us who STILL had to do a majority of the housework is incisive and fresh. The father chapter is particularly interesting.
God, this is a long-ass review. My final point, I guess, is not really a criticism per se, because although I wish the book had gone into this in more depth, that it didn't gave me more of a chance to think about my own ideas...maybe it's the yoga, but Martin introduces the idea very early that this drive for perfectionism leaves many talented, smart, motivated young women with emptiness at their core. I immediately thought, "That's because we're lacking in spiritual experiences!", but Martin didn't address that until near the end of the book. I think a lot of what yoga has to offer, as does much of Eastern thinking, practice, and philosophy, is what we lack. At one point Martin talks about a therapist telling her weight-obsessed friend that "you are not your body," but that misses the entire point. Women are a multiplicity of things, certainly, many of which are not visible in the mirror. To say, "I feel fat," however, with the obvious implication that fat = bad, is in fact tantamount to saying, "I feel bad about myself," an ugly sentiment indeed. The parsing and disassociation ("It's not me, it's just my body") makes it even easier for women to mentally segregate, loathe, surgically alter, abuse, and occasionally starve the bodies upon which our earthly existence depends. Instead of denying our critical need to unify mind and body (tellingly, yoga means union in Sanskrit--specifically between the body and mind), the solution lies in compassion, starting first with ourselves. We ARE our bodies, as much as we our brilliant minds, and we need to love our bodies and minds as that--our own precious, impermanent resources in this lonely world.
I'll get off my soapbox now. Read the book.
fluffernutterfriday's review
5.0
This was poignant, funny, intelligent, and narrative-drivrn research at its best.
emmmmmers's review
For anyone who struggles with body issues or has an eating disorder, or just struggles like I do, this book really awesome. It takes away some pain, knowing you aren't alone. With any disorder.
alleeme's review
2.0
I can't explain how this book annoyed me. In her intro Martin talks about how everyone she mentioned the book to while she was writing it told her, "That's been done." I do think there is more to say about the relationship between young women today, the pressure of “perfection”, and how the outlet for stress and self-hatred seems to so often be our bodies.
Still, the whole thing seems much more like a personal memoir than I was expecting, and though I suppose I technically fit into the same demographic as Martin (white, middle to upper-middle class, college education, Mom always on a diet, middle America blah blah blah) I still felt very distant from the text and unable to relate. And mostly I just found it a bit too whiney to enjoy or be enlightened by it.
Still, the whole thing seems much more like a personal memoir than I was expecting, and though I suppose I technically fit into the same demographic as Martin (white, middle to upper-middle class, college education, Mom always on a diet, middle America blah blah blah) I still felt very distant from the text and unable to relate. And mostly I just found it a bit too whiney to enjoy or be enlightened by it.
book_nut's review
3.0
I'm torn about this one. On the one hand, important information and stories about how women look at their bodies. On the other hand, I felt like a visitor in a foreign land. It also scared the crap out of me: what the hell am I doing trying to raise four girls?