Sammy Secrist

The “Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters” chapter presented a refreshing and interesting look at the new culture of eating disorders, body issues, and “screwed-up attitudes toward food and fitness” (2) that affects nearly all contemporary young women. Driven by the thirst for the ultimate goal of “effortless perfection”, “the expectation that one would be smart, accomplished, fit, beautiful, and popular… without visible effort” (6), they are exhausted from over-exercising, engaging in disordered eating, and scrutinizing their bodies in order to attain a twisted ideal. The feminist charge of “you can do anything” is warped into “you must do everything”. This young generation’s obsession with being fit and thin and the disordered thinking about food and fitness has become normalized, accepted to be just part of womanhood. But just because it is believed to be normal doesn’t mean it is okay. Instead of focusing on the important things like “community building, learning, teaching, loving, listening, birthing, caring” (5), women are so focused inward that health, wellness, and joy are an afterthought in the drive for a perfect body. Yet there is never a limit to perfection. It shocked me to read that more than 7 million American girls and women are affected by eating disorders, and some would rather by run over by a truck or be mean or stupid than be fat. This seemed so extreme to me, yet Martin’s exposé exhibits this young generation as obsessive compulsive and overachieving who feel they need to be perfect in order to be special and stand out. I found Martin’s examination of the athletic obsession and how “a commitment to and passion for a sport provide a foolproof disguise for many girls today” (224) to be very interesting. The disease is masked as dedication. Martin surmises, “almost all female athletes have flirted with disordered eating” (231). They take commitment to the extreme and enter into “the dangerous territory of over-exercising, under-eating, and overtraining” (231). They are “extreme in their fitness regimens” (221) and weight loss becomes more emphasized rather than getting stronger. I found the competitive aspect very interesting. Girls create a competitive and toxic environment around eating and being thin. They feel they’ve won when they’ve resisted food or worked out more, so that anorexia, other disordered eating, and over-exercising comes to feel empowering.

The “Getting Your Body Back” article was an interesting look into the pregnant woman’s body and how contemporary motherhood is established in a postindustrial consumer culture. The “ideals of contemporary motherhood” (114) now involve a set of three shifts: work, household labor and childcare, and bodywork. There is a key feminist tension surrounding the contemporary pregnant woman within the fitness discourse where “exactly at the moment when a woman’s body is accomplishing a highly valued route to femininity, she is least likely to be viewed as aesthetically ideal” (106). Despite having been previously excluded from the “contemporary ideals that prescribe toned, taut, fit femininity for women” (107), pregnant women now participate in the objectification and scrutiny of the body by means of media imagery and magazines “selling the sexualized possibilities of the maternal body” (107) and the idea that a pregnant woman’s body is in need of fitness. The maternal body is trapped between doing what is best for the baby and the need of a slim body. This article looks specifically at the magazine Shape Fit Pregnancy (whose title does not include the word health) and uses textual analysis to explore how fitness practices constitute contemporary motherhood. I found it interesting how a pregnant woman was once restricted from physical activity, but now it is advocated to train for the “physical demands of labor” (112), and “instead of emphasizing the health benefits of fitness for the mother a or for a healthy child, many of the prenatal fitness articles hone in on how fitness activities train women to get in shape for delivery, making it easier, quicker, less painful, and requiring less time to ‘bounce back’” (112). “Bouncing back” and “getting your body back” were reoccurring topics in the magazine with clear messages that “letting the body go” means failed motherhood and femininity. There is clear directive for body surveillance. The articles also merge the second and third shifts, reassuring readers that childcare and fitness are congruous by combining fitness, childcare, and housekeeping. The analysis also reveals a racialized, classed, gendered, and sexualized environment in the meanings of the text.