Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters
The Frightening New Normality of Hating Your Body
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- 3,99 €
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- 3,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
Based on extensive research and in-depth interviews with women from various socio-economic backgrounds, Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters lays bare a stark new world culture of eating disorders, food and body issues that affect virtually all of today's women. Though eating disorders first came to be recognised about 25 years ago, Martin's book shows how the issues surrounding body image have only become more complex, more dangerous and more difficult to treat. The current 'epidemic' of obesity is simply the flip side of the same coin. Drawing from interviews with sufferers, psychologists, nutritionists, and other experts, Courtney Martin's book reveals a whole new generation of 'perfect girls' who have been conditioned from a young age to over-achieve, self-sacrifice, and hate their own bodies - this, despite being raised by a generation of mothers well-versed in the lessons of feminism. Filled with vivid and often heartbreaking personal stories, Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters is both a shocking expos and call to arms, offering hope for a new beginning, one young girl at a time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
It is no longer enough for girls to be good, says journalist and teacher Martin in her debut book. Girls must now be perfect, and that need for perfection is played out in women's bodies. But beneath the high-achieving "perfect girl" surface, seven million American girls and women suffer from an eating disorder; 90% of high school aged girls think they are overweight. Drawing on more than 100 interviews with women and girls ages 9 29, Martin constructs a cultural critique of a generation of girls steeped in the language of self-control. "If I'm not thinking about my body or calories, I'm probably sleeping or dead," a 14-year-old confesses. Such heartbreaking quotes fill the book and fuel Martin's anger. In chapters devoted to the influence of "porn culture," the role fathers play in shaping their daughters' self-image, eating disorders among athletes, the narrowly circumscribed role of women in hip-hop and more, Martin explores the forces that drive young women to sacrifice themselves on the altar of perfection. A self-described perfect girl, Martin brings a personal perspective to the topic. If occasionally overambitious in her reach, Martin has a valuable mission: calling on young women to harness their intellectual and emotional energy and learn to enjoy their bodies, "imperfect" though they may be.
