Girl Trouble (28 page)

Growing girls have probably always been sensitive to their body weight and appearance. There is a haunting passage in Pearl Jephcott's study of working-class girls,
Girls Growing Up
, which was published during the Second World War in Britain. One of the respondents in Jephcott's survey, ‘Mary Smith', was an intelligent and articulate young woman who had struggled against unpromising odds to train as a nurse. Jephcott herself was sufficiently moved by Mary's story to reproduce it, verbatim, as the first chapter in her book. Mary's plucky and heart-warming story ended with a confession:

I never bother the opposite sex & very, very seldom they bother me, but my biggest tragedy is I am fat & wear W.X. clothes, I don't like dancing because I think I am too fat. I
don't go swimming because I think I am too fat, I feel very embaressed [sic] when in the company of males, I cannot dress as I like because the styles of dress I like do not suite [sic] fat people …
14

A study of adolescents published in 1950 found girls more obsessed with their appearance than boys, and noted the widespread concern with ‘fatness, thinness, tallness, shortness, lack of development, exceptionally early development, blackheads, pimples, bad eyes, irregular teeth, ugly noses and receding chins'.
15
James Hemming, a humanist and educational reformer, was awarded a PhD from the University of London for his work on the problems of adolescent girls in the 1950s. His study was subsequently published as a book.
16
Hemming analysed more than three thousand letters written by young girls to a weekly paper in the early 1950s. The girls sought advice on a range of personal matters, including friendship, and relationships at home and school, but one of the biggest areas of anxiety was appearance. Hemming found very few girls content with how they looked, and noted widespread dejection, and a desperate striving for perfection in this area.
17

Writers such as Naomi Wolf were much influenced by surveys such as one carried out by
Glamour
magazine in 1984, which found that some three-quarters of the women polled thought that they were too fat.
18
Only around one quarter of these women would have been regarded as overweight using the medical criteria of the time. The 1980s was a decade in which the ‘workout' became fashionable, and body consciousness may have increased. Whether this was altogether a bad thing is debatable, particularly given generally rising rates of obesity at the end of the twentieth century.
19
But a key question
for feminists is whether younger women's perceptions of their body image were becoming increasingly distorted, and whether this carried increasingly damaging implications for their health. Did such changes lead to an ‘epidemic of eating disorders' as often suggested?

Anorexia nervosa
was a term established in the late nineteenth century, but as a condition self-starvation has a long history. It can be traced back, for instance, to the saints and fasting girls of medieval times.
20
In the nineteenth century, the display of a healthy appetite could be viewed as unfeminine. Some Victorian girls developed troubled eating patterns, swallowing little in public, while consuming food furtively in private. There has been some suggestion that self-starvation was common among girls in the 1920s.
21
The press paid little attention to anorexia before the 1970s, although there were occasional features relating to the pioneering work of Professor Arthur Crisp on the subject. In 1979, for instance, the
Daily Mirror
included a brief mention of Crisp's suggestion that girl anorectics ‘were victims of middle-class values' in a piece headed ‘Peril of the Rich Twiggies'.
22
Dr Tony Smith, medical correspondent for
The Times,
on the other hand reported Crisp's work as showing the strains which society subjected girls to at adolescence, and suggested that anorexic girls were unconsciously rejecting adult sexuality.
23

Newspaper references to the condition increased during the 1980s, but the real explosion of media interest came during the following decade. A quick search for ‘anorexia' in the
Daily Mirror
's digital archive, for instance, yields nearly eight hundred hits, clustering particularly in the years between 1995 and 2005. Brief reports on medical findings gave way to lengthy, personal stories. These were often illustrated by images of cadaverous women, their rib cages and pelvic bones jutting horribly from
their emaciated bodies. Harrowing accounts of personal tragedy – a mother's loss of both of her daughters to the disease, for instance – then began to alternate with gossip and exposés.
24
Photographs of celebrities who were looking a bit on the slim side were accompanied by speculation from their friends about whether or not they had succumbed to anorexia. Princess Diana's thin arms inevitably provoked suspicion. When Diana's sister-in-law, Lady Victoria Spencer, admitted to the disease, the press had a field day.

Speculation about celebrities became feverish and intrusive. Some celebrities went in for personal confession, admitting struggles with anorexia, ostensibly to help others. There have been attacks on the fashion industry for featuring ‘size zero' models, and horror stories about the ballet world, blamed for subjecting young dancers to rigid body-control regimes. Horror stories about ‘sick' ‘pro-ana' or ‘thinspiration' websites, accused of encouraging young girls to starve themselves, drew attention in both the popular press and in television documentaries from the mid-2000s. Stories about anorexia have probably now lost some of their power to shock. More recently, media coverage of the disease has found eye-catching new angles on the subject. ‘Anorexic mum who weighs less than her 7-year old', shrilled the
Daily Mirror
in November 2011.
25
The article was accompanied by a photograph labelled ‘Frock shock', showing beaming mother and slightly embarrassed-looking daughter wearing identical, pink flower-patterned dolly dresses with Peter Pan collars.

Anorexia is a terrible disease and it kills. Has its incidence increased as much as some writers have suggested? Naomi Wolf stated that ‘eating disorders rose exponentially' in the period just before she was writing and described anorexia as ‘a killer epidemic'.
26
But it is very difficult to get a clear, statistical picture.
This is partly because less was known about the condition before 1960. One thing media exposure has ensured is that now, many more people know about the disease, and it is much more likely to be reported. Many parents understandably get concerned as soon as they see any signs of a daughter going on a diet. Another problem is that the statistics which we do have relate to hospital admissions, and not all sufferers are hospitalised.
27
Establishing long-term trends is difficult because we don't have reliable figures on incidence from before the 1970s. The evidence we have is fairly impressionistic. Arthur Crisp's figures have sometimes been used as a baseline. Crisp suggested that around one girl in every hundred in independent schools in London was suffering from some degree of anorexia in the 1970s.
28
Writing later, in 2006, he suggested that the form and content of the disease had changed little between 1960 and 1995, and even that it might have become somewhat
less
common.
29
The incidence of bulimia nervosa, on the other hand – cycles of eating and purging – had risen greatly. An important study of time trends in eating disorder incidence published in 2005 found that the incidence of anorexia nervosa detected by general practitioners had remained stable between 1988 and 2000. The authors of this study too found that the incidence of bulimia had shown a dramatic increase in the 1990s, but that this now appeared to be falling.
30

The notion, then, of a sudden ‘epidemic' of anorexia among young women in Britain at the end of the twentieth century is misleading. The eating disorders charity Beat suggests that between 1 and 2 per cent of young women in the UK may be suffering from anorexia.
31
The Royal College of Psychiatrists suggests that the condition affects approximately 1 in 150 fifteen-year-old girls. The mental health charity Mind gives the ratio of 1 in 100
women between the ages of fifteen and thirty.
32
The disease is not, of course, found only among young women. Men, children and older females can also develop the condition. Anorexia is not the only form of eating disorder suffered by young women. What about bulimia? Bulimia is not life-threatening like anorexia nervosa, but still carries health risks and can undoubtedly cause suffering. There are also many other forms of disordered eating, often referred to as ‘Ednos' (eating disorders not otherwise specified), which include excessive dieting, binging, occasional purging, and similar behaviours. Do we include the kind of overeating that has led to widespread obesity under the label of an eating disorder? If we widen the definition in this way, it is far from evident that this is specifically a female problem.

There has always been a great deal of debate about the causes of anorexia nervosa
.
Arthur Crisp had little time for anyone blaming fashion, insisting that this was to trivialise the condition. Interestingly, he objected strongly to the idea of lumping anorexia together with other ‘eating disorders'. He maintained that problems such as bulimia and susceptibility to diet fads bore ‘the same relationship to the psychopathology of anorexia nervosa as does a cough to cancer of the lung'.
33
Anorexia is now generally recognised as a serious and complex pathological condition, what journalist Laurie Penny has described as ‘a psychotic strategy of self-control'.
34
Another journalist, the
Guardian
's Hadley Freeman (who like Penny has admitted to having suffered from anorexia in her youth), put the matter in a nutshell, asserting that ‘eating disorders do not stem from a desire to be slim: they are an expression of unhappiness through food'.
35

Only a small proportion of girls suffer from serious eating disorders. Affluent societies, and not just girls, are obsessed
with body size and image. Binge eating, and obesity, affect both sexes. It may seem paradoxical that there is so much concern about thinness when obesity is increasingly defined as one of the major health problems of the age, affecting far greater numbers. Notwithstanding Professor Crisp's objection to classifying anorexia alongside other forms of disordered eating, it is possible to see all eating disorders as to some extent rooted in distortions of appetite. These distortions seem to pervade wealthy societies bent on consumption. Young women in our society are undoubtedly subject to many pressures, and they are relentlessly targeted as consumers.
36
It is tempting to suggest that some of them feel
stuffed
, and lose their appetite in consequence. The intake of food is one area over which they can exercise power, and feel in control.

The question of whether too much is expected of girls today has often surfaced in the press throughout the twenty-first century so far. Are girls exhibiting unprecedented rates of unhappiness and depression? Some have urged that this is the case. Two academic studies, one based on a sample of school-aged youngsters in the West of Scotland, the other coming from North America, provoked a great deal of discussion.
37
The Scottish study, published by Patrick West and Helen Sweeting in 2003, resulted in a paper entitled ‘Fifteen, Female and Stressed: Changing Patterns of Psychological Distress over Time'. The authors argued that between 1987 and 1999, levels of worry increased among girls but not boys. The girls' worries were not least about school performance, as well as looks and weight, and the researchers thought that this might have to do with changing gender roles. They recognised that girls tended to internalise, and boys to externalise stress, and admitted that the boys may have found respite from pressure in ‘laddish' pursuits. The American study
which highlighted women's unhappiness was by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers; entitled ‘The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness', it was published in 2009. Stevenson and Wolfers suggested that in spite of all the ostensible improvements in women's lives (better wages, control over fertility, freedom from domestic drudgery and the like), their sense of subjective well-being appeared to have diminished since 1970.

Both studies proved controversial. As philosophers have been aware for centuries, happiness is difficult to define, to pin down and to measure. Subjective experiences of well-being are often mercurial, much influenced by different reference groups and changing aspirations. How does education impact on happiness, for instance? It might bring a measure of happiness through self-respect, while conducing to unhappiness through an increased awareness of the miseries of others on a global scale. Whatever their limitations, both the Scottish and the American studies were eagerly seized upon by commentators. Some journalists with feminist leanings were keen to exploit the opportunity of drawing attention to problems still faced by girls. Other feminists smelt a rat. In the USA, for instance, the much-respected writer Barbara Ehrenreich penned a sharp attack on Stevenson and Wolfers for having opened the doors to those who triumphantly concluded, on the basis of their work, that all feminism had done was to make women miserable.
38

The psychologist and TV pundit Oliver James weighed in with the opinion that young women were ‘the most screwed up group' in society, despite living in an era of greater freedom and affluence than ever before. It was no coincidence, he thought, that girls' unhappiness had increased at around the time they started to outstrip boys at school. Girls were bent on having it all and blamed themselves if they didn't succeed. He likened girls'
situation to that of canaries down a mine, whose suffering should warn others of their impending fate under ‘selfish capitalism'.
39
But were teenage girls ‘a stand-alone demographic in crisis', as the
Observer
's social affairs correspondent, Amelia Hill, averred in 2010?
40
The British think tank Demos set out to investigate this issue in a report entitled
Through the Looking Glass
, published in 2011.
41
Demos researchers came up with a mixed picture. They reported that twice as many girls as boys suffered from ‘teen angst'. Rates of binge drinking, teenage pregnancy and physical inactivity among British girls were higher than in other parts of Europe. However, in many ways girls were doing extremely well. They were ‘significantly more successful than boys in making the transition to adulthood'. Their performance in education was exemplary, and, for the first time, women aged between twenty-two and twenty-nine had closed the pay gap, ‘with young women getting paid 2.1% more than their male peers'.