Perfect Girls, Starving Bodies

“If I'm not thinking about my body or calories, I'm probably sleeping or dead,” confesses a 14-year-old in Courtney E. Martin’s new book, Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters. Sound familiar? We’ll I’m running out to get my copy, especially since I’d found Martin’s wisdom so in tune with my own fear and loathing of Dan Kindlon’s Alpha Girls a few month's back as reported on the Women's Professional Village.

Kindlon spent precious time backslapping and patronizing successful, aggressive young women without seeing that his tale reveals how this "new paradigm" of women's lib has de-natured and de-sensitized our young. He likes the monsters we have created while Martin recoils in horror.

Of Perfect Girls, Publisher’s Weekly reports, “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," and calls stories from the author’s over 100 interviews “heartbreaking.”

You can check out the Women’s Professional Village lambaste of Alpha Girls and then Martin’s book. But, don’t run to Amazon. To date, they’re the only major bookseller who refuses to stop selling dog fighting manuals in the wake of the Michael Vick outrage.

Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body
Free Press, $25 (256p) ISBN 978-0-7432-8796-8)