THREE

A Woman’s Place

WE EXPECT DIFFERENT things of women and men, from their different roles in everyday life, to the behaviors that are deemed acceptable for one gender but not the other. Although social pressures for women and men to conform to traditional gender roles have eased a bit in recent decades, they still exist, exerting a heavy influence on our reactions to each other and the expectations we have for ourselves. Women’s tendencies to engage in self-focused coping and then fall into the toxic triangle of depression, disordered eating, and heavy drinking are the consequences, at least in part, of adherence to gender roles.

No Other Choice

From a very young age, girls are molded and pressured into self-focused coping.1 When a little girl is confronted with an upsetting situation, her parents often ask her about how she feels, sympathize with her feelings of distress, or encourage her to talk at length about the situation. What they don’t do, at least not as much as they do with little boys, is help the girl move from an exploration of her feelings into doing something to change the situation. Parents are in general less likely to encourage in girls an action-oriented, problem-solving approach to dealing with difficult situations than they are with boys.

Now I acknowledge that parents may sometimes not do enough to encourage expression of emotions in their sons. Harvard psychologist William Pollock, in his book Real Boys, Real Men, argues that because parents discourage emotion in their boys, boys lose the ability to articulate and understand their emotions. Pollock also argues that the “big boys don’t cry” message that parents often send their boys fosters the development of aggression and other acting-out behaviors in boys. Not only are boys not encouraged to express negative emotions, they are directly punished for doing so by disapproving parents, teachers, and other children. So they learn to ignore or shut out what they can’t reveal, but these emotions burst out nonetheless as aggressive and harmful acts toward others.

When it comes to girls, the pendulum often swings too far the other way. It’s as if the message girls get is “Big girls DO cry. And cry, and cry, and cry.” As a result, girls don’t learn as many strategies for moving from being upset to doing something about it. They don’t learn how to soothe their own negative feelings and turn their attention to possible solutions; instead they remain mired in feelings of distress and increasingly overwhelmed and immobilized. Or they take control over the only thing they can control—their body—and try to change how they feel with food or drink.

Consider this interchange between six-year-old Kristin and her mother, Susan, after Kristin has had an argument with a friend of hers at school:

Susan: What’s the matter, sweetie, why are you crying?

Kristin: Jennifer told me she hates me!

S: Why would she say something like that?

K: I don’t know. She’s just being mean!

S: No, I’m sure she has some reason. This is really upsetting you, isn’t it?

K: Yeah. (sniffles and tears)

S: Mommy understands. I get really upset when other people are angry with me also. It makes me feel like crying and locking myself in my room.

K: Yeah.

S: What are you feeling right now, honey?

K: Mad.

S: Mad? But if you’re crying, you must also be feeling sad. Do you feel sad, honey?

K: Yeah.

S: I had a friend get angry with me the other day—you know her, Mrs. Murdo—and I came home and really felt like crying and wanting just to curl up in a little ball.

Susan’s intentions in encouraging Kristin to talk at length about her feelings and worries are good. In fact, that is what many parenting books say you’re supposed to do. And that’s what little girls want to talk about, right? While the kind of mirroring Susan is doing here, using examples from her own life to show that she understands how Kristin feels, can be an effective way of validating another person’s feelings, it can also send some pretty damaging, unintended messages. Susan not only lets Kristin know she’s faced similar situations, she makes it clear to Kristin that she, too, finds such situations overwhelming. The mother articulates her own concerns about conflicts with others but doesn’t go on to explain how she has handled these concerns in the past, except to become upset. The message Kristin may take from this interchange is that even Mom finds such situations impossible to deal with, so how could she, Kristin, possibly deal with them except to become upset?

When a mother is herself depressed, she is especially likely to draw her daughter into conversations about her own feelings and even her sense of incompetence at handling daily life. Researcher Hyman Hops and his colleagues at the Oregon Research Institute observed interactions between mothers and their daughters and found that depressed mothers were more likely than nondepressed mothers to talk with their daughters about negative feelings and negative interpretations of recent events.2 Depressed mothers are, however, less likely to draw their sons into such conversations. Hops suggests that the daughters of depressed mothers become sounding boards for their mothers’ feelings of sadness, anxiety, and self-loathing.

Anger: Don’t Go There

There are male emotions and there are female emotions—at least there are emotions that are okay for males to experience and express and emotions that are okay for females to experience and express. Boys and men can be angry, but they can’t be sad or afraid. Girls and women can be sad or afraid, but they can’t be angry.

It’s not that girls don’t feel anger as much as boys—many studies of children and adults have shown that females are just as likely as males to become angry when they are cheated, insulted, or transgressed in some way. It’s that girls, and women, are not allowed to express this anger, and as a result learn to squash it and hold it in.3

A few years ago, I did a combination of studies with two graduate students, Lisa Butler and Cheryl Rusting, that showed how differently women handle feelings of anger and sadness. In one study, we asked women undergraduates to come into our lab and spend a few minutes reading a story about an anger-provoking situation (being cheated out of a grade by a teaching assistant).4 We then asked them to imagine themselves in that situation. Our intent was to coax these women into an angry mood for a short while, and when we asked them how they felt after imagining themselves in the situation, we found that they did indeed feel angry. We then gave them the option of writing one of two short essays: an essay about their typical emotional experiences or an essay describing their dormitory or living room. We were interested in whether the women, when they were in an angry mood, would choose to write about (or focus on) their emotions, or would choose not to focus on their emotions in this way. Seventy percent of the women chose not to write about their emotions, preferring to write about their dorm or living room.

When it comes to feelings of sadness, women make different choices. In a second study, we asked women to imagine themselves in a very sad situation.5 Then we gave them the option of continuing to think about how they were feeling, or moving on to a boring geography task. In this case, the women overwhelmingly chose to continue thinking about their sad feelings, rather than complete the distracting geography task. This combination of data showed that when it comes to angry feelings, women don’t want to go there, but when it comes to sadness, they are ready to dwell on these feelings.

It’s not just parents who socialize girls and boys into “gender appropriate” expressions of emotion. Teachers reward girls more than boys for compliant, dependent behavior—for being good little girls. And children themselves enforce our cultural norms of how girls should act. An assertive, in-your-face little girl is a pariah among other girls, just as a sensitive, more emotional little boy is cruelly harassed by the other boys.

With all this pressure girls receive to suppress feelings of anger and frustration, but to experience feelings of sadness and anxiety, it’s no wonder that they develop self-focused styles of coping. When they are upset, they are told to explore and articulate their negative feelings, as long as the feelings are directed at themselves and not at others. Sadness and anxiety are okay, even expected, in girls. So they nurture these feelings, expanding and growing them, and eventually may turn to binge eating and drinking to dull the pain the feelings cause. Anger, being not okay, requires that a lid be put on it; in worse cases, anger is transformed into self-doubt, or unhealthy behaviors such as yo-yo eating or heavy drinking.

Relationship Keepers

From a very early age, women are the keepers of relationships, responsible for everyone else’s happiness, and for soothing bad feelings. Men rely on women to fulfill this role, and in close male-female relationships, women do the vast majority of the emotional work. Women draw men out to talk about how they feel, listen nonjudgmentally, console, encourage, and support them. When a relationship ends through breakup, divorce, or death, men usually seek a relationship with another woman to fill this gap in their lives.

How do girls learn to be the keepers of relationships? Again, they are taught, directly and indirectly, by adults. Psychologist Carolyn Zahn-Waxler has found that parents are much more likely to encourage girls than boys to empathize with other people. Parents point out to girls how others feel about situations, and make it clear that others’ feelings are a major factor in how a girl should act. Parents are more likely to emphasize the harmful consequences to other people that would result from a girl expressing anger or, heaven forbid, retaliating against another person.

Partly as a result of this encouragement, girls recognize others’ feelings and are acutely attuned to them. They take into consideration points of view other than their own and take other people’s feelings into account when making their own decisions. As adults, women continue to be more sensitive toward others than men.

Women are also much more likely to define themselves in terms of their relationships with others—to think of themselves primarily as “the wife of…” or “the mother of…” Women’s strong and close ties with friends and family are a major source of support in times of need. Indeed, women are much more likely than men to have a strong emotional support network come to their aid after a loss or a tragedy in their lives.

Unfortunately, some women cross a line into an excessive concern with the status of their relationships with others. Their only source of self-esteem is being “the wife of” or “the mother of.” Their own moods are unduly influenced by the moods of others. If her husband wakes up happy, she is happy, but if he wakes up grumpy, she remains fearful and sad. If her child had a good day at school, then she has had a good day.

Women who are excessively concerned with relationships also tend to let their opinions of themselves be unduly influenced by how they perceive others see them. In a study conducted by myself and psychologist Tomi-Ann Roberts, who is now at Colorado College, we gave women and men some challenging puzzle tasks to do. Then we gave half the women and half the men positive feedback about how they did on the tasks. The other half were given negative feedback. In truth, the feedback in both cases was bogus—not at all reflective of how the men or women actually did but randomly assigned. We then asked all participants how they thought they did on the puzzles. We found that the men thought they did well, regardless of what we told them about their performance. On the other hand, the women felt good about their performance if we told them they did well, but felt bad if we told them they had done poorly.

This was the typical style of Emily, a secretary for a construction firm:

Emily always tried to do her best at her job. Working at a construction firm was tough at times—she was the only woman in the business, and the guys could get pretty rough with their talk. Her boss, Mr. Maxwell, was a gruff old guy who tried to be nice and praise his workers, but often lapsed into yelling when he got frustrated with someone. Emily took every word he said to heart. One day she overheard Mr. Maxwell saying to a customer that since she had started working for him, Emily had cleaned up his accounting system so that he was collecting payments due much more efficiently and as a result showing a much better growth in his business. For the rest of that day, Emily felt like a queen. Another day, though, Mr. Maxwell barked at Emily for writing down an order from a customer incorrectly, and for the next week Emily felt ashamed and lived in fear of being fired.

Emily was also hypersensitive to what the construction workers said to her as they came in and went from the office. They weren’t known for their political correctness, and sometimes would comment on her sexy blouse or whether she looked especially thin that day. On days when they said something that could be taken as a compliment, she felt good about how she looked. On days when they said nothing, she wondered if it was because they actually thought she looked unattractive, and that is how she felt about herself

Psychologist Vicki Helgeson at Carnegie Mellon University has come up with a complicated name for crossing the line into an obsession with your relationships with others. She calls this unmitigated communion, meaning that an individual’s close personal relationships are not tempered by an appropriate amount of concern for her own well-being. Helgeson’s measure of unmitigated communion includes items such as “I always place the needs of others above my own.” “For me to be happy, I need others to be happy.” And “I often worry about others’ problems.”

When I’ve used this measure in my studies, I have found that women are significantly more likely than men to say these statements apply to them. I have also found that unmitigated communion is tied to women’s tendency to engage in self-focused coping, and to the consequences of self-focused coping.6 Specifically, women who scored higher on unmitigated communion were more likely to turn inward and ruminate when they were distressed about something. They were also more likely to have symptoms of depression, and to binge eat when upset. In other words, my research suggests that an excessive concern for relationships is a significant contributor to self-focused coping, and in turn to depression and binge eating.

Unmitigated communion, or, more generally, women’s concerns about relationships, may contribute to self-focused coping, specifically to symptoms of depression, disordered eating, and heavy drinking in at least three ways.

ALWAYS WATCHING YOURSELF

When you are excessively concerned with how others feel about you and with how your relationships are going, you become extremely self-conscious, always checking yourself and your behaviors to make sure you aren’t doing anything that would cause others to disapprove. “Do I look good? Did I say the right thing?” Turning inward, watching and analyzing your every move, you try to ensure that you behave more perfectly in the future. You are hypercritical of yourself for any mistakes you make in your interactions with others. “How could I have said that? What an idiot I am—I should have known not to do that! What must they think of me?”

Unfortunately, mistakes are inevitable and there are always difficult times in relationships. Women beat themselves up for these mistakes and difficulties, losing self-esteem, sometimes becoming sad and depressed. Indeed, when women become so depressed that they need treatment for depression, they most often report that a problematic relationship is at the heart of their suffering. It may be conflict with a spouse. It may be a boss she fears doesn’t like her. It may be difficulty in parenting her children. Whatever the relationship problem, women hold themselves responsible for the problem and sink into depression, full of self-criticism and full of terror that the other person may abandon them altogether.

Hannah and Lisa had been best friends since fifth grade. Now, at fifty-two years of age, they were both married with teenage children and had good jobs. They still lived in the same town, so they saw each other at least once a week, for coffee or for a barbecue with both families. It seemed that it was one of those rare friendships that served both women well, and would last their lifetimes.

What most people couldn’t see, however, was that Hannah often drove Lisa crazy with her insecurities. If Lisa was having a bad day, and so seemed a bit sour in conversation with Hannah, Hannah would pester her about what was the matter, what had she done to annoy Lisa. Lisa would swear that Hannah had done nothing, that she was just in a bad mood because of something that had happened at work that day, or with the kids. Lisa really just wanted to drop the matter and talk about something else, or attend to cooking dinner. But Hannah kept at her, asking for details about what had happened, trying to “fix” it for her, even if nothing needed fixing. Eventually, Lisa would either just walk away or might blow up at Hannah, telling her just to drop it. If Lisa did blow up, Hannah would seem hurt and confused, saying she had just been trying to be helpful.

Lisa often wondered why she maintained the friendship with Hannah. Sometimes it felt like Hannah was an over-eager puppy, always jumping at her ankles and licking her face. If Lisa got a raise at work, or even just bought a nice new dress, Hannah would praise her until it was embarrassing. Hannah frequently told other people how wonderful it was to have a lifelong relationship with Lisa, how they had been friends since fifth grade, and how close they and their families were to each other. When Lisa thought about pulling away from Hannah and trying to see her less often, she felt extremely guilty, because she knew Hannah would be devastated.

The kind of desperation that Hannah shows in her relationship with Lisa can, as was the case here, drive others away. Even if friends and family members pull away subtly, or try to mask their frustration, women who are excessively concerned about their relationships can sense this, and can become even more desperate in their ploys to maintain the relationship. They exaggerate conflicts that arise, worrying that it means the end. If the end does come, they are devastated, and at risk of falling deep into depression.

EXTREME MAKEOVER

Other women decide that if they could just improve themselves in some way, they could change or hold on to a relationship. This is where excessive dieting sometimes comes in: “I have to lose twenty pounds or my husband will lose interest in me!” Or the woman may try to diet, but lapse into binge eating because her sense of her own body becomes so distorted that she loses control of her eating.

Eating disorders often begin in adolescence. Many theorists argue that they are an attempt by adolescent girls to gain control of their relationships with their families. Theorist Hilde Bruch noted that anorexia nervosa often occurs in girls who have been unusually “good girls,” high achievers, dutiful and compliant daughters who are always trying to please their parents and others by being “perfect.”7 These girls tend to have parents who are overinvested in their daughters’ compliance and achievements, who are controlling, and who will not allow the expression of feelings, especially negative feelings.

Bruch argued that throughout their daughters’ lives these parents were more concerned about their own needs than their daughters’ needs for food and comfort. As a result, the daughters do not learn to identify and accept their own feelings and desires but rather to monitor closely the needs and desires of others so as to better comply with others’ demands, as we can see in the case of Randi and her family.8

Randi is a sixteen-year-old with anorexia nervosa. Her parents are highly educated and very successful, having spent most of their careers in the diplomatic corps. Randi, her two brothers, and her parents are “very close, as are many families in the diplomatic corps, because we move so much,” although the daily care of the children has always been left to nannies. The children had to follow strict rules for appropriate conduct, both in the home and outside. These rules were partly driven by the requirements of the families of diplomats to “be on their best behavior” in their host country and partly driven by Randi’s parents’ conservative beliefs. Randi, as the only daughter in the family, always had to behave as “a proper lady” to counteract the stereotype of American girls as brash and sexually promiscuous. All the children were required to act mature beyond their years, controlling any emotional outbursts, taking defeats and disappointments without complaint, and happily picking up and moving every couple of years when their parents were assigned to another country.

Randi’s anorexic behaviors began when her parents announced they were leaving the diplomatic corps to return to the United States. Randi had grown very fond of their last post in Europe, because she had finally found a group of friends that she liked and her parents approved of, and she liked her school. She had always done well in school but had often hated the harshly strict schoolteachers. In her present school, she felt accepted by her teachers as well as challenged by the work. When Randi told her parents she would like to finish her last year of high school in this school rather than go to the United States with them, they flatly refused even to consider it. Randi tried to talk with her parents, suggesting she stay with the family of one of her friends, who were willing to have her, but her parents cut her off and told her they would not discuss the idea further. Randi became sullen and withdrawn and stopped eating shortly after the family arrived in the United States.

As a result of family dynamics, Bruch argued, girls who develop anorexia experience themselves as acting in response to others, rather than in response to their own wishes and needs. They don’t accurately identify their own feelings and desires, and thus don’t cope appropriately with their own distress. They don’t even accurately identify their own bodily sensations, such as hunger, contributing to their ability to starve themselves for long periods of time.

Girls in overcontrolling families such as these harbor rage against their families that they can’t express. Instead, they discover that controlling their food intake gives them both a sense of control over their lives and elicits concern from their parents. In addition, their rigid control of their bodies provides a sense of power over the whole family, which they never had before.

Research has confirmed that the families of girls with eating disorders tend to experience high levels of conflict, though the expression of negative emotions is discouraged and perfectionism remains a key family theme.9 These characteristics are also present in the families of girls with depression, and may be one way in which depression and eating disorders are so strongly connected. What may distinguish families in which girls develop eating disorders from those in which girls become depressed is that mothers of girls with eating disorders believe their daughters should lose more weight, are critical of their daughters’ weight, or are themselves more likely to have disordered eating patterns.10

Drinking Like a Guy

Men tend to drink with their buddies, often as part of “male bonding.” Women, however, tend to drink with husbands or boyfriends who hold significant influence over how much they drink. Research shows that married women are prone to matching their husbands’ drinking patterns, and when women refuse to drink as much as their husbands, it often creates conflict in the marriage.11 The problem, of course, is that women can’t get away with drinking as much as men.

Diane and Harry had been married twenty-three years. They had grown up together in New Orleans, where their two families had been important in the jazz scene. Diane and Harry had always had an active social life, going to clubs with friends and having dinner parties in their spacious home. Diane loved the vibrant social scene of New Orleans and was known as a generous and creative hostess. She specialized in designing fancy mixed drinks, with exotic juices and lots of alcohol.

Harry was a big man, 6 foot 5, about 250 pounds, and he could drink like a fish. No one ever kept count of how many drinks Harry typically had in a night, least of all Harry, but he always had one in his hand. When they were first married and Diane was in her twenties, she could almost keep up with Harry, though she would invariably have a major hangover the next day after one of their parties or nights at the clubs. Now that she was in her mid-forties, she could only drink about one drink for every two Harry drank. In fact, one reason she began creating new mixed drinks was to keep herself busy at their parties so she wouldn’t drink so much. She still drank a lot, however, typically four or five large mixed drinks in an evening, plus maybe some wine or beer.

Every once in a while, Diane would try to cut back and drink much less. But her friends or Harry would tease her about “being on the wagon,” or tell her she was making them feel guilty, and push her to drink more. She usually gave in and ordered another drink, vowing that after that night she really was going to cut back on her drinking so she wouldn’t feel so lousy after a party.

Trying to drink like a guy starts, unfortunately, early in women’s lives. Over 90 percent of girls will have consumed alcohol by the time they graduate high school. Although most adolescent girls drink infrequently and lightly, in the last decade the percentage of high school girls who binge drink has increased so that it is nearly equal to the percentage of high school boys who do so. Teenage binge drinkers consume alcohol with their friends, who also tend to be binge drinkers, and their social life is built around getting drunk together. Schoolwork invariably suffers from their drinking.

College-age women report that they strive to keep up with male friends’ drinking levels at parties, with the expectation that this will impress the guys. Some women drink during the school week in an effort to increase their tolerance levels so they can handle more alcohol on the weekends. My colleague Amy Young, a professor at Eastern Michigan University, has found that “drinking like a guy” is connected in young women’s minds to a variant of third-wave feminism, in which college-age women interpret heavy drinking as their right as liberated women.12 This may be one reason why the rates of health- and life-threatening moderate drinking among young women have spiked significantly in recent decades, and also why there’s been a threefold increase in the number of college women who report having been drunk on ten or more occasions in the previous month.

Beauty Queens and Other Dangerous Ideas

Our icons of beauty—the models in glossy magazines, the stars on TV and in the movies, the singing sensations—are getting skinnier and skinnier. Indeed, when researchers tracked the average weight of Playboy centerfolds and Miss Americas over the last forty years, they found that the average weight of these women has become much less; by today’s standards, these women weigh about 20 percent less than what would be expected for a woman of their height.13 The average model in a fashion magazine these days is pencil-thin, with a figure that is physically unattainable by the majority of adult women.

Pressure to be thin doesn’t come only from the media and from marketers of Barbie dolls. Women also exert these pressures on one another. We judge women who are thin as more feminine and attractive than those who are heavier, and we judge women who dare to eat as much food as they want in public settings (such as in a dormitory cafeteria) as less attractive than those who eat less.14 Women pick up on these cues and change their behaviors to conform to social expectations. For example, women eat less in situations where they want to appear desirable and feminine, or in situations in which they want to show superiority over or compete with other women.15 Just think back for a moment to college or high school, when girls would sit around the cafeteria, watching what each other was eating. Being thin is difficult, however, in our high-fat, fast-food culture. And so girls and women seldom feel they are thin enough, and want to lose more weight.

A PSYCHOLOGICAL CORSET

Can the social pressures toward thinness really lead to symptoms of the toxic triangle in girls and women? Many studies have been done to examine this question, and the answer seems to be yes.16 Adolescent girls and women who are exposed to persistent messages that they are not thin enough are, not surprisingly, less satisfied with their own appearance. They are also more likely to follow highly restrictive diets, including unhealthy diets. For example, they may restrict themselves to nothing but green salads (no dressing) and herbal tea. It’s nearly impossible for people to stay on such restrictive diets, however, and women who feel pressured to be thin are actually more likely to lapse into binge eating. Then they may use purging (vomiting, laxatives, and exercise) to try to lose the weight gained from their binges.

Women who feel pressured to be thin also experience more sadness and symptoms of depression. This sadness and sense of defeat seems to be tied to their dissatisfaction with how their bodies look, as well as to the hopelessness they feel that they will ever be thin enough. Being thin is such a core component of women’s and girls’ self-esteem these days that failure to achieve this goal can lead to self-loathing and depression.

Even brief exposure to our social icons of beauty is enough to put some women on the road to the toxic triangle. For example, in a study, researchers showed one group of young women images from fashion magazines of ultra-thin models, while another group of young women saw images from nature magazines. Both groups of women saw these images for only three minutes.17 Those women who saw the ultra-thin models experienced increases in depression, shame, guilt, stress, insecurity, and body dissatisfaction, while those who saw the images from the nature magazines did not. In addition, women who saw the ultra-thin models and who had already subscribed to the thin ideal for women, showed increases in symptoms of bulimia. If just three minutes of exposure to fashion models can have such effects, think what the constant exposure young women experience does to their self-image and well-being!

Another study looked at what chronic exposure to the thin ideal in fashion magazines does to adolescent girls’ mental health.18 Researchers randomly gave one group of girls, ages thirteen to seventeen, a 15-month subscription to a leading fashion magazine and the other group none. They found that girls who already felt pressured to be thin and who were dissatisfied with their bodies became more depressed over time if they had been given the subscription to the fashion magazine. In addition, girls who had little social support from family members and friends became more dissatisfied with their bodies, dieted more, and showed more bulimic symptoms if they were given the fashion magazine subscription.

Adolescent girls and women can, to some extent, avoid pressures to be thin by avoiding these fashion magazines and other media depictions of the thin ideal. We can’t completely avoid our friends, however, and it is sometimes they who are the worst carriers of the thin-ideal message. In another clever study, researchers asked young women students to talk to a young woman whom they thought was just another student but who was actually a confederate or an accomplice in the study. The accomplice was a thin, attractive nineteen-year-old woman, 5 foot 10 inches tall, who weighed 127 pounds.19 First, both the participant in the study and the accomplice watched a neutral film about a seascape, supposedly so they could rate the film. After the film, the accomplice launched into a pre-scripted conversation with the participant. In the pressure condition, the accomplice complained about how dissatisfied she was with her weight and discussed the extreme exercise routine and restrictive diet she was using to reduce. In the neutral condition, the accomplice talked about classes she was currently taking and her plans for the weekend. A researcher then entered the room and asked both women to fill out questionnaires about how they felt about their bodies. The participants in the pressure condition became significantly more dissatisfied with their own bodies after talking with the thin accomplice about her own weight concerns. In contrast, the women in the neutral condition did not become more dissatisfied with their bodies after talking with the accomplice about matters unrelated to weight or dieting.

Again, this research shows how much power the messages we get from others about our bodies can hold over us. If just a few minutes of talking with a complete stranger can lead women to become more dissatisfied with their bodies, think what hearing these messages from an admired peer can do a young woman’s self-perception!

EATING AND DRINKING GO TOGETHER

You’d think that women who are highly concerned about their weight would avoid alcohol because it is highly caloric. Research shows, however, that women who are dissatisfied with their bodies and subscribe to the thin ideal use alcohol more frequently than women who are more satisfied with their bodies or who reject the thin ideal.20 Though not much is known about why this is, it may be that women who want to be thin but can’t attain this goal become depressed, and so use alcohol to relieve the symptoms of depression.21 It may also be that women use alcohol to escape the chronic self-consciousness created by pressure to be thin. Finally, constantly restraining yourself from eating in an effort to be thin can make you vulnerable to all sorts of impulsive behavior, including binge eating and binge drinking.

The woman we met at the beginning of this book, Jill, began her yo-yo eating patterns as an adolescent in response to an accumulation of pressures from her family. Her heavy drinking emerged in college. Jill’s parents were both overweight, due in part to their family meals of heavy, fattening foods in large portions. Jill was never terribly heavy herself, although she inherited the pear shape of her father’s side of the family, carrying much of her weight in her rear end and hips. Her father, who was not the most sensitive guy in the world, would tease her about having a “tub butt.” Jill would try to diet and lose weight, but her mother pushed her to eat at meals. It was during this time that Jill developed the habit of avoiding eating for long periods, then eating heavily when pressured by her mother.

When Jill went to college, she discovered how much she liked alcohol. Being intoxicated was a welcome relief from the pressure to do well in school. Her accomplishments, however, were never really enough for her parents, who were quick to criticize but slow to praise. Losing herself in alcohol gave her a short respite from her own self-criticism and worries about failing. Of course, being hungover two or three times a week made it that much harder to keep up with her schoolwork.

The social pressures on women to be thin, to be concerned with relationships above all else, and to suppress anger and frustration in favor of sadness and fear are clearly not the only contributors to the toxic triangle. Although most, if not all, women are exposed to these pressures, most women, fortunately, do not develop significant psychological symptoms. Nonetheless, the toxic atmosphere that these pressures create keeps women’s focus on their bodies—on how they look to others as well as how able they are to control their appearance—which contributes to self-focused coping and nudges them down the path into the toxic triangle.22