Effortlessly Perfect Girl: The Superhero for the Modern Woman [Working really hard to pretend like you don’t have to work really hard… why?]

cronuts

Don’t get too excited – these are FAKES. But apparently the real Cronuts (which probably look and taste the same) are selling for $100 a piece in New York. All I can say is that if you pay that much money you better not pretend-eat it!

Y’all the apocalypse is here: the impossibly tiny Victoria Beckham tweeted a photo of a box of cronuts (that would be croissant + donut, not the cro-magnon version of Rocky Mountain oysters as was my first thought) with the caption “Breakfast!”

At first I was overcome with a twinge of why-can’t-I-eat-junk-and-wear-sample-sizes melancholia but then I slapped myself and remembered I just posted yesterday about how I am going to stop doing that comparing crap. (You never realize how much you do something until you try to stop doing it!!) And then I thought to myself… Eh, she probably didn’t really eat any of them. I wasn’t trying to be snarky. I was being realistic. Sure there are some grown women who are naturally ultra thin but by far the vast majority have to work at being skinny, often like it’s their full-time job. Heck you could argue that for some it is their full-time job. And while I don’t have any insider knowledge of Beckham’s metabolism or eating habits, I do remember very well what she looked like in her Spice Girls days and girlfriend has gotten way skinnier since then. I could be wrong but I don’t think thin comes easily to her.

I wasn’t the only one who came to this un-startling conclusion. Message boards lit up with variations of the O RLY? face. Things only got worse for poor Posh when Dominique Ansel, the inventor of the Cronut, publicly called her out for having fakes in the picture. (Turns out they aren’t like plastic Little People cronuts or something like I’d thought but the pastries were just not personally made by Ansel and his little elves.) And then her bike got stolen at Fashion Week. (I KNOW. The thought of a) someone that famous riding a bike to fashion week and b) someone stealing said famous bike is kinda mind blowing.) I started to feel bad for her. After all, it can’t be easy being the poster girl for the “Myth of the Effortlessly Perfect Girl.”

You know the kind – the one who is a size 00 with buttery highlights and the hottest clothes… who always says in interviews that she eats nothing but hamburgers and ice cream, only uses natural sunlight on her locks (that are NOT extensions!) and shops by falling into dumpsters behind Chanel. Oh and if she works out it’s by taking “hikes” with her dogs when she feels like it. Which isn’t that often because why would she need to bust her butt in the gym? She’s Effortlessly Perfect Girl!

Meghan Murphy, in her essay on the EPG, takes down Olivia Wilde’s beer-drinking, chucks-wearing, tousled-looking character in “Drinking Buddies” as being one of the quintessential examples of this relatively new phenomenon: the girl who wants to look perfect but doesn’t want to look like she had to try to get there. She writes, “It’s for this reason that I feel relieved when an actress admits that she never eats carbs and works out six days a week — not because I think anyone should have to do that, but because, for once, super thin and beautiful stars aren’t pretending like they eat pizza every day and laze around in their sweatpants. Women already feel as though they are imperfect without the added confusion of wondering why they don’t wake up looking like Olivia Wilde. ” For those of you who are a little older (like me), just replace “Drinking Buddies” with “Gilmore Girls” and Olivia Wilde with Lauren Graham and Alexis Bledel. Holy crap those ladies could shovel it in! While talking non-stop! And staying a designer-sized 0! I could never watch that show without getting mega-cravings.

Julie Gerstein makes a similar point in her article “The Myth of the Eating Actress” when she talks about the dangers of “the major disconnect between what actresses look like and what they supposedly eat on TV and in interviews.” It was inspired by a real-life incident where Garance Doré (wife of The Sartorialist Scott Schulman) posted on social media about choosing not to eat dessert one day and was harangued for being anti-feminist. Dore shot back, explaining that she was “only showing what her concept of reality is — the way it is for so many women for whom eating a huge slice of cheesecake or gorging on a basket of fries means hours and hours in the gym.”

But it’s not just famous people who fall prey to this myth. Every day normal ladies are doing the “documented instance of public eating” – coined DIPE by the New York Times – by posting pictures of decadent meals with them poised over it, fork in hand, generally in a stabbing posture. Not only is your old roommate’s friend whom you met once but friended anyhow going to eat that food, she’s going to attack it! ” And it’s not just a personal statement this plebeian pasta lover is making but it’s become a social commentary. Writes the Times, “Any individual DIPE may not shed much light on the inner life, but collectively, their frequency seems to tell us something about societal standards, judgments and yearnings.” So what exactly is it telling us? That we are all celebrities in our own minds? That we are simultaneously proud and ashamed of our deep love of delicious food? That we are all braggarts? That we feel such a need to craft the perfect facade that lying seems like the only and best option?

In the end, I think Reader Nina, in her comment on my post yesterday summed it up perfectly:

“What surprises me is this ideal of “it comes easy to me”. As if that would be better then saying “I run 3x a week and that let me run a half-marathon” or – “I spent hours to get the room just right”, as if that would be worth less then making it seem effortless.

What I’m trying to do is not lessen their accomplishments but to put them into a context – a context a lot of people (and I find especially blogs) don’t mention. When reading or hearing those things it can be easy to feel “less then”. I think it’s not just a personal but also a cultural problem, especially when it comes to women. Unless things (seem) to come easy they are worth-less.” [Emphasis mine]

Well said, Nina.

For once I can say that doing this isn’t a problem of mine – mostly just because I never, ever post pictures of my food on principle. The idea of doing “What I Ate Wednesday” not only makes my skin crawl but I cannot read others’ posts on it either. (I’m not being high and mighty, I just spent way too many eating-disordered years staring at pictures of other people’s food to not understand the sick power a food-selfie has over me.) I’m also, for better or worse, extremely honest about what I eat or don’t eat. But it’s taken me a long time to get the point where I was even comfortable with talking about it with friends, so afraid of scrutiny was I.

And so now I’m asking you: Why is it that we’ve idolized the Effortlessly Perfect Girl? What do you think of DIPEs? Have you ever posted one??

24 Comments

  1. Hi Charlotte
    Just wanted to say I feel honoured you quoted my comment in your post.
    I think this also relates to why I like your blog and have been following it for a while – you are honest about your struggles (and often times very funny) – and your successes therefore to me are even more valuable.
    Nina

  2. I think it goes back to the Renaissance; there was this idea of ‘sprezzatura’ at European courts, in which noblemen were obliged to be always perfectly dressed, poised, perfect hunters, archers, dancers and what not AND write rhyming sonnets to boot. all effortlessly of course, if you admitted that you had to work on it you were basically out of the game.
    I think it’s all very destructive, we teach this to our children and they may grow up believing that you don’t have to work at anything, just post pictures of food that someone else has cooked.

  3. I think this is partly because you have such a strong presence of people saying we shouldn’t have this same standard of beauty for everyone that is unhealthy for most of them… While you still have industries not actually changing the standard. I think sometimes that ends up getting twisted into “you’re not supposed to care what size you are and you’re not supposed to diet into oblivion… But you’re still supposed to be THAT thin. Just without an ED.”
    Not saying that people should stop pushing for change, just that this seems like it might be an I unintended consequence of being in the midst of change.

  4. I have posted pictures of my food before, but not with me poised over it, fork in hand (does that still count as a DIPE?). And I only post the stuff I’m really excited to eat – and I actually do EAT it!

    Of course, I’m definitely not EPG – I’d be proud to say how hard I worked for something, if someone happened to ask.

  5. I post pictures of my food pretty often, but I’m a vegan athlete. I eat a lot. It takes a lot of salad to feed an athlete. Sure, I eat the occasional treat, but mostly it’s healthy, healthy food like giant mixing bowls (yeah, I copied that from you!) full of spinach and mangoes. I don’t try to tell anyone I stay in shape by eating donuts.

    I get a lot of flak at work about being thin because I stand at my desk and eat healthy and don’t eat bad-for-you stuff (which is pretty easy when you’re vegan), which is annoying. I’m like, um, I run all the time and I eat WHOLE FOODS. I don’t starve myself by any stretch of the imagination, but I put good stuff in. And yet… “Shut up, yo’ure so skinny!” Sigh. LEAVE MY BODY ALONE.

    Also the vegan community is all about sharing their food. I buy in.

  6. What always kills me is the photos where the caption is like “OMFG look at my huuuuuuuuge dessert” and then it’s like TWO BITES OF CAKE.

    Or the Paleo food photos with a “massive pile of carbs” and they’re eating like 1/2 a sweet potato.

    That just totally messes with my head. Do they really think that’s a huge amount of food? Is anyone *that* out-of-touch with how much food an adult human actually needs? Are they trying to convince themselves that it’s a huge amount of food so they feel better about restricting their portions? Are they trying to convince ME that they think it’s a huge amount of food, to make themselves look like effortlessly perfect girls even though even they know it’s a lie?

    I don’t get it. But I know it makes me crazy and then I feel guilty about eating a healthy and reasonable amount of food, so mostly I just stop following those blogs :/

  7. I didn’t get a chance to post on yesterday’s topic, but I think this one dovetails in nicely. I think our culture requires too high a standard of humility. It’s not acceptable (especially for women), to say that you worked really hard at something, or that you’re really talented at something. Instead you are expected to downplay it, to make it look easy, to pretend that anyone could have done what you did. We’re taught it’s not OK to “brag” and that it’s somehow nice to be self-effacing.

    Well, guess what, it’s NOT. It’s not nice to anyone, to the person saying it or to others hearing it, because it distorts reality and furthermore leaves no path for anyone to improve themselves. If the only way to be fit is to be somehow magically or genetically gifted, then huge swaths of us are excluded from ever getting there. If what it requires is hard work, well, then it’s available to anyone willing to work for it.

    I’ll admit that when I was in college, a friend of mine told me that I was really intimidating to him. I couldn’t understand where this could possibly come from. He said that academically, I always acted as if everything were easy and obvious, and that certainly anyone could see that the answer to that complicated chemistry problem was… Thinking about it, it was because I never allowed myself to see that I was really smart, especially at chemistry and math. I thought I was merely “average” and as such, if I could do something, everyone else ought to be able to do it too. Once I could see that I actually had talents in this area, and was good at it, I stopped inadvertently putting down others and started helping them instead. Perhaps it really was easy for your friend to do perfect wainscoting in 10 minutes. But if she doesn’t see (or isn’t socially allowed to admit) that this is a particular talent she has, then it won’t occur to her to share that talent with others and offer to come give your living room a makeover.

    Charlotte, whether you see it or not, one of your strengths is in your willingness to be honest, real, and imperfect. You create a safe place for us all to be imperfect too. And oh, we are! Thank you so much for sharing this strength with us!

  8. Victoria Beckham has always been super blunt about how much effort goes into the way she looks. Its also possible that she ate a cronut – having something decadent every six months is not going to add pounds to you when you work out/follow food intake the way she does.

  9. Maybe Victoria had a Cronut from Toronto’s CNE. About 100 people had food poisoning from them.

  10. I really love this post, Charlotte! Something else that occurs to me…eating in public or posting pics of it is sort of only deemed socially acceptable IF you’re thin/conventionally attractive. Most women who aren’t super thin/hot or who feel like they are carrying a few extra pounds are going to feel self-conscious about posting their burger pics because it’s not considered “OK” in our culture to indulge if you’re overweight.

    • I have no shame about admitting that I’ve posted pictures of beer and/or ice cream after a hard workout (usually group run). I’m overweight, but I’m just excited that I burned enough calories to not undo the hard work by drinking or eating something I love. If someone finds that unacceptable, too bad!

  11. Wow! I love that reader comment you included. People are so smart!

  12. Oooooh, first post on your blog.

    This whole phenom makes me think about why skinny is “ideal” whereas historically a lady with curves would be the ideal. I am struggling to put this comment in a body positive way, because lady bodies get enough hate….aaaargh you know what I am trying to say.

    ANYWAY. I think it’s a combination of this whole ideal of what is “hard to get” is gorgeous (i.e. back in the day lady curves/pasty white was beautiful b/c only nobles/royalty could achieve it) and this new phenom of males saying, “I love a lady that can EAT.”

    So guys want a lady who has the ideal “skinny” body but can also eat an entire hamburger and fries every meal (i.e. my brother and his frat friends…oh the polos and sperry shoe phenom I must endure since he went to college).

    The reality is that is very nearly impossible, and so women feel a pressure to fudge the truth…especially women in the glare of the spotlight.

  13. On the one hand, the idea that the Effortlessly Perfect Girl is just naturally thin because she was born that way is a sort of absolution for the fact that I am not thin because I just don’t have the ‘effortlessly thin’ gene; of course this also makes me feel sad/bitter/frustrated because why can’t I be effortlessly thin?

    On the other hand you have the knowledge that these people work extremely hard, exercise for hours, don’t eat real food…don’t enjoy life, in other words, in order to be thin. And I can console myself with the fact that I don’t have to live like that and I can eat a cookie if I want one, while at the same time berating myself for not having the discipline it takes to be thin.

    So basically, it’s a lose-lose situation.

  14. What I am wondering is why anybody think looking like Posh Spice would be perfect!?

  15. Every once in a while I go on my hubby’s facebook page just to catch up with what our friends are up to. Today, a friend posted a picture of her living room absolutely covered in half folded laundry with her little boy on the couch on their tablet and her new baby screaming in her infant seat. She posted, “It never ends.” I cannot tell you how much better that made me feel. It does no one any good to pretend we’re effortlessly flawless. To prove how wonderful that post was, it garnered about 40 likes and responses in return such as “I KNOW” and “I feel you” and “Mine looks even worse than that”. Such relief on the part of people to admit they struggle too! I think it’s partially pride that drives people to pretend they are perfect, and I loved the line yesterday that likened (especially social media) to comparing our ‘behind the scenes’ to someone else’s highlight reel. I’ve always been honest in my flaws and I’ve always hoped people appreciate it. I’ve never understood people who cannot admit that they don’t have it all together, at work, at home, in the family, whatever. I’m pretty sure none of us believe it anyways, so why work so hard to look perfect? It’s too much hassle.
    I’m going to go ignore the supper dishes now and have an ice cream cone. Cheers!

  16. I think it all boils down to wanting to feel important. At the same time, we want to be accepted. But to be important we need to do things above and beyond other’s which might make us feel like we don’t fit in so we fake what we really do to hope for acceptance.

    Or it could be just fun to mess with people 🙂

  17. AMEN. This is an epidemic that has spread from the stars to our very own sisters and neighbors. I’m sorry, but when did we all start having to have it all together? I’m a hot mess, and I’m not afraid to admit it. On the rare occasion when I show up looking like I have it all together, it’s beccause I busted my ass AND the stars aligned AND God decided to give me a break that day. The rest of the time, I look more like this: I’m frequently messy, the sponges in my kitchen sometimes smell, I always watch what I eat – really carefully. I always have to work out to keep my body the way I want it, I probably don’t give enough to charity, I frequently swear at other cars in traffic, my living room does not now – nor will it ever – look like a Pottery Barn catalog and perhaps most importantly, I’m wrong. A lot. I’m pretty sure that if I turned into a Stepford version of myself, my husband and friends would be exhausted just from being around me all the time.

    Good for you for writing this post, and kudos to every woman out there who can honestly say “I do my best, and it’s damn hard work, and most of the time I’m far from perfect!”

  18. I remember talking to a trainer in L.A. who told me that he just had to laugh every time one of his clients told the press that they didn’t work out, ate whatever they wanted, yada yada yada. In reality, he was at their homes 6 days a week, putting them through punishing workouts, and cleaning out their cabinets and refrigerators of any junk they might have there.
    Because if he didn’t laugh, he might start crying.

    Recently Benedict Cumberbatch talked about bulking up for “Star Trek,” then having to get skinny again for “Sherlock.” He was VERY honest about how difficult it was to do both, and how miserable it made him. At one point he said “Now I know how women feel: Dieting is shite.”
    Made me love him even more.

  19. This reminds me of someone who has always refused to eat at my house, even when there for long periods of time and declares that they just “don’t eat breakfast” or “don’t eat lunch”, sipping only on coffee all day. I kind of think it is sad because we all know it takes effort to do anything, well it does for me at least. I have more respect for someone who works hard to get where they are then someone who snakes around. I just think that many of these stars are in positions of influence for young women. And whilst I maybe able to see through their effortless BS, little high schoolers may not.

  20. While in many ways it is neither here nor there, I actually do have insider knowledge. For two years I worked at a restaurant in NYC with an extremely large celebrity clientele and an awesome menu full of healthy and not-so-healthy goodies.

    I personally waited on Victoria Beckham twice. Each time she asked for an assortment of veggies, nothing starchy, steamed, no butter, no oil. We would send out a large plate full and she would polish it off. Her husband would usually order half the menu and eat a good deal of it. I have to say though, she was always incredibly polite and very sweet (both of them were).
    I’m sure she works incredibly hard too, but she is one of those people who seems to compartmentalize it, there is a time and a place for enjoying yourself and sometimes you just gotta let go.

    On the other hand Olivia Wilde was one of my favorite customers EVER. She would come in, often by herself, just to grab a quick lunch. She was incredibly unfussy, got very excited over the menu, and always had a hard time choosing what she wanted so sometimes she ordered both. She’d drink a beer and really seem to kick back and have fun. She is very down to earth, sweet as pie, and by the end of her first visit I desperately wanted to be her best friend 🙂

    And those are just 2. I should write an anonymous tell-all 🙂

  21. Pingback:True Genius | Stitch and Philosophize

  22. What does that say about the rest of us who try to make it look like we are working harder than we really are? The illusion that we only Facebook on rare occasion, never play, never relax, always working out, cleaning house, making crafts with our kids, and successfully experimenting with Pinterest recipes that have cute little animal faces? Because in the perfect woman world, I see that far more often. Anxiously engaged in a good cause gets a whole new meaning.