Fighting pressure to be 'effortlessly perfect'

I first learned the term "male chauvinist pig" when I was four. I was watching Beauty and the Beast, and my mom told me that that was what Gaston was, a male chauvinist pig. Needless to say, my feminist ideals began developing early.

When I was 12, my parents sent me on an Outward Bound course called Connecting with Courage. It was designed for 12 and 13-year-old girls to gain confidence and keep them from feeling like they need to change themselves to conform to male chauvinist standards to seem more attractive to boys. In those two weeks, I went swimming in Boston Harbor at six in the morning, I survived a lightning storm on a little wooden sailboat in the middle of Boston Harbor, I peaked Mt. Cardigan and by the last day, when I jumped off a tower after yelling to the world "I am a strong girl with a strong voice and I can!" I damn well believed it.

It sounds hokey and lame, but it did the job. By the time I hit high school, I had about as much interest in being one of the popular girls as I did in running headlong into a brick wall. If all they wanted in life was to have pretty faces and wear designer clothes, fine; but I was going to do more.

In 2004, there was a study done at Duke that found that undergraduate women there felt the need to be "effortlessly perfect": intelligent, slim, successful and well-dressed, all without seeming like they'd tried at all. My mom brings it up frequently because it embodies her worst fears for the future — that my generation of women will conform to the sexist standard and will undo everything that has been accomplished by generations past. I used to laugh every time she would bring it up. She couldn't seriously still believe that there was a chance of that happening to me. Not only was I very safe from that, but I had a fair amount of disdain for anyone who fell prey to such girly-girl stupidity. If you were actually that much of a ditz to feel like you had to be someone else's vision of perfect, then you deserved it.

When I found out my best friend was anorexic, my world came crashing down around me. Everything I thought I knew all of sudden didn't fit anymore. How could the smartest, prettiest, nicest, most amazing girl I knew feel like she wasn't good enough? Why could she possibly feel the need to do this? To starve herself so that she could be perfect? Why couldn't she see that she was already perfect?

At some point, I remembered the Duke study. And suddenly I understood why my mom had felt the need to bring it up every few weeks for the past three years. This study wasn't about ditzy bimbos. This was about talented, intelligent women who had presumably worked hard to get into a really good university. Talented, intelligent women who nonetheless felt that they weren't good enough, who felt the need for approval by a society that, despite claims to the contrary, still expects every woman to look like a supermodel.

I'm not saying we should rebel, burn bras, stop shaving our legs and declare all men evil. In fact, I'd rather we didn't. What the Duke study showed is that this impossible standard for the perfect woman isn't confined to Hollywood and isn't a thing of the past. It's a standard that even some of the most brilliant women feel compelled to meet, at Duke and certainly here at Princeton. Just because we all go to the number-one college in the country doesn't mean we're out of the woods. And that's really scary. Alexis Levinson is a sophomore from Los Angeles, Calif. She can be reached at arlevins@princeton.edu.