Eating disorders are often framed as private battles, but they are also symptomatic of a broader issue that society is slow to tackle
"I desire the things which will destroy me in the end."
These words, tucked inside Sylvia Plath’s journals, beckoned me to visit similar storylines hidden in my memory.
I was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa in 2018. I was twelve. Young and naive, I too desired something that almost destroyed me; a pull to be perfect for a world that demanded it.
A year later, I realised I wasn’t alone.
Sitting in group therapy with nine other girls who were battling eating disorders, I heard stories very similar to mine. We all broke under the pressure of perfection.
It didn’t stop there. Throughout high school, I witnessed friends follow the same path. Like moths to a flame, we all fluttered, fragile and weary, until the mirror reflected a stranger: a shell of a former self.
We were taught to desire the thing built to destroy us.
In an age where eating disorders rates are rising, with Australia alone recording 1.1 million diagnoses, it’s time to view this issue for what it is. Eating disorders are not private battles, they are the wounds of a culture teaching women to equate self-worth with perfection.
This impulse for flawlessness begins young. Girlguiding UK research shows that a quarter of 7 to 10-year-old girls already exhibit perfectionist behaviour.
As Reshema Saujana, the founder of Girls Who Code, said in her TED talk, "We’re raising our girls to be perfect."
She points out that from girlhood, women are made starkly aware of our society’s gender expectations.
"Most girls are taught to avoid risk and failure. We're taught to smile pretty, play it safe, get all A's," Saujana says.
But these lessons only trap girls in a cage of socially prescribed perfectionism, conditioning them to peel and pick at every imperfection until society deems them worthy.
Yet in this pursuit, women only uncover an obsession for control.
"There's a real rigidity to anorexia, and that maps on quite well to the rigidity that can be associated with perfectionism," Dr Anna Bardone-Cone told ABC’s All in the Mind.
When perfectionists fall short of their own impossible standards, they look for ways to "zone out from feeling so badly about themselves", Dr Bardone-Cone says.
For many, that escape is conjured by "engaging in … anorexic behaviours like fasting and restrictive dieting, as well as bulimic behaviours [like] binge eating and purging".
With social media, this issue has only worsened. Between 2000 and 2018, eating disorder rates more than doubled globally. Social media developed at the same time and researchers think that it has played a significant role.
While the ideals of flawless femininity predate the internet, social media has turned them into an inescapable presence in women’s lives. In every corner of our digital world, the female form is filtered, flattened and fed back to women as the new normal.
From #skinnytok to heroin chic, the visual format of these toxic beauty trends push women to measure themselves against the damaging content reflected on their screens. "With social media, there are so many ways for people to feel inadequate", says dietitian Christie Naze. "People who identify as women are disproportionately affected, and it starts at younger ages."
A 2024 study by Charles Stuart University researchers, published in PLOS journal, found just eight minutes of TikTok "thinspiration" content is enough to damage body image satisfaction.
The research warns that TikTok’s algorithm quickly amplifies even the smallest sign of user interest to curate a feed, meaning a single moment of engagement can snowball into an inescapable echo-chamber of hyper-thin body ideals.
This reality makes avoiding eating disorders devastatingly hard.
In the digital age, perfection’s grip tightens, pulling women deeper down paths of destruction.
How many more young girls must suffer before we demand change?
I can still see my high school friends hiding their hunger behind practiced smiles; a room full of girls battling the same disorder but refusing to name its cause; my younger self, ashamed to admit her desire for perfection.
Too embarrassed, too vulnerable, too shameful to express what is truly breaking them. But why?
The belief that eating disorders are private battles to be dealt with individually has made this issue taboo, enabling the societal pressures driving this disorder to go unchallenged. It’s time we normalise the conversation.
Whether it be checking in with the women around you, calling out toxic content in your daily scroll or questioning the gender ideals we normally accept without thought, we must all play our part to break this curse.
