Effortless Protection My Butt, By: Jacqui Detwiler

4/18/07

I'd like to take this moment to be thankful that I didn't go to Duke as an undergrad. Now before you take up rakes and shovels against me, listen to my reasoning. Since I moved here, I've been hearing a lot about "effortless perfection," a buzz phrase for something Duke women apparently crave to the point of mental deterioration. Effortless perfection is the need to do everything well and with seeming ease, and it is used by mental health professionals at Duke to explain high rates of eating disorders, illicit drug use, anxiety and depression among its aspirants.

The funny thing is that effortless perfection is hardly unique to this school. We all knew (or were) the high school valedictorian who was captain of the swim team, wrote for the school newspaper, weighed 95 pounds and won fully half of the senior superlatives. Everywhere, women develop effortless-perfection-striving tendencies in youths spent overtaxed by advanced classes, arts, clubs and multiple sports. The desire to do all of these things well simultaneously is then tempered by the environment of the first few years of college.

Factors like how socially isolated the school is and what other women are concerned about influence the exact way the tendency is embodied. So if you'd gone to ASU, FSU or USC, maybe you'd think a boob job would make you happy regardless of your grades. If you'd gone to Harvard or Yale, maybe you'd be striving for one of the five A's in an Organic Chemistry class without giving two sh-s about your hair. But put a horde of high school overachievers who want to be beautiful, fun and smarter than everyone else in a socially circumscribed situation and effortless perfection gets out of hand.

This weekend I decided to reward myself for finishing my detestable thesis by flying to Florida for a notorious beach party on Panama City Beach called Spring Weekend, a straight-up meat market in which the tanned, fake-breasted, steroid-enhanced greeks of FSU party and fornicate for 48 hours straight. Obviously, I had to be 110 lbs. Not 112. Not 110.5. One hundred and 10. Never mind that I'm busy with two graduate classes, meetings, journal clubs, a thesis and this column-I had to look perfect, and it had to look easy.

But then life got intense, and there were 80 pages of thesis to cite, and spending 15 hours a day in the lab turns out not to be so good for the waistline. At a Student Health physical mere days before I left for the beach I found out I weighed 115 pounds. And I was devastated… at least, I was devastated until I got to Florida and realized that nobody cared.

I'd been so caught up worrying about the size of my butt that I forgot I was an actual graduate student, who conquered aviophobia and can actually do the dance to "Walk It Out." Being home with all my friends who are beautiful because of their own big butts, small breasts, not-so-great GRE scores and what-have-you, made me realize how useless worrying about being perfect really is. People actually seemed to like us because we were smart and could carry on a conversation. And we all even managed to find somebody to make out with.

So I'm thankful I went to Florida State because my own effortless perfection tendencies were only directed toward my body, and not also my intelligence or social talents, which I have lately realized are fabulous. I'm also thankful that at Florida State, guys are equally affected. Seeing an overly-steroid-enhanced beefcake strutting on a beach makes it easier to see how ridiculous being "perfect" really is.

Incidentally, I ran into my ex-boyfriend this weekend. He said I looked absolutely gorgeous. Whether he was telling the truth or not, those last five pounds can kiss my not-so-effortlessly perfect butt.