Dirty Little Secrets - Kerry Cohen [72]
Part of how we help girls battle the waves and own their identities is by having them do something other than sitting in front of the mirror, by encouraging them to be subjects instead of objects. Sports are an excellent way to encourage a girl to use her body in such a way that she understands it has more purpose in the world than just to be looked at. Girls in sports often focus on making their bodies strong rather than thin, because they can see that strength has more purpose for their goals—to succeed as an athlete—than being skinny. On teams they work together, as a unified group, for a goal that doesn’t involve boys. Of course, some girl-heavy sports, such as cheerleading, can be more about what a girl looks like than how she feels. There is nothing wrong, of course, with wanting to look good, and parents should not try to encourage their daughters away from an interest in their looks or clothes. The key is to support their sense of selves, whatever that may be.
Sports work well to protect a girl’s body image, but really, anything that can keep a girl’s attention that isn’t a boy, anything that can build a sense of self-efficacy, of confidence, is prohibitive of a girl focusing every thought on boys. This might include the arts, or music, or academics. When a girl has something that makes her feel worthwhile in the world—something other than a boy’s attention—she has the opportunity to defy the cultural pressure to think only about how to make herself attractive to boys.
This is what happened to me. My interest in writing grew, I got some encouragement, and I came to have a sense of myself as a writer, not just a potential girlfriend.
Of course, this is easier said than done. Remember the strength of those waves. They are powerful, withstanding. Feminism and human rights work have barely touched them. The waves have even grown bigger. They’ve taken on more ways—the Internet, the cell phone—to pound girls with their messages. It is so very necessary to be continually aware of that tidal-wave culture.
One of the activities I like to do with girls is to have them find at least five images in their daily lives that give them a message about their sexual identities. The girls come back to me with many more than five images. They have magazines and phrases scribbled down from bathroom stalls. They have television shows and older men checking them out from their cars. They’ve got billboards and bus boards and posters. One had porn magazines she found in her brother’s closet. They come back angry. Some come back nonplussed, perhaps desensitized to our hypersexualized culture. Then we discuss what the messages mean and who the girls want to be in the world. They tell me their truths about the boys they like and what they’ve done and how it made them feel—the good stuff and the bad. And I listen, which is all they want.
If parents could do this for their girls, if they support their girls as they question the culture they live in, they will help them to be a little stronger against those waves. My hope is that with this kind of support, mothers like Jo, who we met at the beginning of this chapter, will have daughters who are much more powerful in the world than their mothers felt they were as teens.
Recently, I received an email from a woman who didn’t want me to know her name. She described her years of loose-girl behavior and how no one knows. She wrote, “I’ve spent my whole life hiding from the world, from myself. At this point I don’t know who I am or what I want. I’m lost…I wish we could talk honestly about ourselves, but loose girls can’t do that. The shame is eating me alive.” This brave woman’s pain is not that she had sex. Her pain comes from feeling silenced, from living an unnecessarily unspeakable life.
My hope is that this book begins some movement toward cracking