Prime Time - Jane Fonda [19]
Me, third in line, at my high school graduation. I designed the dresses we all wore.
GIRLS
When you do a life review, think about your adolescence. What was it like, in gender terms? What scenes do you remember? What were you like? What was your mother like? Your aunts? What role models did you have? How did your father and mother respond to your changes and development during puberty?
Doing my life review, I realized the extent to which I changed when I entered adolescence. For me it began to happen around age twelve, when boys entered the picture and my father began to insinuate that I was fat. Prior to that, I had been a tomboy and what had mattered to me about my body was that I was strong and limber and brave enough to climb high trees and wrestle with my boy friends. Once it was expected that the boy friends would become boyfriends, the emphasis shifted to fitting in, being popular, looking right, staying thin. This is when I became disembodied—I can feel it now, in retrospect. I moved out of myself and took up residence next door. The most authentic parts of me took a backseat to the girl (and then the woman) who tried—at least on the surface—to become whatever I thought the boy (or man) I was with wanted. I was beginning my Third Act before I felt I had recovered from this Act I conditioning. This phenomenon, by the way, is not unique to me … far from it.
Taken at my high school graduation.
Because of my work with adolescents, I have studied the ways in which this stage of gender-identity development in Act I is different for girls than it is for boys. For many girls, especially Caucasian girls, adolescence is when they try to hide what they know and feel; the code says, “Don’t be too strong, too outspoken, too sexual, too aggressive.”
A perfect example of this was related to me by Catherine Steiner-Adair, an instructor at Harvard’s Department of Psychiatry and the former director of Eating Disorders Education and Prevention at the Klarman Eating Disorders Center. “I was doing research in a middle school,” she said. “Sometimes I’d invite the students out for pizza. When I would ask the girls what they wanted on their pizzas, the ten-year-olds would want double cheese with pepperoni, the thirteen-year-olds would say, ‘I don’t know,’ and the fifteen-year-olds would answer, ‘Whatever you want.’ ” In other words, girls lose their relationship with themselves and what they want in order to fit in and to be in a relationship, especially with a boy. Asking for double cheese and pepperoni might make them look like they’re pigging out or not “feminine” enough.
Like many girls, I first began to experience anxiety and depression during adolescence. That is also when my twenty-year-long battle with anorexia and bulimia began. As I know all too personally, this doesn’t end with adolescence but is a pattern of disembodiment that, unless consciously broken, can make intimate relationships nigh impossible; we are not bringing our whole selves to the table—literally and figuratively! If we manage to break the pattern of anxiety, disembodiment, and addiction, then, in our Third Acts, we will be able, as the psychologist Carol Gilligan says, to find our way back to the spirited ten- and eleven-year-old girls we once were, before our voices went underground—only better, wiser.
If you are a woman, think about your own adolescence. Did you feel you had to conform to culturally imposed stereotypes of femininity, or did you have an authentic relationship to your sexuality and to your gender? Did you own it? Were you able to embody your sexuality because someone made sure you understood that sexuality isn’t just about the act of sex, it’s also about sensuality and feelings? Were you made to feel you had to look and behave a certain way if