Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [12]
I recommended she write down three things every day that she felt proud of. I asked her to write me a letter telling me her good qualities. She wrote that she was proud of mowing the lawn, doing dishes and going to church with her grandmother. As for good qualities, she liked her navel and her feet. When I pressed her for personality characteristics, she liked her courage and directness. At least, she could remember being that way.
One session, dressed in sweats and red-nosed from a bad cold, Cayenne told me that Chelsea was afraid she was pregnant. She had missed a period and showed positive on a home testing kit. We had a general discussion of girls getting pregnant, teenage mothers, abortion and birth control pills. Cayenne was happy to discuss her friend’s sexual behavior, but volunteered nothing about her own.
The next session she said that Chelsea was not pregnant and had renounced sex until she was sixteen. She and Chelsea had gone to the movies to celebrate. We talked about Mermaids, the movie they had seen, in which a teenage girl has graphic sex with a guy she barely knows. I asked Cayenne what she thought of that. She said, “It tells it like it is.”
I’d just seen Medicine Man, the story of a male scientist who is in the rain forest searching for a cure for cancer. Sean Connery is visited by a female scientist forty years younger than he, wearing short shorts and a tight, low-cut top. He’s shocked to find that a scientist is female and refuses to work with her. She’s snooty and terrified of snakes. Then she has an accident, Sean saves her, and she falls weeping into his arms. Reduced to a helpless blob of jelly, the female scientist becomes more feminine and likable. She follows Sean around and he rewards her with smiles and caresses. In the end she gives up her career to help him find the cure for cancer.
I thought it was sexist and told her why. “This movie says it’s okay for women to be scientists if they are beautiful, young and seductive. But they must allow themselves to be rescued by a man and give up their careers to serve his needs.”
As I wondered aloud if a movie like this could influence a girl’s grades in science, I told Cayenne about the MTV I had watched in a hotel room in Chicago. I was shocked by the sexual lyrics and scenes. In the first video, openmouthed and moaning women writhed around the male singer. In the second video, four women with vacant eyes gyrated in low-cut dresses and high black boots. Their breasts and bottoms were photographed more frequently than their faces. When I expressed dismay, she said, “That’s nothing; you should see the Guns ’N’ Roses videos.”
We talked about Silence of the Lambs. Much to my dismay, she insisted on describing to me the pictures of skinned women and oozing body parts. I realized as she talked how different we were. Violence and casual sex that upset me didn’t bother her. In fact, Cayenne was proud of being able to watch scary and graphic scenes—it proved she wasn’t a wimp. Despite our different reactions to media, the talk raised important issues—lookism, sexism, cultural stereotypes of men and women, and the importance of sex and violence in movies.
Finally Cayenne was ready to talk about her own sexual experiences, at first in a tentative way, and later in a more relaxed manner. She made fun of the school films with their embryos and cartoon sperm that looked like tadpoles. She said her parents told her to wait for sex until she was out of high school and involved with someone whom she loved.
I asked, “How does your experience fit with what your parents told you?”
Cayenne looked at me wide-eyed. “My parents don’t know anything about sex.”
She pushed back her frizzy bangs. “In seventh grade everyone was sex-crazy. Kids kept asking me if I did it, if I wanted to get laid, stuff like that. Guys would grab at me in the halls. I was shocked, but I didn’t show it. Later I got used to it.”
By the middle of her eighth-grade year, Cayenne wanted