Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [131]
Spending money is a pastime. Cassie wants expensive items—a computer, a racing bike and trips to Costa Rica with her Spanish class and to the ski slopes of Colorado. She takes violin and voice lessons from university professors and attends special camps for musicians.
Cassie’s been surrounded by media since birth. Her family owns a VCR, a stereo system, two color televisions and six radios. Cassie wakes to a radio, plays the car stereo on the way to school, sees videos at school and returns home to a choice of stereo, radio, television or videocassettes. She can choose between forty channels twenty-four hours a day. She plays music while she studies and communicates via computer modem with hackers all over the country in her spare time.
Cassie and her friends have been inundated with advertising since birth and are sophisticated about brand names and commercials. While most of her friends can’t identify our state flower, the goldenrod, in a ditch along the highway, they can shout out the brand of a can of soda from a hundred yards away. They can sing commercial jingles endlessly.
Cassie’s been exposed to years of sophisticated advertising in which she’s heard that happiness comes from consuming the right products. She can catch the small lies and knows that adults tell lies to make money. We do not consider that a sin—we call it marketing. But I’m not sure that she catches the big lie, which is that consumer goods are essential to happiness.
Cassie has more access to books than I had. I was limited to a town library the size of a Quick Stop and a weekly bookmobile. She has a six-branch public library system, a school library as big as a gymnasium and three university libraries. But she reads much less than I did. Particularly the classics that I loved, Jane Eyre, Moby Dick, and Return of the Native bore her with their loopy, ornamental prose. She has more choices about how to spend her time, and like most teens raised in a media-saturated culture, Cassie does not often choose to read books.
There are more magazines for girls now, but they are relatively unchanged in the thirty years since I bought my copies of Teen. The content for girls is makeup, acne products, fashion, thinness and attracting boys. Some of the headlines could be the same: TRUE COLORS QUIZ, GET THE LOOK THAT GETS BOYS, TEN COMMANDMENTS OF HAIR, THE BEST PLACES TO MEET AVAILABLE MEN and TEN WAYS TO TRIM DOWN. Some headlines are updated to pay lip service to the themes of the 1990s: TWO MODELS CHILL OUT AT OXFORD UNIVERSITY IN SEASON’S GREATEST GRAY CLOTHES Or ECO-INSPIRED LOOKS FOR FALL. A few reflect the greater stress that the 1990s offer the young: REV UP YOUR LOOKS WHEN STRESS HAS YOU DOWN, THE STD OF THE MONTH, GENITAL WARTS and SHOULD I GET TESTED FOR AIDS? Some would never have appeared in the 1950s: WHEN YOU’RE HIGHLY SEXED, IS ONE PARTNER ENOUGH? and ADVICE ON ORGASMS.
Cassie listens to music by The Dead Milkmen, 10,000 Maniacs, Nirvana and They Might Be Giants. She dances to Madonna’s song “Erotica,” with its sadomasochistic lyrics. The rock-and-roll lyrics by 2 Live Crew that make Tipper Gore cringe don’t upset her. Sexist lyrics and the marketing of products with young women’s naked bodies are part of the wallpaper of her life.
Cassie’s favorite movies are The Crying Game, Harold and Maude and My Own Private Idaho. None of these movies would have made it past the theater owner of my hometown.
Our culture has changed from one in which it was hard to get information about sexuality to one in which it’s impossible to escape information about sexuality. Inhibition has quit the scene. In the 1950s a married couple on TV had to be shown sleeping in twin beds because a double bed was too suggestive. Now anything—incest, menstruation, crotch itch or vaginal odors—can be discussed on TV. Television shows invite couples to sell their most private moments for a dishwasher.