Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [142]
When Margaret came to see me, we talked about her school. She still had trouble with the boys. We talked about how she could avoid negative encounters and how, when she was cornered, she could fight her way out. I recommended a self-defense class for her so that she would be more in control. I called the school and her parents about the harassment.
Margaret wished she had talked to her parents about her problems at the time they occurred. But she was not sure that they would have appreciated her despair. “Adults don’t take kids seriously,” she said. She wished the school would have intervened with the girls sooner and that she had had a therapist who listened to her instead of enforcing the social order. But she was proud that she resisted doing something that was so hurtful to her. She was glad that she would not let herself be bullied by the girls in her class, by her parents or by doctors.
“I’m not going to let fear rule my life again,” she told me. “I’ll stay and fight rather than run. Next time I won’t pretend that my stomach hurts when it’s my life that is hurting.”
I handed her a Kleenex and said, “As you told about your school, I had this image from Tiananmen Square. Remember that young Chinese man who stood all alone before the Red Army tanks? He looked so vulnerable and yet he was where he needed to be. He was courageous and so were you.”
“I didn’t feel brave at the time. I felt evil, dishonest and weak. Now, though, I can see that I was fighting for my life.”
While dramatic, Margaret’s experiences were in many ways typical. Until puberty, she was relatively free to be who she was. Then, as her body changed, her social environment became an emotional obstacle course that she couldn’t maneuver. Margaret was exceptional in her resistance to an environment where she was devalued and objectified. She would not tolerate the shaming and the humiliation inflicted on her by anxious classmates. Even then, she realized that this was a “life and death” matter.
Ironically, what was strong about Margaret—her resistance to pressure—looked weak to the adults around her. They saw the surface symptoms and missed the deep-structure strength. This often happens with adolescent girls. The issues are so complicated that strength is labeled weakness and vice versa.
Many young women are less whole and androgynous than they were at age ten. They are more appearance-conscious and sex-conscious. They are quieter, more fearful of holding strong opinions, more careful what they say and less honest. They are more likely to second-guess themselves and to be self-critical. They are bigger worriers and more effective people pleasers. They are less likely to play sports, love math and science and plan on being president. They hide their intelligence. Many must fight for years to regain all the territory that they lost.
I entered adolescence confident, curious and loud. I knew I was smart and expected to make something of myself. I wasn’t afraid of anyone. I changed. By the time I graduated from high school, I was shy and demure, more polite than it’s healthy to be, worried about my weight and my facial features and desperately eager to be liked. Much of my adult experience has been the slow trip back to my preadolescent androgynous personality.
Early adolescence is when many of the battles for the self are won and lost. These are hard fights, and the losses and victories determine to a great extent the quality of women’s future lives. While young women are in the midst of these battles, none of them look terribly strong. Surface behaviors reveal little of the deep struggles that are battles to hold on to true selves.
Alice Miller would say that strength in adolescence requires an acknowledgment of all parts of the self, not just the socially acceptable ones. Simone de Beauvoir would say that strength implies remaining the subject of one’s life and resisting the cultural pressure to become the object of male