Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [15]
But because of girls’ developmental stage, parents have limited influence. Cayenne, for example, would barely speak to her parents. As daughters move into the broader culture, they care what their friends, not their parents, think. They model themselves after media stars, not parental ideals.
With puberty, girls face enormous cultural pressure to split into false selves. The pressure comes from schools, magazines, music, television, advertisements and movies. It comes from peers. Girls can be true to themselves and risk abandonment by their peers, or they can reject their true selves and be socially acceptable. Most girls choose to be socially accepted and split into two selves, one that is authentic and one that is culturally scripted. In public they become who they are supposed to be.
Authenticity is an “owning” of all experience, including emotions and thoughts that are not socially acceptable. Because self-esteem is based on the acceptance of all thoughts and feelings as one’s own, girls lose confidence as they “disown” themselves. They suffer enormous losses when they stop expressing certain thoughts and feelings.
Cayenne exemplifies the process of disowning the true self. With puberty she went from being a whole, authentic person to a diminished, unhappy version of herself. Her dream of being cut into pieces and fed to a goat reflects quite exactly her loss of wholeness. Many girls report dreams like Cayenne’s. They dream of drowning, of being paralyzed and of being stuck in quicksand. A common dream is of being attacked and unable to scream or fight back in any way. The attackers can vary—men, schoolmates, insects or snakes. The important elements of the dream are the attack, the paralysis and the imminent destruction of the self.
With adolescence, Cayenne begins to operate from a false self. When she says “Let’s face it, I’m a dog,” she is accepting society’s right to define her solely on the basis of her appearance. She is even defining herself that way. Earlier, she fought to save a turtle or defend an ideal, now she is used to being “grabbed,” and no longer protests when her bodily integrity is threatened.
As she adopts a false self, Cayenne loses her confidence and calmness. She loses her clear, direct speech. She distances from her parents, who encourage her to remain true to her self. Her surface behavior and her deeper feelings are not congruent. She no longer behaves in a way that meets her true needs.
Her decisions are not thoughtful, conscious choices, but rather reactions to peer pressure. She’s pressured to use chemicals and to have sex. Cayenne is off course and unfocused. Her long-term goal to be a doctor is abandoned.
Cayenne experienced what all girls experience in early adolescence—rigorous training for the female role. At this time girls are expected to sacrifice the parts of themselves that our culture considers masculine on the altar of social acceptability and to shrink their souls down to a petite size. Claudia Bepko and Jo-Ann Krestan call it “indoctrination into the code of goodness,” which they argue is essentially unchanged since the fifties. The rules remain the same: be attractive, be a lady, be unselfish and of service, make relationships work and be competent without complaint.
This is when girls learn to be nice rather than honest. Cayenne told me, “The worst punishment is to be called a bitch. That will shut anyone up.” She continued, “Girls are supposed to smile. If I’m having a bad day, teachers and kids tell me to smile. I’ve never heard them say that to a guy.”
Adolescent girls discover that it is impossible to be both feminine and adult. Psychologist I. K. Broverman’s now classic study documents this impossibility. Male and female participants in the study checked off adjectives describing the characteristics of healthy men, healthy women and healthy adults. The results showed that while people