Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [159]
Our society teaches that sex, alcohol and purchasing power lead to the good life. We really do know better. We need to rebuild the media so that its values are not antagonistic to the values we must adopt in order to survive and move into the twenty-first century. These changes will not happen overnight. But we can work together toward a new century in which men and women truly have equal power in our culture.
In the last few years violence has become part of ordinary life. A study by the American Psychological Association released in August 1993 found that teens are 250 percent more likely than adults to be crime victims. In some of our cities, seven out of ten kids have seen someone shot or killed. In America today the number-one cause of injury to women is battering. Women are kidnapped and murdered in numbers that were unthinkable in the fifties. It’s hard for girls to grow into independent, autonomous people when they are fearful for their physical safety.
This vulnerability curtails the freedom of every young woman. For instance, Tammy Zywicki, a Grinnell student, was kidnapped and murdered when her car broke down on Interstate 80. One of her friends, Natasha Spears, pointed out that our society’s current response to safety issues is to restrict the freedom of women. She noted that first women were urged not to walk by themselves, then not to live by themselves and now not even to drive by themselves. She said, “When I was in junior high I had more freedom than I have now.”
My grandfather liked a poem about a town that had people falling off its cliffs. The city elders met to debate whether to build a fence at the top of the cliffs or put an ambulance down in the valley. The poem summarizes the essential differences between treatment and prevention of social problems. My work as a therapist is ambulance work, and after years of ambulance driving, I’m aware of the limits of the treatment approach to major social problems. In addition to treating the casualties of our cultural messages, we need to work for cultural change.
I believe, as Miller, Mead and de Beauvoir believed, that pathology comes from failure to realize all one’s possibilities. Ophelia died because she could not grow. She became the object of others’ lives and lost her true subjective self. Many of the girls I describe in this book suffer from a thwarting of their development, a truncating of their potential. As my client said—they are perfectly good carrots being cut into roses.
Adolescence is a border between childhood and adulthood. Like life on all borders, it’s teeming with energy and fraught with danger. Growth requires courage and hard work on the part of the individual, and it requires the protection and nurturing of the environment. Some girls develop under the most adverse conditions, but the interesting question to me is, Under what conditions do most girls develop to their fullest?
Carol Bly coined the term “cultural abuse” for those elements in the culture that block growth and development, and she wrote: “A century from now, it will be thought ridiculous that we have not laid out lists of what influences people to be full-hearted, free-spirited and daring-minded.”
Long-term plans for helping adolescent girls involve deep-seated and complicated cultural changes—rebuilding a sense of community in our neighborhoods, fighting addictions, changing our schools, promoting gender equality and curtailing violence. The best “fence at the top of the hill” is a culture in which there is the structure and security of the fifties and the tolerance for diversity and autonomy of the 1990s. Then our daughters could grow and develop slowly and peacefully into whole, authentic people.
I quoted Stendhal in Chapter One: “All geniuses born women are lost to the public good.” Some ground has been gained since he said that, and some lost. Let’s work toward a culture in which there is a place for every human gift, in which children are