Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [16]
The rules for girls are confusing and the deck is stacked against them, but they soon learn that this is the only game in town. One friend remembered that when she was in seventh grade, she wished someone would tell her what the rules were. She said, “It was so hard to play the games correctly without knowing the rules.”
While the rules for proper female behavior aren’t clearly stated, the punishment for breaking them is harsh. Girls who speak frankly are labeled as bitches. Girls who are not attractive are scorned. The rules are reinforced by the visual images in soft- and hard-core pornography, by song lyrics, by casual remarks, by criticisms, by teasing and by jokes. The rules are enforced by the labeling of a woman like Hillary Rodham Clinton as a “bitch” simply because she’s a competent, healthy adult.
Many of the girls I teach at the university can remember some of their choices—the choice to be quiet in class rather than risk being called a brain, the choice to diet rather than eat when they were hungry, the choice to go out with the right crowd rather than the crowd they liked, the choice to be polite rather than honest, or to be pretty rather than have fun. One girl put it this way: “You have to suffer to be beautiful.” But generally, girls are inarticulate about the trauma at the time it happens. The issues that adolescent girls struggle with are barely discussed in the culture. Language doesn’t fit their experiences. Protest is called delinquency, frustration is called bitchiness, withdrawal is called depression and despair is labeled hormonal. Many battles for the self are won and lost without reports from the front lines.
There are many different experiences that cause girls to relinquish their true selves. In early adolescence girls learn how important appearance is in defining social acceptability. Attractiveness is both a necessary and a sufficient condition for girls’ success. This is an old, old problem. Helen of Troy didn’t launch a thousand ships because she was a hard worker. Juliet wasn’t loved for her math ability.
The Ladies’ Guide to Health, written in 1888, pointed out that while boys were dressed for winter in wool pants, jackets and sweaters, girls were dressed in silks and laces that fell gracefully from their shoulders and left their arms exposed. The author bemoaned the deaths of girls from diphtheria and pneumonia.
Teen magazines are a good example of the training in lookism that girls receive. Once when my daughter was sick I wanted to buy her some light reading. When I picked up her antibiotics at the drugstore, I leafed through the magazines. The models all looked six feet tall and anorexic. The emphasis was on makeup, fashion and weight. Girls were encouraged to spend money and to diet and work out in order to develop the looks that would attract boys. Apparently attracting boys was the sole purpose of life, because the magazines had no articles on careers, hobbies, politics or academic pursuits. I couldn’t find one that wasn’t preaching the message “Don’t worry about feeling good or being good, worry about looking good.”
Girls come of age in a misogynistic culture in which men have most political and economic power. Girls read a history of Western civilization that is essentially a record of men’s lives. As Dale Spender says, “Women’s accomplishments are relegated to the lost and found.” As girls study Western civilization, they become increasingly aware that history is the history of men. History is His Story, the story of Mankind.
I discovered this when I read H. G. Wells’ Outline of History and Winston Churchill’s History of the Western World. Both are primarily histories of war and the distribution of property.