Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [18]
She noticed that male voices carry more authority in commercials. Men are the doctors and scientists who give product endorsements. She observed that women’s bodies sell products that have nothing directly to do with women—tires, tractors, liquor and guns.
Another client hated the Old Milwaukee beer ads that feature the Swedish Bikini Team in which a group of bikini-clad women parachute onto a beach to fulfill the sexual fantasies of a beer-drinking man. She said, “Women are portrayed as expensive toys, as the ultimate recreation.” She brought in cologne ads. A Royal Copenhagen ad shows a semi-naked woman kissing a man. The tag line is: “Some of the wildest things happen below deck.” A Santa Fe ad has a couple in bed with the woman’s body in the foreground and it reads: “It’s pretty hot in Santa Fe.” She showed me a Courvoisier ad showing a woman in a short tight skirt sitting on a man’s lap locked in a passionate embrace. She said, “It looks like he’ll get sex if he buys this alcohol.”
To my embarrassment, one client brought in a magazine from my own waiting room. It was an alumni magazine that features arts and sciences. In the glossy thirty-five-page magazine, there were forty-five photographs, forty-four of which pictured males. The one female pictured was on the last page in an article on ballet classes. A male teacher posed with a young girl in a tutu.
My psychology students are aware that the field is male-dominated. While 90 percent of the students are women, almost all the theorists and the famous therapists are men. It’s hard to find books about psychotherapy written by women or films of women psychotherapists.
Ironically, bright and sensitive girls are most at risk for problems. They are likely to understand the implications of the media around them and be alarmed. They have the mental equipment to pick up our cultural ambivalence about women, and yet they don’t have the cognitive, emotional and social skills to handle this information. They are paralyzed by complicated and contradictory data that they cannot interpret. They struggle to resolve the unresolvable and to make sense of the absurd. It’s this attempt to make sense of the whole of adolescent experience that overwhelms bright girls.
Less perceptive girls may miss the meaning of sexist ads, music and shows entirely. They tend to deny and oversimplify problems. They don’t attempt to integrate aspects of their experience or to “connect the dots” between cultural events and their own lives. Rather than process their experience, they seal in confusion.
Often bright girls look more vulnerable than their peers who have picked up less or who have chosen to deal with all the complexity by blocking it out. Later, bright girls may be more interesting, adaptive and authentic, but in early adolescence they just look shelled.
Girls have four general ways in which they can react to the cultural pressures to abandon the self. They can conform, withdraw, be depressed or get angry. Whether girls feel depression or anger is a matter of attribution—those who blame themselves feel depressed, while those who blame others feel angry. Generally they blame their parents. Of course, most girls react with some combination of the four general ways.
To totally accept the cultural definitions of femininity and conform to the pressures is to kill the self. Girls who do this are the “Muffys” and “Barbie dolls” with hair and smiles in place and a terrible deadness underneath. They are the ones who make me want to shout, “Don’t give up, fight back.” Often girls who try to conform overshoot the mark. For example, girls with anorexia have tried too hard to be slender, feminine and perfect. They have become thin, shiny packages, outwardly carefully wrapped and inwardly a total muddle.
Girls have long been trained to be feminine at considerable cost to their humanity. They have long been evaluated on the basis of appearance and caught in myriad double binds: achieve, but not too much; be polite, but be yourself; be feminine