Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [2]
This last year I have struggled to make sense of this. Why are girls having more trouble now than my friends and I had when we were adolescents? Many of us hated our adolescent years, yet for the most part we weren’t suicidal and we didn’t develop eating disorders, cut ourselves or run away from home.
At first blush, it seems things should be better now. After all, we have the women’s movement. Hasn’t that helped? The answer, as I think about it, is yes and no. Many of my friends, middle-aged and middle-class women like myself, are entitled in ways few women have been since the beginning of time. Many of us are doing things our mothers never dreamed of doing.
But girls today are much more oppressed. They are coming of age in a more dangerous, sexualized and media-saturated culture. They face incredible pressures to be beautiful and sophisticated, which in junior high means using chemicals and being sexual. As they navigate a more dangerous world, girls are less protected.
As I looked at the culture that girls enter as they come of age, I was struck by what a girl-poisoning culture it was. The more I looked around, the more I listened to today’s music, watched television and movies and looked at sexist advertising, the more convinced I became that we are on the wrong path with our daughters. America today limits girls’ development, truncates their wholeness and leaves many of them traumatized.
This book is an attempt to share my thinking with parents, educators, health and mental-health professionals, policymakers and anyone else who works for and with girls. It’s also for girls. In the sixties Betty Friedan wrote of “the problem with no name.” She pointed out that many women were miserable but couldn’t articulate the source of that misery. Adolescent girls today also face a problem with no name. They know that something is very wrong, but they tend to look for the source within themselves or their families rather than in broader cultural problems. I want to help them see their lives in the context of larger cultural forces.
I believe that most Americans share the concerns I have for our daughters. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Tipper Gore, Janet Reno, Marian Wright Edelman and many others are sounding the alarm. I hope this book offers a description of a particular point in girls’ lives. With puberty girls crash into junk culture. One way to think about all the pain and pathology of adolescence is to say that the culture is just too hard for most girls to understand and master at this point in their development. They become overwhelmed and symptomatic.
What can we do to help them? We can strengthen girls so that they will be ready. We can encourage emotional toughness and self-protection. We can support and guide them. But most important, we can change our culture. We can work together to build a culture that is less complicated and more nurturing, less violent and sexualized and more growth-producing. Our daughters deserve a society in which all their gifts can be developed and appreciated. I hope this book fosters a debate on how we can build that society for them.
Chapter 1
SAPLINGS IN THE STORM
When my cousin Polly was a girl, she was energy in motion. She danced, did cartwheels and splits, played football, basketball and baseball with the neighborhood boys, wrestled with my brothers, biked, climbed trees and rode horses. She was as lithe and as resilient as a willow branch and as unrestrained as a lion cub. Polly talked as much as she moved. She yelled out orders and advice, shrieked for joy when she won a bet or heard a good joke, laughed with her mouth