Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [33]
Like any recent converts to an ideology, girls are at risk of becoming the biggest enforcers and proselytizers for the culture. Girls punish other girls for failing to achieve the same impossible goals that they are failing to achieve. They rush to set standards in order to ward off the imposition of others’ standards on them. The content of the standards is variable—designer jeans or leather jackets, smoking cigarettes or the heavy use of eye shadow. What’s important is the message that not pleasing others is social suicide.
This scapegoating functions as the ultimate form of social control for girls who are not sufficiently attentive to social pressures. Scapegoats are shunned, teased, bullied and harassed in a hundred different ways. Girls who are smart, assertive, confident, too pretty or not pretty enough are likely to be scapegoated.
Girls do not learn to express anger directly. Unlike boys, they are not permitted to fight physically with their enemies. They express anger by cattiness and teasing. They punish by calling a girl on the phone to say that there’s a party and she’s not invited. They punish by walking up to girls with insults about their clothes or bodies. They punish by nicknames and derogatory labels. They punish by picking a certain girl, usually one who is relatively happy, and making her life miserable.
Of course this shunning takes its toll. The pain often drives adolescent girls to despair. As one girl put it, “You can only go so long with people putting you down before you begin to believe it.”
In junior high I was a big awkward girl with wild yellow hair. One day a girl approached me and said sweetly, “Promise you won’t get mad if I ask you a question?” Now this should have been a tip-off, but I was only twelve. I promised, and she said, “Do you ever brush your hair?”
My classmate Patty was obese and slow-moving. She suffered the most. Her nickname was “Mammoth,” and girls called her this to her face. Anything she did was scorned. One year her mother brought in lovely red popcorn balls for Halloween. No one would eat them even though just looking at the bowl made our mouths water. Everyone was afraid that if we ate popcorn balls made by “Mammoth’s mother” we’d be “germed.”
My school had the “germs” method of shunning. Girls who were unpopular were considered to have germs, and anyone who touched them would be infected unless they immediately passed them along to another girl. Lots of between-class time was spent getting rid of germs from contact with undesirables. To my credit I never played, but I hated the days when I was labeled as the person with germs. I have since learned how common that game was in towns all over the country. Even today it’s played. In my town now, the germs are called shigellae.
The peer culture is much tougher now than when I was a girl. Chemicals are more available and more widely utilized. Teenagers drink earlier and more heavily. A speaker in my college class told about his life in a small Nebraska town in the early sixties. He said that in high school his buddies would buy a six-pack and cruise on a Saturday night after they dropped off their dates. After his talk, a young woman in the class said that she lived in his hometown in the 1990s. He asked how it was different. She said, “Kids buy cases, not six-packs, and the girls get drunk too.”
Most teenagers are offered drugs by seventh grade. Marijuana wafts through the air at rock concerts and midnight movies. Gangs operate along the interstate, and crack is sold in the suburbs.
Many girls complain about sexual harassment in the schools. While junior-high boys have always teased girls about sex, the level of the teasing is different. Girls are taunted about everything from oral sex to pubic