Reviving Ophelia - Mary Bray Pipher [6]
Alice Miller wrote of the pressures on some young children to deny their true selves and assume false selves to please their parents. Reviving Ophelia suggests that adolescent girls experience a similar pressure to split into true and false selves, but this time the pressure comes not from parents but from the culture. Adolescence is when girls experience social pressure to put aside their authentic selves and to display only a small portion of their gifts.
This pressure disorients and depresses most girls. They sense the pressure to be someone they are not. They fight back, but they are fighting a “problem with no name.” One girl put it this way: “I’m a perfectly good carrot that everyone is trying to turn into a rose. As a carrot, I have good color and a nice leafy top. When I’m carved into a rose, I turn brown and wither.”
Adolescent girls are saplings in a hurricane. They are young and vulnerable trees that the winds blow with gale strength. Three factors make young women vulnerable to the hurricane. One is their developmental level. Everything is changing—body shape, hormones, skin and hair. Calmness is replaced by anxiety. Their way of thinking is changing. Far below the surface they are struggling with the most basic of human questions: What is my place in the universe, what is my meaning ?
Second, American culture has always smacked girls on the head in early adolescence. This is when they move into a broader culture that is rife with girl-hurting “isms,” such as sexism, capitalism and lookism, which is the evaluation of a person solely on the basis of appearance.
Third, American girls are expected to distance from parents just at the time when they most need their support. As they struggle with countless new pressures, they must relinquish the protection and closeness they’ve felt with their families in childhood. They turn to their none-too-constant peers for support.
Parents know only too well that something is happening to their daughters. Calm, considerate daughters grow moody, demanding and distant. Girls who loved to talk are sullen and secretive. Girls who liked to hug now bristle when touched. Mothers complain that they can do nothing right in the eyes of their daughters. Involved fathers bemoan their sudden banishment from their daughters’ lives. But few parents realize how universal their experiences are. Their daughters are entering a new land, a dangerous place that parents can scarcely comprehend. Just when they most need a home base, they cut themselves loose without radio communications.
Most parents of adolescent girls have the goal of keeping their daughters safe while they grow up and explore the world. The parents’ job is to protect. The daughters’ job is to explore. Always these different tasks have created tension in parent-daughter relationships, but now it’s even harder. Generally parents are more protective of their daughters than is corporate America. Parents aren’t trying to make money off their daughters by selling them designer jeans or cigarettes, they just want them to be well adjusted. They don’t see their daughters as sex objects or consumers but as real people with talents and interests. But daughters turn away from their parents as they enter the new land. They befriend their peers, who are their fellow inhabitants of the strange country and who share a common language and set of customs. They often embrace the junk values of mass culture.
This turning away from parents is partly for developmental reasons. Early adolescence is a time of physical and psychological change, self-absorption, preoccupation with peer approval and identity formation. It’s a time when girls focus inward on their own fascinating changes.
It’s partly for cultural reasons. In America we define adulthood as a moving away from families into broader culture.