Reviving Ophelia (10 page)

Adolescence in America is the psychological equivalent of toddler-hood. Just as toddlers move away from their parents physically, so adolescents move away from their parents emotionally. There are continuous negotiations between parents and children about distance. Children want to explore and parents want to keep them safe. And both toddlers and adolescents are outraged when their parents don’t agree with them about the ideal balance of freedom and security.

Of course, since the fifties, families have changed. Divorce, which was uncommon in my childhood, is a fact of life in the 1990s. One in every two marriages ends in divorce, and the most common family is now a blended family. The average adult has at least one divorce, and half of all children spend some of their childhood in single-parent homes. There are many families in which the adults cannot or do not protect their children. Adults who are struggling with their own problems such as depression, drug or alcohol addiction or crippling poverty often have no energy to parent. There are families in which parents are abusive or neglectful. Many children are homeless or in foster care or institutions. Still the majority of parents are motivated to do their best for their children.

Adolescence is currently scripted in a way that builds in conflict between teenagers and their parents. Conflict occurs when parents try to protect daughters who are trying to be independent in ways that are dangerous. Teenagers are under great social pressure to abandon their families, to be accepted by peer culture and to be autonomous individuals.

Girls this age often no longer want to be touched by their parents. They grimace and pull away with a look of alarm when their parents approach. Partly that’s a reaction to their new awareness of their bodies, partly that’s a way of asserting their grown-upness. But it’s more than that. It’s a way of stating, “I need space to be my own person.”

At the same time, girls want to stay close to their parents. They may even argue as a way to maintain a connection. Fights are a way of staying close and asserting distance at the same time. Baffled parents, especially mothers, report that their daughters go out of their way to pick fights. “We can argue over whether the sky is blue.” Another said, “We fight ten times a day, over the most ridiculous stuff. It’s like being nibbled to death by minnows.”

Much of girls’ behavior is not what parents think. The surface behavior is not all there is. The deep structure is on a quest for an autonomous self. The distancing and hostility are not personal. On the other hand, understanding why girls act the way they do doesn’t take away all parental stress. It’s hard when loving daughters refuse to be seen with their parents in public. It’s hard when a daughter storms off in response to the question “How was your day?” It’s painful for parents to be criticized for the way they yawn or peel potatoes.

Because parents often are ignorant of how much the world has changed, further misunderstandings arise. Parents wrongly assume that their daughters live in a world similar to the one they experienced as adolescents. They are dead wrong. Their daughters live in a media-drenched world flooded with junk values. As girls turn from their parents, they turn to this world for guidance about how to be an adult. They cling to the new, reject the old.

Music is important to most girls at this time. It catapults them out of the world of their family and into the world of their peers. It expresses the intensity of their emotions in a way that words cannot. Music is a place where love is a life-and-death matter, where small events are dramatized and memorialized. Music fits the emotional experience of girls much more closely than ordinary adult speech. Unfortunately, much of the music girls hear offers them McSex. As Tipper Gore noticed some time ago, in much of teen music girls are treated as sexual machines. There’s a big difference between Elvis Presley and 2 Live Crew.

A friend told me about talking to her eleven-year-old daughter about sex. She was embarrassed, but wanted to give her daughter more information than she had received. She struggled through the mechanics of sex and then shared her values about healthy relationships. She confessed that she had had sex before marriage. The daughter listened as her mother shared her sexual values.

An hour later she went into her daughter’s room. MTV was showing a nubile young woman clad in a leather bikini crawling all over a muscular young man. She mouthed song lyrics in praise of their sexual experience the night before. The young man had been too drunk to remember, so she was refreshing his memory with salacious details. My friend said, “I realized then that we were in different worlds with different languages. My daughter could no more understand my shame at being sexual before marriage than I could understand this girl in a leather bikini. It was a hard discovery.”

Girls tell me how radically their relationships with their parents changed when they hit puberty. Many said that they had once been “good little kids” but that with puberty they stopped being good. They lied, sneaked around, drank, smoked, yelled and disobeyed. These girls realized the choices they made were self-destructive, but they were in terrible binds. They believed that only nerds stayed close to their parents.

Girls, like Charlotte, who operate from a false self are more likely to break emotionally from their families. They are vulnerable to peer pressure to reject all parental advice. They are more likely to do things that cause great conflict in the family. Because they are operating from false selves, they have no way of keeping peer culture in perspective. They give up the relationship they most need, the relationship with people who would protect them from girl-diminishing experiences.

Girls who hold on to their true selves are more likely to keep their relationship with their families alive. Although they distance some, they do not totally abandon their families. Lori still loves and trusts her parents even though she has typical teenage reactions, such as wanting more time away from her parents and being embarrassed by their smallest flaws.

The role of parents has changed radically in the 1990s. Parents used to help their children fit into the culture. Now many parents fight against the cultural influences that they know will harm their daughters. This was true of both Lori’s and Charlotte’s parents. They wanted their daughters to have more time to grow and develop, time without sex, drugs, alcohol and trauma. They fought to preserve their daughters’ androgyny and wholeness in girl-destructive environments. Most parents today are not the agents of culture, but rather the enemies of the cultural indoctrination that their daughters face with puberty. They battle to save their daughters’ true selves.

As girls pull away from parents, peers are everything. Teens who hardly speak to their parents talk all night with friends. Peers validate their decisions and support their new independent selves. This is a time of deep searching for the self in relationships. There is a constant experimenting—What reaction will I get from others? Talking to friends is a way of checking the important question—Am I okay? The talk is endless, as any parent who shares a phone line with their teenager can attest. Cutting teens off from their friends is incredibly punishing. As one girl explained it, “Grounding teenagers drives them crazy.”

While peers can be satisfying and growth-producing, they can also be growth-destroying, especially in early adolescence. Many girls can describe a universal American phenomenon—the scapegoating of girls by one another. Many girls become good haters of those who do not conform sufficiently to our culture’s ideas about femininity.

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 hair, from periods to the imagined appearance of their genitals. The harassment that girls experience in the 1990s is much different in both quality and intensity. The remarks are more graphic and mean-spirited. Although the content is sexual, the intent is aggressive, to be rude and controlling.

Recently the American Association of University Women released a study, “Hostile Hallways,” that documents what girls are experiencing. It reports that 70 percent of girls experience harassment and 50 percent experience unwanted sexual touching in their schools. One-third of all girls report sexual rumors being spread about them, and one-fourth report being cornered and molested. The study says that the classrooms and hallways of our schools are the most common sites for sexual harassment. Many girls are afraid to speak up for fear of worse harassment.

Often harassment extends beyond remarks to touching. It’s usually from students, although girls also report harassment from male teachers. Generally girls do not tell school authorities about these incidents. More and more I see girls who are school refusers. They tell me they simply cannot face what happens to them at school. Charlotte had trouble returning to school, where she was called a slut when she walked through the halls. Another client complained that boys slapped her behind and grabbed her breasts when she walked to her locker. Another wouldn’t ride the school bus because boys teased her about oral sex.

Girls are also harassed on the streets, in the parks and in swimming pools. In the summer of 1993 New York police reported making arrests at different pools and different times for “the whirlpool.” This was a phenomenon in which bands of young men locked arms and churned through the water, surrounded a girl and then harassed her.

What is sexual harassment in junior high can turn into sexual assaults later. In Lakewood, California, fourteen high school athletes, called the Spur Posse, were on trial for raping many girls, one of whom was ten years old. The gang used threats and persuasion to score points in a long-running game of conquest. Even more alarming than the assaults are the reactions of many of the adults and students in the community to the assaults.

The boys claimed they were innocent of wrongdoing. One said, “The schools pass out condoms and teach us about pregnancy, but they don’t teach us any rules.” Another said, “It’s not illegal to hook up with sluts.”

After their arrests the boys returned to their school for a heroes’ welcome, their status enhanced by all the media coverage of their assaults. Students wore black armbands to protest their arrests and called the girls “sluts” who got what they asked for. Some of the boys’ parents were bewildered, others boastful. One father said that his son was “all man” and added, “There wouldn’t be enough jails in America if boys were imprisoned for doing what he has done.” Another father said that his son had acted no differently from Wilt Chamberlain, who claimed to have had sex with 20,000 women.