Reviving Ophelia (38 page)

Carol was a wiry, freckled farm girl from a big family. She boarded with our neighbors to attend high school in town. In the evenings, after she had the chores done, Carol came over to play with me. One night we were standing in our front yard when a carload of boys came by and asked her to go for a ride. She hesitated, then agreed. A month later Carol was sent back pregnant to her farm. I worried about her because she’d told me her father used belts and coat hangers on the children. My father told me to learn from Carol’s mistake and avoid riding with boys. I took him literally and it was years before I felt comfortable riding in cars with any boys except my cousins.

In my town the rules for boys were clear. They were supposed to like sex and go for it whenever they could. They could expect sex with loose girls, but not with good girls, at least not until they’d dated them a long time. The biggest problem for boys was getting the experience they needed to prove they were men.

The rules for girls were more complicated. We were told that sex would ruin our lives and our reputations. We were encouraged to be sexy, but not sexual. Great scorn was reserved for “cockteasers” and “cold fish.” It was tough to find the right balance between seductive and prim.

The rules for both sexes pitted them against their Saturday-night dates. Guys tried to get what they could and girls tried to stop them. That made for a lot of sweaty wrestling matches and ruined prom nights. The biggest danger from rule breaking was pregnancy. This was before birth control pills and legal abortion. Syphilis and gonorrhea were the most common sexually transmitted diseases, and both were treatable with the new miracle drug, penicillin.

Sexual openness and tolerance were not community values. Pregnant teachers had to leave school as soon as they “showed.” I had no girlfriends who admitted being sexually active. There was community-wide denial about incest and rape, which undoubtedly occurred in my small town as they did all over America. The official story was kept G-rated.

There was a great deal of hypocrisy. A wealthy man in my town was known for being a pincher. We girls called him “the lobster” among ourselves and knew to avoid him. But because his family was prominent, no one ever told him to stop his behavior.

I didn’t know that pornography existed until I was a senior in high school. My parents took me to Kansas City and we stayed near the Time to Read bookstore. It was two bookstores in one: on the left, classics, best-sellers and newspapers from all over the world, and on the right, an eye-popping display of pornography.

In my town male homosexuals were mercilessly scorned. The one known homosexual was the crippled son of a Brethren minister. He made the enormous mistake of asking another boy for a kiss, and forever after he lived a nightmarish life of isolation and teasing. Female homosexuality was never acknowledged.

Outsiders—such as socialists, Native Americans or blacks—were ostracized in small communities. Our town took great pride in having no black or Native American citizens. Restaurant signs that read “We have the right to refuse service to anyone” were used to exclude non-whites.

Adults told racist jokes and held racist beliefs about ethnic groups they had never even met. My father warned me never to dance with or talk to “Negroes” when I went to college or people would think I was low-class. Terms like “jewing people down” and “Indian giver” were part of the language.

Once scorned, a person was out for years. One classmate who broke into a building in the eighth grade was ostracized for years by all the “good” families. We were forbidden to associate with him. He was killed in a car wreck the week after graduation. Only then did I realize how awful his high school years must have been.

The town newspaper was full of stories about who attended whose birthday party or fiftieth wedding anniversary. Crime was garbage cans and privies being overturned on Halloween. No one locked their doors. Our town sheriff mostly looked for lost pets and speeders. I could go anywhere before or after dark without my parents’ worrying. My most traumatic experience was reading
The Diary of Anne Frank
and realizing that somewhere people could be incredibly evil.

As I recall my childhood, I’m cautioned by Mark Twain’s line, “The older I get, the more clearly I remember things that never happened.” Remembering is more like taking a Rorschach test than calling up a computer file. It’s highly selective and revealing of one’s deep character. Of course, others had different experiences, but I recall small-town life as slower, safer and less sexualized. Everyone did know everyone. Sometimes that made the world seem safe and secure and sometimes that made the world seem small and oppressive.

Cassie attends a high school with 2,300 students. She doesn’t know her teachers’ children or her neighbors’ cousins. When she meets people she doesn’t try to establish their place in a complicated kinship network. When she shops for jeans, she doesn’t expect the clerk to ask after her family.

Cassie sees her extended family infrequently, particularly since her parents’ divorce. They are scattered all over the map. Most of the adults in her neighborhood work. In the evening people no longer sit on their front porches. Instead they prefer the privacy of backyard patios, which keep their doings invisible. Air-conditioning contributes to each family’s isolation. On hot summer days and nights people go inside to stay cool. Cassie knows the Cosby family and the people from “Northern Exposure” better than she knows anyone on her block.

Cassie fights with her parents in a more aggressive way than the teens of my youth. She yells, swears, accuses and threatens to run away. Her parents tolerate this open anger much more readily than earlier generations would have. I’m confused about whether I was more repressed as a child or just happier. Sometimes I think all this expression of emotion is good, and sometimes, particularly when I see beleaguered mothers, I wonder if we have made progress.

Cassie is much more politically aware of the world than I was. By the time she was ten she’d been in a protest march in Washington, D.C. She’s demonstrated against the death penalty and the Rodney King trial. She writes letters to her congressmen and to the newspapers. She writes letters for Amnesty International to stop torture all over the world. She is part of a larger world than I was and takes her role as an active participant seriously.

Cassie and her friends all tried smoking cigarettes in junior high. Like most teenagers today, Cassie was offered drugs in junior high. She can name more kinds of illegal drugs than the average junkie from the fifties. She knows about local drug-related killings and crack rings. Marijuana, which my father saw once in his lifetime, wafts through the air at her rock concerts and midnight movies.

Alcohol is omnipresent—in bowling alleys, gas stations, grocery stores, skating rinks and Laundromats. Alcohol advertising is rampant, and drinking is associated with wealth, travel, romance and fun. At sixteen, Cassie has friends who have been through treatment for drugs or alcohol. The schools attempt alcohol and drug education, but they are no match for the peer pressure to consume. Cassie knows some Just Say No leaders who get drunk every weekend. By eighth grade, kids who aren’t drinking are labeled geeks and left out of the popular scene.

Spending money is a pastime. Cassie wants expensive items—a computer, a racing bike and trips to Costa Rica with her Spanish class and to the ski slopes of Colorado. She takes violin and voice lessons from university professors and attends special camps for musicians.

Cassie’s been surrounded by media since birth. Her family owns a VCR, a stereo system, two color televisions and six radios. Cassie wakes to a radio, plays the car stereo on the way to school, sees videos at school and returns home to a choice of stereo, radio, television or videocassettes. She can choose between forty channels twenty-four hours a day. She plays music while she studies and communicates via computer modem with hackers all over the country in her spare time.

Cassie and her friends have been inundated with advertising since birth and are sophisticated about brand names and commercials. While most of her friends can’t identify our state flower, the goldenrod, in a ditch along the highway, they can shout out the brand of a can of soda from a hundred yards away. They can sing commercial jingles endlessly.

Cassie’s been exposed to years of sophisticated advertising in which she’s heard that happiness comes from consuming the right products. She can catch the small lies and knows that adults tell lies to make money. We do not consider that a sin—we call it marketing. But I’m not sure that she catches the big lie, which is that consumer goods are essential to happiness.

Cassie has more access to books than I had. I was limited to a town library the size of a Quick Stop and a weekly bookmobile. She has a six-branch public library system, a school library as big as a gymnasium and three university libraries. But she reads much less than I did. Particularly the classics that I loved,
Jane Eyre, Moby Dick, and Return of the Native
bore her with their loopy, ornamental prose. She has more choices about how to spend her time, and like most teens raised in a media-saturated culture, Cassie does not often choose to read books.

There are more magazines for girls now, but they are relatively unchanged in the thirty years since I bought my copies of
Teen.
The content for girls is makeup, acne products, fashion, thinness and attracting boys. Some of the headlines could be the same: TRUE COLORS QUIZ, GET THE LOOK THAT GETS BOYS, TEN COMMANDMENTS OF HAIR, THE BEST PLACES TO MEET AVAILABLE MEN and TEN WAYS TO TRIM DOWN. Some headlines are updated to pay lip service to the themes of the 1990s: TWO MODELS CHILL OUT AT OXFORD UNIVERSITY IN SEASON’S GREATEST GRAY CLOTHES Or ECO-INSPIRED LOOKS FOR FALL. A few reflect the greater stress that the 1990s offer the young: REV UP YOUR LOOKS WHEN STRESS HAS YOU DOWN, THE STD OF THE MONTH, GENITAL WARTS and SHOULD I GET TESTED FOR AIDS? Some would never have appeared in the 1950s: WHEN YOU’RE HIGHLY SEXED, IS ONE PARTNER ENOUGH? and ADVICE ON ORGASMS.

Cassie listens to music by The Dead Milkmen, 10,000 Maniacs, Nirvana and They Might Be Giants. She dances to Madonna’s song “Erotica,” with its sadomasochistic lyrics. The rock-and-roll lyrics by 2 Live Crew that make Tipper Gore cringe don’t upset her. Sexist lyrics and the marketing of products with young women’s naked bodies are part of the wallpaper of her life.

Cassie’s favorite movies are
The Crying Game, Harold and Maude
and
My Own Private Idaho.
None of these movies would have made it past the theater owner of my hometown.

Our culture has changed from one in which it was hard to get information about sexuality to one in which it’s impossible to escape information about sexuality. Inhibition has quit the scene. In the 1950s a married couple on TV had to be shown sleeping in twin beds because a double bed was too suggestive. Now anything—incest, menstruation, crotch itch or vaginal odors—can be discussed on TV. Television shows invite couples to sell their most private moments for a dishwasher.

The plot for romance movies is different. In the fifties people met, argued, fell in love, then kissed. By the seventies, people met, argued, fell in love and then had sex. In the nineties people meet, have sex, argue and then, maybe, fall in love. Hollywood lovers don’t discuss birth control, past sexual encounters or how a sexual experience will affect the involved parties; they just do it. The Hollywood model of sexual behavior couldn’t be more harmful and misleading if it were trying to be.

Cassie has seen
Playboys
and
Penthouses
on the racks at local drugstores and Quick Stops. Our city has adult XXX-rated movie theaters and adult bookstores. She’s watched the adult channels in hotel rooms while bouncing on “magic fingers” beds. Advertisements that disturb me with their sexual content don’t bother her. When I told her that I first heard the word “orgasm” when I was twenty, she looked at me with disbelief.

Cassie’s world is more tolerant and open about sex. Her friends produced a campy play entitled Vampire Lesbians of Sodom. For a joke she displays Kiss of Mint condoms in her room. She’s a member of her school’s branch of Flag—Friends of Lesbians and Gays—which she joined after one of her male friends “came out” to her. She’s nonjudgmental about sexual orientation and outspoken in her defense of gay rights. Her world is a kinder, gentler place for girls who have babies. One-fifth of all babies today are born to single mothers. Some of her schoolmates bring their babies to school.

In some ways Cassie is more informed about sex than I was. She’s read books on puberty and sexuality and watched films at school. She’s seen explicit movies and listened to hours of explicit music. But Cassie still hasn’t heard answers to the questions she’s most interested in. She hasn’t had much help sorting out when to have sex, how to say no or what a good sexual experience would entail.