Reviving Ophelia (6 page)

By junior high girls sense their lack of power, but usually they cannot say what they sense. They see that mostly men are congressmen, principals, bankers and corporate executives. They notice that famous writers, musicians and artists are mostly men. But they don’t focus on the political—their complaints are personal.

What girls say about gender and power issues depends on how they are asked. When I ask adolescent girls if they are feminists, most say no. To them, feminism is a dirty word, like communism or fascism. But if I ask if they believe men and women should have equal rights, they say yes. When I ask if their schools are sexist, they are likely to say no. But if I ask if they are ever harassed sexually at their school, they say yes and tell me stories. If I ask who writes most of the material they study at school, they know it’s men. If I ask who is more likely to be a principal, they say a man. If I ask who has more power, they say men.

I encourage girls to think about these issues and bring me examples of discrimination. One girl noticed that the mountains in Colorado that were named for men had their last names. She brought in a map to point out Mount Adams, Mount Audubon, Babcock Peak, Mount Edwards, Mount Garfield, Hilliard Peak, Mount Sneffels and Mount Richthofen. The few natural features that are named for women are named with only the woman’s first name, such as Mount Alice, Mount Emma, Mount Eva, Lake Emmaline, Lake Agnes, Maggie Gulch and Mount Flora.

Girls complain that they do more chores than their brothers. Or that they make less money baby-sitting than their brothers do mowing lawns. Or that parents praise brothers’ accomplishments more than theirs. An athlete complained that her track coach spent more time with the boys. Another noted that only the female gymnasts had to weigh in at practices. A softball player complained that sports coverage was better for men’s events than for her own. A musician noticed that most rock stars were male.

I was a reader and I remember the trouble I had with misogynistic writers. I loved Tolstoy, but it broke my heart to realize when I read
The Kreutzer Sonata
that he detested women. Later I had the same experience with Schopenhauer, Henry Miller and Norman Mailer. My daughter, Sara, read Aristotle in her philosophy class. One night she read a section aloud to me and said, “This guy doesn’t respect women.” I wondered what it means to her that one of the wisest men of the ages is misogynistic.

It’s important for girls to be exposed to more women writers, but it’s equally important to change the way women are portrayed in the media. Not many girls read Tolstoy today, but almost all watch television. On the screen they see women mainly depicted as half-clad and half-witted, often awaiting rescue by quick-thinking, fully clothed men. I ask girls to watch the ways women are portrayed on television. We’ll talk about their observations and I’ll ask, “What does this teach you about the role of women?”

Cayenne noticed that television almost never features old, heavy or unattractive women. She also noticed that on TV even if a woman is a doctor or a scholar, she looks like a
Playboy
bunny. Another noticed that women are often victims of violence. Lots of plots have to do with women being raped, beaten, chased or terrorized by men. She also noticed that some sex scenes have scary music and some violent scenes have sexy music so that sex and violence are all mixed up.

She noticed that male voices carry more authority in commercials. Men are the doctors and scientists who give product endorsements. She observed that women’s bodies sell products that have nothing directly to do with women—tires, tractors, liquor and guns.

Another client hated the Old Milwaukee beer ads that feature the Swedish Bikini Team in which a group of bikini-clad women parachute onto a beach to fulfill the sexual fantasies of a beer-drinking man. She said, “Women are portrayed as expensive toys, as the ultimate recreation.” She brought in cologne ads. A Royal Copenhagen ad shows a semi-naked woman kissing a man. The tag line is: “Some of the wildest things happen below deck.” A Santa Fe ad has a couple in bed with the woman’s body in the foreground and it reads: “It’s pretty hot in Santa Fe.” She showed me a Courvoisier ad showing a woman in a short tight skirt sitting on a man’s lap locked in a passionate embrace. She said, “It looks like he’ll get sex if he buys this alcohol.”

To my embarrassment, one client brought in a magazine from my own waiting room. It was an alumni magazine that features arts and sciences. In the glossy thirty-five-page magazine, there were forty-five photographs, forty-four of which pictured males. The one female pictured was on the last page in an article on ballet classes. A male teacher posed with a young girl in a tutu.

My psychology students are aware that the field is male-dominated. While 90 percent of the students are women, almost all the theorists and the famous therapists are men. It’s hard to find books about psychotherapy written by women or films of women psychotherapists.

Ironically, bright and sensitive girls are most at risk for problems. They are likely to understand the implications of the media around them and be alarmed. They have the mental equipment to pick up our cultural ambivalence about women, and yet they don’t have the cognitive, emotional and social skills to handle this information. They are paralyzed by complicated and contradictory data that they cannot interpret. They struggle to resolve the unresolvable and to make sense of the absurd. It’s this attempt to make sense of the whole of adolescent experience that overwhelms bright girls.

Less perceptive girls may miss the meaning of sexist ads, music and shows entirely. They tend to deny and oversimplify problems. They don’t attempt to integrate aspects of their experience or to “connect the dots” between cultural events and their own lives. Rather than process their experience, they seal in confusion.

Often bright girls look more vulnerable than their peers who have picked up less or who have chosen to deal with all the complexity by blocking it out. Later, bright girls may be more interesting, adaptive and authentic, but in early adolescence they just look shelled.

Girls have four general ways in which they can react to the cultural pressures to abandon the self. They can conform, withdraw, be depressed or get angry. Whether girls feel depression or anger is a matter of attribution—those who blame themselves feel depressed, while those who blame others feel angry. Generally they blame their parents. Of course, most girls react with some combination of the four general ways.

To totally accept the cultural definitions of femininity and conform to the pressures is to kill the self. Girls who do this are the “Muffys” and “Barbie dolls” with hair and smiles in place and a terrible deadness underneath. They are the ones who make me want to shout, “Don’t give up, fight back.” Often girls who try to conform overshoot the mark. For example, girls with anorexia have tried too hard to be slender, feminine and perfect. They have become thin, shiny packages, outwardly carefully wrapped and inwardly a total muddle.

Girls have long been trained to be feminine at considerable cost to their humanity. They have long been evaluated on the basis of appearance and caught in myriad double binds: achieve, but not too much; be polite, but be yourself; be feminine and adult; be aware of our cultural heritage, but don’t comment on the sexism. Another way to describe this femininity training is to call it false self-training. Girls are trained to be less than who they really are. They are trained to be what the culture wants of its young women, not what they themselves want to become.

America today is a girl-destroying place. Everywhere girls are encouraged to sacrifice their true selves. Their parents may fight to protect them, but their parents have limited power. Many girls lose contact with their true selves, and when they do, they become extraordinarily vulnerable to a culture that is all too happy to use them for its purposes.

Alice Miller said, “It is what we cannot see that makes us sick.” It’s important for girls to explore the impact the culture has on their growth and development. They all benefit from, to use on old-fashioned term, consciousness-raising. Once girls understand the effects of the culture on their lives, they can fight back. They learn that they have conscious choices to make and ultimate responsibility for those choices. Intelligent resistance keeps the true self alive.

DEVELOPMENTAL ISSUES—“I’M NOT WAVING, I’M DROWNING”

Rain drummed on the office windows and rolled down the casings as Rob and Sue, looking weary, talked about their daughter. Charlotte was fifteen, but looked much older in her heavy makeup and tight dress. Her face had a hardness that I hate to see in anyone, especially in someone so young.

Sue thought that Charlotte’s problems went back to her divorce, which had occurred when Charlotte was three. Charlotte hadn’t missed her father, who was an abusive alcoholic, but she had missed Sue, who immediately began a full-time job at a Quick Stop. Sue looked at her nicotine-stained fingers and said, “After the divorce, I had less of everything—time, money, patience. I think that hurt Charlotte.”

As Sue talked, Charlotte sat stiffly, her mouth a tight, thin line.

Rob changed the subject. “Sue and I met at a singles group and dated for ten months. We got married when Charlotte was eight. She was our flower girl. Really a cute kid.”

“Charlotte was okay till junior high, but then things started going wrong fast,” Sue said. “She developed an attitude. She started smoking and dressing like a slut. She slipped out to drink with older kids.”

“She’s not the only one in trouble,” Rob said. “Three of her friends have babies. Our town has one thousand people and three liquor stores. Kids have nothing to do but get into trouble.”

Sue added, “We haven’t been great supervisors. Rob commutes to manage a Safeway, and I run the Quick Stop at home.”

Charlotte was in about every kind of trouble an adolescent girl could be in. She was flunking ninth grade. She smoked cigarettes, drank whiskey and used pot. She had an older boyfriend. She barely spoke to her parents and had tantrums when they tried to keep her safe. A month ago, when they insisted on a drug and alcohol evaluation, Charlotte ran away from home.

For three weeks Rob and Sue worried that she’d been kidnapped or killed. Sue said, “You don’t know what fear is until you have a daughter hitchhiking around the country.” Then Charlotte called from Seattle to say she wanted to come home. She sounded frightened and promised to do whatever her parents wanted. They called for a therapy appointment.

I asked Charlotte if she was willing to work with me for a while. She shrugged elaborately, feigning exasperation. But over the next few months Charlotte and I figured a few things out. She really had been okay in elementary school. She had played ball every summer until the town’s insurance was canceled and Little League was discontinued. She liked hanging out at the Quick Stop, drinking root beer and reading the magazines. She was happy when Rob became her dad. He took her camping and bought her a new bike. He made her mom laugh.

But adolescence changed everything. First it was the ordinary stuff: fights with girls and teasing by the boys. Her breasts developed early and boys were always rubbing against her, grabbing her from behind and calling her names. She also was heavier than most of her classmates and worried about her weight. She bought some diet pills and lost weight rapidly. Charlotte loved the light, airy feeling she had on those pills. She started smoking cigarettes to help herself lose weight. Charlotte stole her Virginia Slims from the Quick Stop.

Rob and Sue hated her smoking, but they smoked too and couldn’t take the high moral ground on this issue. Sue and Rob didn’t like her friends, her constant dieting, her music, her falling grades or her mouthiness. Conversations became tense and angry. Charlotte stayed in her room or out of the house as much as she could.

The summer of her eighth-grade year she started “partying,” a euphemism for getting loaded with friends. She met kids at a sand pit south of town and drank beer and cheap wine around a bonfire until dawn. She told me, “Getting baked erased my life.”

Once Rob showed up looking for her, but she hid behind a cotton-wood tree while her friends lied about her whereabouts. Several times Sue and Rob called the police to help them find her. She was grounded, but she slipped out her window and went anyway. Finally Rob and Sue had what Charlotte described as an “emotional meltdown.” They gave up and let her do what she wanted.

That is, they gave up until she began dating Mel. He was twenty-two and had a job at the co-op that paid him just enough money to buy beer and lotto tickets. He was good-looking but sleazy, and Rob and Sue were adamant that their daughter wouldn’t date him.

Unfortunately, Charlotte no longer obeyed them. She wore seductive clothes, dyed her hair Madonna blond and did whatever she pleased. With guys she was quiet and docile, eager to please—exactly the kind of girlfriend Mel wanted. The harder Rob and Sue fought, the more appealing the forbidden fruit became, and eventually they lost this battle too.

When Charlotte talked about Mel, I was surprised by how realistic her perceptions were. She knew he was a loser and disapproved of his heavy drinking and gambling. She even admitted that sometimes she was bored with him. All they did was rent movies and drink at his place. Now and then they fished for catfish and carp, but as Charlotte said, “Those trips are really an excuse to stay out drinking all night.”

Mel didn’t even like to have sex that often. But Charlotte was fiercely loyal. Mel was the first guy she dated who wanted a relationship with her. As she put it, “With him, it wasn’t wham, bam, thank you ma’am.”

Mel had confided to her about his own difficult family situation. His father was the town drunk in the town just west of them on the highway. Once Mel came home from school to find all their furniture had been sold to buy booze. He had memories of Christmases without presents, of food baskets from churches delivered by his classmates and of nice kids not being permitted to play with him.