Reviving Ophelia (46 page)

It’s good to remind girls that junior high is not all of life. There are other places—the mountains and beaches, the family cabin on the lake or the neighborhood clubhouse. There are other people—neighbors, relatives, family friends, old people and babies. And there are other times. They will not always be trapped in teenagehood; people do grow up. Along with this reminder, it’s good to encourage non-peer activities : work at a soup kitchen or for Meals on Wheels, go rock climbing or join computer clubs. These activities help girls to stay in contact with the nonadolescent portion of the human race.

Plato said that education is teaching our children to find pleasure in the right things. Parents can share their own pleasures with their daughters by introducing them to the natural world and the world of books, art or music. They can take them backpacking and teach them to fly fish, tune up engines, collect political buttons, play cello, knit afghans or go hang gliding. Especially during this turbulent time, it’s important to have regular ways that the family can have fun together.

But even as I encourage parents to help, I admonish them to be gentle with themselves. Their influence is limited. Parents can do only so much, and they are not responsible for everything. They are neither all-knowing nor all-powerful. Parents can make a difference in the lives of their daughters only if their daughters are willing to allow this. Not all daughters are. Daughters have choices and responsibilities. Friends will have an impact. The culture will have an impact.

While parents can do some fence building, we need to change our institutions. For example, junior highs are not user-friendly for adolescent girls. Most of what girls read in schools is written by men and about men. We need more stories of women who are strong, more examples of women in a variety of roles. History needs to include the history of women; psychology, the psychology of women; and literature, the writing of women.

Adolescent girls need a more public place in our culture, not as sex objects but as interesting and complicated human beings. Chelsea Clinton has become a hero for many young teens. Sixth-grade girls light up at the mention of her name. She’s not a sex object or a victim of violence but a person, and she is much respected by other girls. With the exception of some Olympic athletes, who girls also love to see, I can think of no other adolescent girls who are positive public figures.

Girls benefit from the limelight. Girls’ schools, clubs and groups allow girls to be leaders. Girls’ art shows, literature festivals and athletic events give girls’ lives dignity and public importance. Girls need to see reflections of themselves in all their diversity—as workers, artists and explorers.

Inclusive language helps girls feel included. One client said, “My aunt is a mail carrier. It’s been hard to know what to call her—‘mail person’ didn’t sound right and ‘mail woman’ sounded like something from the circus. I’m glad we have a word now for lady mailmen.” Another noticed that artists are generally referred to as “he.” She said, “That makes us say ‘women artists,’ which doesn’t sound like they are real artists.”

Teachers need equity training. Most teachers are well intentioned and think they are gender-fair, but they aren’t. They discriminate inadvertently. The teacher who found girls’ science projects trite probably didn’t see himself as discriminating. Until I read the research on teachers’ differential treatment of the sexes, I was unaware of the subtle ways I discriminated in the classroom. Schools need to be structured in ways that validate and nurture strengths in female students. Girls do better in cooperative environments and in all-girl math and science classes.

Junior highs often ignore what is happening to students as they are herded from one class to another. Between the ages of eleven and fourteen, students’ issues are relationship issues, and their problems are personal and social. Academics take a backseat to urgent developmental concerns. Schools could foster groupings organized around talents, interests and needs, rather than cliques. They could offer students the clarity they desperately need—supervised activities in which adolescents work and relax together, conflict-resolution training and classes in which guidelines for chemical use and sexual decisions are discussed. They could offer awareness training in areas such as lookism, racism and sexism. They could take responsibility for helping adolescents structure all the social and emotional turmoil they are experiencing.

Schools could offer clear sexual and physical harassment policies that protect students and establish norms for conduct toward the opposite sex. They could offer guidelines for appropriate sexual behavior and teach how to say no. This work with young teens might help prevent the “gang bangs” and the date rapes of the high school years.

“Manhood” needs to be redefined in a way that allows women equality and men pride. Our culture desperately needs new ways to teach boys to be men. Via the media and advertising, we are teaching our sons all the wrong lessons. Boys need a model of manhood that is caring and bold, adventurous and gentle. They need ways to be men that don’t involve violence misogyny and the objectification of women. Instead of promoting violence as a means of solving human problems, we must strengthen our taboos against violence. Some Native American cultures have no words in their language for hurting other humans. What do those cultures think of us?

We need places for kids to go. We need ball fields and gyms, community centers, halls where bands can play music and young thespians can put on plays. Except for movie houses and video arcades, teens have few places they are welcome. They need no-cost supervised places where they can be together to talk, dance and play.

Much of the horrible behavior that now happens between the sexes comes from ignorance of proper behavior and lack of positive experiences with the opposite sex. We adults can provide that. For example, in my town the Red and Black Cafe was opened by adults who wanted their teenagers to have a safe, cheap place to congregate. It stays open late and hosts local bands. Teens love it. Or teens can work together in volunteer activities. By working side by side they can learn to see each other as people worthy of respect.

As a culture, we could use more wholesome rituals for coming of age. Too many of our current rituals involve sex, drugs, alcohol and rebellion. We need more positive ways to acknowledge growth, more ceremonies and graduations. It’s good to have toasts, celebrations and markers for teens that tell them, You are growing up and we’re proud of you.

Adolescent girls come of age in a culture preoccupied with money, sex and violence, a culture with enormous problems—poverty, pollution, addictions and lethal sexually transmitted diseases. And it’s a culture in which more than half of all children will be raised by only one parent for at least part of their childhood.

The ways the media have dehumanized sex and fostered violence should be the topic of a national debate. After a five-year study, the American Psychological Association found that watching television can lead to antisocial behavior, gender stereotyping and bad grades in school. The APA warned that television has become a dominant and disturbing influence on the national psyche. They recommended that the government develop a national policy to promote quality and diverse programming and to protect society and individual citizens from its harmful effects.

Although I believe that the First Amendment has become the last refuge of scoundrels, I don’t advocate censorship. I believe that the best defense against bad ideas is better ideas. But now in our culture the problem is that many people make their living by telling lies and spreading bad ideas. The truth is not getting equal time. We need more public media that exists to enliven and enlighten, not to sell.

Our society teaches that sex, alcohol and purchasing power lead to the good life. We really do know better. We need to rebuild the media so that its values are not antagonistic to the values we must adopt in order to survive and move into the twenty-first century. These changes will not happen overnight. But we can work together toward a new century in which men and women truly have equal power in our culture.

In the last few years violence has become part of ordinary life. A study by the American Psychological Association released in August 1993 found that teens are 250 percent more likely than adults to be crime victims. In some of our cities, seven out of ten kids have seen someone shot or killed. In America today the number-one cause of injury to women is battering. Women are kidnapped and murdered in numbers that were unthinkable in the fifties. It’s hard for girls to grow into independent, autonomous people when they are fearful for their physical safety.

This vulnerability curtails the freedom of every young woman. For instance, Tammy Zywicki, a Grinnell student, was kidnapped and murdered when her car broke down on Interstate 80. One of her friends, Natasha Spears, pointed out that our society’s current response to safety issues is to restrict the freedom of women. She noted that first women were urged not to walk by themselves, then not to live by themselves and now not even to drive by themselves. She said, “When I was in junior high I had more freedom than I have now.”

My grandfather liked a poem about a town that had people falling off its cliffs. The city elders met to debate whether to build a fence at the top of the cliffs or put an ambulance down in the valley. The poem summarizes the essential differences between treatment and prevention of social problems. My work as a therapist is ambulance work, and after years of ambulance driving, I’m aware of the limits of the treatment approach to major social problems. In addition to treating the casualties of our cultural messages, we need to work for cultural change.

I believe, as Miller, Mead and de Beauvoir believed, that pathology comes from failure to realize all one’s possibilities. Ophelia died because she could not grow. She became the object of others’ lives and lost her true subjective self. Many of the girls I describe in this book suffer from a thwarting of their development, a truncating of their potential. As my client said—they are perfectly good carrots being cut into roses.

Adolescence is a border between childhood and adulthood. Like life on all borders, it’s teeming with energy and fraught with danger. Growth requires courage and hard work on the part of the individual, and it requires the protection and nurturing of the environment. Some girls develop under the most adverse conditions, but the interesting question to me is, Under what conditions do most girls develop to their fullest?

Carol Bly coined the term “cultural abuse” for those elements in the culture that block growth and development, and she wrote: “A century from now, it will be thought ridiculous that we have not laid out lists of what influences people to be full-hearted, free-spirited and daring-minded.”

Long-term plans for helping adolescent girls involve deep-seated and complicated cultural changes—rebuilding a sense of community in our neighborhoods, fighting addictions, changing our schools, promoting gender equality and curtailing violence. The best “fence at the top of the hill” is a culture in which there is the structure and security of the fifties and the tolerance for diversity and autonomy of the 1990s. Then our daughters could grow and develop slowly and peacefully into whole, authentic people.

I quoted Stendhal in Chapter One: “All geniuses born women are lost to the public good.” Some ground has been gained since he said that, and some lost. Let’s work toward a culture in which there is a place for every human gift, in which children are safe and protected, women are respected and men and women can love each other as whole human beings. Let’s work for a culture in which the incisive intellect, the willing hands and the happy heart are beloved. Then our daughters will have a place where all their talents will be appreciated, and they can flourish like green trees under the sun and the stars.

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