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Revising Ophelia
Celebrating--and
getting over--a decade in crisis
True story: Abby, age ten, is on the
playground after school, reading out to some of us mothers bits of her
essay on why single-sex education is good for middle school girls.
When I ask her if girls might not be better off mixing it up
academically with boys, just as they'll have to one day in the real
world, I am beset. Don't I know that girls suffer a precipitous drop in
self-esteem the moment adolescence hits? Don't I know boys harass them
in the halls and intimidate them in the classroom? Don't I know science
and math teachers ignore girls and call only on boys?
I should keep my mouth shut, but I can't resist. "Omigod, are we still
picking on those poor science teachers? That is so ‘90s!"
Nobody laughs. I think someone actually puts her hands on her hips.
"Didn't you read Reviving Ophelia?"
she demands.
Ah, Ophelia.
It's been ten years since child psychologist Mary Pipher published Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of
Adolescent Girls. In that decade, "Ophelia" has become universal
shorthand not for Hamlet's mopey girlfriend--though that's who we see
floating on the cover in a sea of water lilies--but for a
soul-destroying culture that "limits girls' development, truncates
their wholeness and leaves many of them traumatized," as Pipher wrote
in her introduction.
But here's what's disturbing: ten years after its debut--the lifetime,
as it turns out, of an adolescent girl--Ophelia still sells between 45,000
and 50,000 copies each year. That's fifty thousand new copies to
parents who presumably wouldn't dream of relying on an old edition of What to Expect... or a Penelope
Leach book from another millennium.
This is dangerous business, I think. It's undeniable that Reviving Ophelia played the pivotal
role in inspiring teachers, parents, health advocates and others to
fight back against gender bias, sexual harassment, and "girl-poisoning"
popular culture.
But it's equally undeniable that we shouldn't be reading it--or is that
obsessing on it?--anymore. Read the actual book, as I did recently, and
you'll find it's badly dated and, in places, needlessly inflammatory,
and we can't help today's teens of either gender by relying on old
information. It's time to thank Ophelia for all her good work and come
back to our own decade.
***
Mary Pipher says she never expected Ophelia
to be a hit. It wasn't until the paperback was issued in 1996 that
sales truly took off. "It was a slow-building book. Nobody expected it
to do much of anything," Pipher recalls, speaking from her home in
Nebraska, where she still maintains a clinical practice, teaches part
time, and updates a web site (marypipher.net) to apprise fans on her
latest writings.
Instead, the book did something big: it hit No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list and
went on to spend three years there. Almost two million copies of the
paperback edition alone are in print.
Drawing on and expanding upon earlier work on girls like Carol
Gilligan's Meeting at the Crossroads
and the American Association of University Women's 1992 study How Schools Shortchange Girls, Reviving Ophelia kick-started a
wave of girl-centric activism that's still going strong.
"Reviving Ophelia started a
dialogue about adolescence that wasn't there before," says Rachel Muir,
who was inspired by Ophelia
to form Girlstart Inc., an Austin-based program dedicated to narrowing
the digital divide between boys and girls in the classroom. "Ophelia validated an entire girls'
movement by asking us to take a look at how we shape society for girls,
to look at the pressure girls are under."
But Ophelia the book, as
distinct from Ophelia the movement, hasn't kept pace with the changes
it brought about.
Reviving Ophelia
was never strong on facts to begin with--the book has no footnotes and
little attribution--and those facts are now twelve or more years out of
date. To cite just two of many examples, Pipher claims at one point
that "sexual and physical assaults on girls are at an all-time high,"
but references no statistics. Surely--taking into account ages past
when women and girls were considered property and incest and rape
weren't crimes--surely Pipher meant reports of sexual assault were on
the rise, which can even be a good thing if that means girls and their
advocates are gaining the courage to speak up and out against sexual
crimes.
Elsewhere, Pipher casually lets drop that girls are "growing up in a
world where one in four women will be raped in her lifetime." Again,
the number isn't referenced, and ten years on, when asked, Pipher can't
recall where it came from (and shouldn't, in all fairness, be expected
to remember now).
But if that statistic, shocking as it is, were ever true, it's not true
now. The Department of Justice and the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention puts the number at one in six, and that's for sexual assault
and attempted assault combined, which means the number of actual rapes
is even lower.
I'm not suggesting the girls' movement has run its course--in the week
this article was written, two football players in Massachusetts were
charged with raping a fifteen-year-old classmate; voters in Ohio told
pollsters they couldn't vote for John Kerry because his wife was not
sufficiently "ladylike"; and a teenaged actress rumored to have already
had breast implants posed with shirt up and thong pulled down past her
pubic bone for the cover of a magazine read by men in their thirties
and forties.
Yes, we still have work to do. But wallowing in outdated and possibly
inflammatory numbers won't help us make our daughters any safer or
secure; it only makes us, and them, feel hysterical, or paralyzed, or
both. And that paralysis can stop us from acknowledging the very real
progress we've made in the past decade and being able to meet head-on a
changing crop of girl-relevant issues as they emerge today.
Progress has been significant. Girlstart and programs like it across
the country mentor girls in math and science. Bullying and sexual
harassment education raises awareness among teachers, administrators,
and students in middle school and high school. Health services reach
out to girls who otherwise have little or no access to information
about their changing bodies. And publications like New Moon, an advertising-free
magazine written by girls for girls, presents girls in their most
formative years with an alternate view of themselves from what they see
in the mainstream media.
Experts on adolescent issues that I spoke with--Andrea Prejean, the
National Education Association's specialist in mathematics/science
student achievement, and Angela Diaz, MD, director of the Mt. Sinai
Adolescent Health Center in New York City, to name just two--agree
that, while we still have a long way to go, we've made dramatic headway
in bettering girls' lives the past ten years.
Many more girls are taking math, science, and computer science in
middle and high school. Mortality, deaths from firearms, cigarette use,
binge drinking, and illicit use of drugs are all on the decline among
adolescents in the 1990s and into the early part of the new century.
On the downside, very young teens are becoming sexualized at an earlier
and earlier age, says Diaz, and many teens of either gender lack
adequate access to health services close to where they live and go to
school. And while there's been little decline in eating disorders like
anorexia and bulimia in the past decade, there's been an increase in
childhood and adolescent obesity so sharp it's been labeled an
epidemic.
None of this news, good or bad, will get through to the fifty thousand
people who buy Reviving Ophelia
this year, simply because none of it's in there. Pipher has never
revised the book; she has turned her scholarly attentions elsewhere,
publishing books on elders, refugees, and psychotherapy itself.
***
So why can't we turn our attention elsewhere? Why can't we stop reading
Ophelia? Because
the book, in its enormous popularity, trained us a bit too well to
pathologize teenage girlhood, to view every adolescence as an ongoing,
irrefutable crisis. Wrapped inside Ophelia's
"empower and protect" message is a darker theme, one that appeals in a
forbidden kind of way to moms who aren't ready to let go: your girl is
helpless and under attack. A healthy, normally developing teen, after
all, will naturally begin to turn away from her parents--even her
loving mom--in favor of her friends and her teen-girl culture. But a
girl in crisis, well, she still needs you, doesn't she!
Intentionally or not, Pipher repeatedly reinforces this message.
"[Vegetarianism] is popular with girls because they so easily identify
with the lack of speech and powerlessness of animals," she writes in Ophelia. Oh, dear, it's the teen
girl as veal calf, boxed up helplessly in her pen and set upon by
enemies of every stripe--boys/men, society/culture, advertising/media,
divorced/working parents and those awful, unenlightened science
teachers.
This isn't to say there aren't plenty of girls in our country who
aren't yet hearing the Girl Power message--read Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's
Random Family for
an account of one such untouched neighborhood and the trials of the
teen girls who live there. But inner-city and rural/poor moms aren't
the ones buying Ophelia, I
suspect, nor the aftermarket of books by other authors that followed in
Ophelia's wake--Ophelia Speaks, Surviving Ophelia,
Ophelia's Mom, and so on.
No, these book buyers are much more likely educated, hands-on parents
out to give their girls every advantage--even if that means schooling
them in potential disadvantages before they're even out of American
Girl dolls. Thus we get the specter of Abby on the playground,
precociously reciting all the woe that awaits her with the same
efficient good cheer that she tackles dance lessons, piano, tennis, and
debate club.
***
As Pipher's original call to arms has morphed into something more
fetishistic, the teen-girl book market has only picked up speed, minus
the activism. The second wave of books center not so much on the sexist
indignities of the world as on the slings and arrows girls suffer at
the hands of other girls--a phenomenon known in the industry as
"girl-on-girl aggression."
Odd Girl Out by
Rachel Simmons (2002); Mean Girls
by Hayley DiMarco (2004); Mean
Chick, Cliques and Dirt Tricks by Erika V. Shearin Karnes
(2004), and the queen bee of the genre, Rosalind Wiseman's Queen Bees & Wannabes (2002),
all document the carnivorous ways those poor veal calves are able to
tear one another to shreds.
In Queen Bees & Wannabes,
and in the Empower seminars that she conducts at middle schools and
high schools, Wiseman delineates in anthropological detail the seven
kinds of teen girl and their supposed behaviors. "Queen Bees," for
example, use fear and control to rule their cliques. "Bankers" create
chaos in the hierarchy by hoarding and then strategically releasing
information about other girls. "Wannabes," "Targets," "Torn Bystanders"
. . . you might be able to guess at their roles; if not, Wiseman is
right there with pages of description on each, the better to help you
figure out which role your daughter plays in her school.
To go with these girl types are nine varieties of boys (from "Desperate
Annoying Guy" to "Good-Boy Jock"), and as for you, hapless parent that
you are, Wiseman lists off a whopping twelve different kinds of
parenting styles, only one of which, alarmingly, passes muster in her
opinion. (Congratulations, all you "Loving Hard-Ass" parents.)
At first read, this seems like just the book a teen and her mom could
use to figure out why she's on top of the world one day and cast out
the next. So mesmerizing is Queen
Bees, in fact, that it takes awhile to realize how deeply
cynical and sexist this book is. Wiseman's willingness to rigidly
categorize people, her unapologetic enumeration of ages-old attributes
of social acceptance, and her laser-like dissection of the smallest of
social interactions is all very, well, high school. It's a book about
queen bees written in the style of a queen bee--authoritative and
unquestioning--maybe even by a queen bee, that winds up validating the
importance of the social hierarchy it claims to debunk.
You might very well be able to steer your daughter through the
treacherous waters of adolescence following Wiseman's morally
relativistic advice, but what kind of young woman she'll be when she
reaches the far shore is still very much up for grabs.
***
While we've spent the past decade chasing the bogeyman in the science
classroom and unraveling the mysteries of teen tribes under Wiseman's
tutelage, another group, a mammoth, well-organized, deep-pocketed,
truly scary and worthy opponent has been working with tireless
efficiency to mess with the heads of teen girls and create strife in
their homes.
They're marketers, and if you think you've already heard the yadda
yadda about the evils of Barbie and Seventeen
magazine, it's time to take another, closer look. Since 1992, marketing
aimed at children, including teens, has increased by two-and-a-half
times. It now amounts to some $15 billion annually, according to the New York Times.
Pipher complained about marketing's ill effects on teen girls in Ophelia, and today says she
believes it's the
single most significant element of girls' lives that's gotten markedly
worse since she published her book. "If anything, girls are even more
targeted by vicious consumerism, branding, and marketing. The message
is, if you don't own these products, you cannot love yourself," says
Pipher.
"I think it's a terrible thing to do to young people."
As always, there are people who want to sell anxious parents books
about this burgeoning threat, and indeed, the past eighteen months has
seen the advent of tomes like Branded:
The Buying and Selling of Teenagers by Alissa Quart (2003), Born To Buy: The Commercialized Child and
the New Consumer Culture by Juliet Schor (2004) (excerpted in
Brain, Child's Summer 2004 issue) and Consuming
Kids: The Hostile Takeover of Childhood by Susan Linn (2004).
We've all heard by now that teenaged girls are particularly vulnerable
to the effects of advertising, marketing, and media messages, but in
Linn's book at last we find the answer to why that's so. The chain of
vulnerability goes something like this: Children are being exposed to
material ostensibly intended for adults earlier and earlier in their
lives--c.f. the Coors twins, Sex in
the City reruns, and thongs for ten-year-olds. Meanwhile,
physically, girls are going into puberty at a younger age, but their
emotional development isn't keeping pace. When they look to the culture
around them for cues on how to act, they find MTV, Abercrombie &
Fitch, and Maybelline ready and waiting.
Linn's book doesn't focus solely on girls, or teens, but chapters on
food marketing, the alcohol and tobacco juggernauts, and sex as a
commodity strike at the heart of the pressures teenaged girls feel to
simultaneously conform and rebel. Linn explains just why Barbie has the
influence she does over the way girls feel about their bodies; makes
the connection between obesity, anorexia/bulima, and food marketing;
and exposes the subtle ways the tobacco industry gets the message out
to girls that smoking will keep their weight down.
Perhaps most tragically, marketers have benefited handsomely--and
cynically--from the girls' movement, co-opting its message of hope and
empowerment to move products off the shelves.
"The media is worse, more sexist, more limiting in how it portrays
girls than it was even ten years ago," asserts Nancy Gruver, who
founded New Moon magazine in
1992. "Before, we had benign neglect. There was not a lot of focus on
girls. Now they've co-opted our message. Now girl power is about what
kind of lip gloss you wear."
There we have it. In ten short years, we've leapt from girl-as-victim
to girl-as-power-shopper. Linn's call to arms--that all marketing
toward children should be banned--is of particular import to people who
care about girls, because girls can't and won't flourish without space
to make their own creative decisions apart from the impervious,
insistent marketplace.
What Ophelia helped to start--a movement to empower girls--has been
hijacked by marketers who are a more potent threat to girls' developing
creativity and self-esteem than some bumbling science teacher will ever
be. IM to Ophelia: Get out of that weed bath, girlfriend, we've still
got work to do.
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About the author:
TRACY MAYOR is a long-time contributor to Brain, Child. She writes frequently
on culture and technology. Stacey Evers contributed research for this
article.
The more
pop/psych/parenting books I read, the more deeply I am coming to
mistrust the whole genre. At best, they rob you of perspective; at
worst, they induce parental paranoia. As an antidote, try a broader
take on girls in the world, like Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita
in Tehran, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc's Random
Family, or Catherine Hardwicke's 2002
movie, Thirteen.
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