WHY GIRLS ARE "GIRLS":
The story of Ophelia from Shakespear's Hamlet, shows the destructive forces that affect young women. As a girl, ophelia is happy and free, but with adolescence she loses herself. When she falls in love with Hamlet, she lives only for his approval. She has no inner direction; rather she struggles to meet the demands of Hamlet and her father. Her value is determined by their approval. Ophelia is torn apart by her efforts to please. When Hamlet leaves her for being an obedient daugher, she goes mad with grief. Which leads to her death.
Something dramatic happens to girls in early adolescence. Just as planes and ships disappear misteriously into the Bermuda Triangle, so do the selves of girls disappear. They crash and burn in a social and developmental Bermuda Triangle.
As I looke at the culture that girls enter at the come of age, I can't help but think what a girl-poisoning culture it is. How can we inspire girls to take on the world when it is a world that includes kidnappers and date rapists? "They are not waving, they are drowning." And just when they need help the most, they are unable to take their parents hands. Just when they are begining to explore the world, men clip their wings, and in result girls are tiptoeing, not flying through adolescence.
Girls need to be valued for their personhood, not their bodies.
Double standard exists! The same girls who are pressured to have sex on Saturday night are called sluts on Monday morning. The boys who coaxed them into sex, avoid them in the halls at school.
"All geniuses born women are lost to the public good."
After a lifetime of work, Freud claimed that he didn't know what women wanted. I think his ignorance came from his failure to analyze the cultural context in which women lived. Margaret Fuller was able to define what women need in a way that stands the test of time. "What a woman needs, is not as a woman to act or rule, but as a nature to grow, as an intellect to discern, as a soul to live freely to unfold such powers as are given her."
I think anorexia is a metaphor. It is a young womans statement that she will become what the culture asks of its women, which is that they be thin and nonthreatening. Anorexia signifies that a young woman is so delicate that she needs a man to shelter and protect her from a world she can't handle. Women signal with their bodies: "I will only take up a small amount of space. I won't get in the way."
Many young women are less whole then they were at age 12. They are more appearance-conscious and sex-conscious. Quieter, more fearful of holding strong opinions, more careful of what they say, and less honest. More likely to 2nd-guess themselves and to be selfcritical. Bigger worriers and more effective people pleasers. Less likely to play sports, love math and science and plan on being president. They hide their intelligence. Many must fight for years to regain all the territory they lost.
9:33 p.m. - Jan. 20, 04
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