The other night I took my son out to a local cafe to buy him dessert and thank him for accompanying me to a poetry reading in a part of town I didn't know very well and didn't want to go into at night alone.
We were talking about his MySpace page, and I was struck by the differences in some of the photos he and his male friends put up. The boys posted images of themselves skateboarding, leaping off things, or eating voraciously and with abandon. By contrast, the photos of the girls all fit the same formula – each of them seemed to be trying to exude the essence of sultriness as defined by Hollywood, fashion magazines, and celebrity websites.
“They all look pretty but exactly the same,” I told him. He looked at me pityingly and replied: “That's because they take about a hundred photos of themselves before they find one they're willing to put up.”
Suddenly I felt myself taken back to my own adolescence – the tyranny of other girls commenting on what I wore, what fashionable items of clothing I didn't own because I couldn't afford them, and who I should hang out with. Girls, some of them my close friends, for God's sake, were the ones who noticed and pointed out every pimple, every fashion faux pas, every hair out of place,
Even when I reached college, I still remember the shock of how much I angered my freshman roommates when one evening we went down to the dining hall, and I decided, on the spur of the moment, to sit with some other people. They were furious with me, and that moment of rupture signaled the beginning of the end of my friendship with women, who seemed to me to still be caught up in the controlling social dynamics of high school.
In college I discovered feminism and found words to describe the frustrations with gender stereotypes that I had felt ever since I was a little girl. Later, in graduate school, I met gifted, generous women, who hardly ever wore make-up, were smart, and looked beautiful because they didn't give a damn about living up to some single cultural stereotype of feminine beauty.
So I felt both sad and angry when I saw those images on my son's MySpace page. Here was a group of young women who seemed trapped in the most entrenched stereotypes of femininity, like butterflies fixed with pins on a collector's board. Where was the spontaneity, the sense of fun, even the silliness I saw in the photos of my son and his friends? Why did they find it necessary to give up all the vestiges of childhood so soon? And for what? An air-brushed, stiff, fashion-magazine version of what it means to be a woman? A sexiness so put on it seemed like a caricature of any real expression of sexual desire?
We tend to blame our culture, and in particular the media, for inundating young women with images they can't possibly live up to. But the “beauty trap” women find themselves in is more complicated. Women are not simply “victims” of consumer culture. Girls themselves enforce the “beauty trap” because of the peer pressure that seems to be an inevitable part of their psycho-sexual development.
We see a similar, although much more horrific dynamic, in cultural rituals like female circumcision, where older women and even female relatives can be as active in perpetuating this act of mutilation as the men in these societies. We condemn those practices as barbaric form of child abuse, even if we also recognize that in societies where women are so dependent on men for survival, none of the women involved seem to have much choice in the matter. But whenever and wherever women work in concert to enforce conformity upon other women, it can be just as damaging as when men openly abuse women, and often far more insidious.
So having emerged from some of the painful feminine rituals of adolescence, with my self-confidence mostly intact, I cannot help but ask myself: What should I do when I confront evidence that the same thing is happening to women young enough to be my daughter?
Do I dismiss it as “just a phase”? A rite of passage? A temporary bit of role-playing that girls engage in before they find their own individual expressions of beauty and sexuality?
I'd like to believe that, but I don't.
I look back on photos (and there are very few of them; I saw to that) of myself as an adolescent girl and then a young woman in my twenties. When I see them, I feel both nostalgia and a strange sense of sadness that I experienced so much of the same self-doubt that adolescent women continue to experience more than twenty years later. The comments of other girls and my own internal self-critique (I'm too fat; too short; too this; too that) mar the pleasure I should have taken in just being young and beautiful in my own way.
So when I look at my adolescent sons who are clinging to childhood for all its worth and enjoying being children as well as young men, my heart goes out to young women, who are so caught up in how they are seen, that they give up the spontaneity and freedom of childhood much too soon, just in order to “fit in” with the other girls -peers who can be a source of support, but just as easily the ones who cut most deeply and painfully into their self-esteem and their sense of autonomy.
How the post-feminist age addresses that problem and how it might give girls the courage to just be themselves and not some distorted image of conventional beauty is a question that remains open. The “beauty trap” remains just as entrenched in our culture and in our psyches as ever.
But one thing women of my generation can do is to keep reaching out to girls--our daughters, our students, our patients, our neighbors' kids--listening to them and demonstrating that they do have a support system to counter the pressure to “fit in” that they feel from our media culture and most of all from other girls.
No comments:
Post a Comment