Free Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher Page A

conceive of happiness at that height.” Another told of watching a cute blonde in her eighth-grade class flirt with boys. “The same boys who tripped over themselves to open doors for her would look away if I walked by.”
    Appearance was important when I was in junior high, but it’s even more important today. Girls who lived in smaller communities were judged more holistically—for their character, family background, behavior and talents. Now, when more girls live in cities full of strangers, they are judged exclusively by their appearance. Often the only information teenagers have about each other is how they look.
    The right look has always mattered, but now it’s harder to obtain. Designer clothes, leather jackets, name-brand tennis shoes and expensive makeup shut more girls out of the competition. The standards of beauty are more stringent. Miss Americas have become taller and slimmer over the years. In 1951, Miss Sweden was 5 feet 7 inches tall and weighed 151 pounds. In 1983, Miss Sweden was 5 feet 9 inches tall and 109 pounds. While beautiful women are slimmer, average women are heavier than they were in the 1950s. Thus the discrepancy between the real and the ideal is greater. This discrepancy creates our plague of eating disorders.
    What is culturally accepted as beautiful is achieved only with great artince—photo croppings, camera angles and composite bodies are necessary to get the pictures we now see of beautiful women. Even the stars cannot meet our cultural ideals without great cost. Dolly Parton dieted until she looked ill. Jamie Lee Curtis, who worked months to get in shape for the movie Perfect, felt her body was not right for the part. Jane Fonda and Princess Di have both had eating disorders.
    I’m struck by how intense and damaging these issues are every time I speak in a high school or college class. I ask, “How many of you know someone with an eating disorder?” Usually every hand goes up. After my talk girls come up to ask about their friends, their sisters or themselves. They all have horror stories of girls who are miserable because they don’t quite meet our cultural ideals.
    With early adolescence, girls surrender their relaxed attitudes about their bodies and take up the burden of self-criticism. Just at the point their hips are becoming rounder and they are gaining fat cells, they see magazines and movies or hear remarks by peers that suggest to them that their bodies are all wrong. Many girls scorn their true bodies and work for a false body. They allow the culture to define who they should be. They diet, exercise compulsively and wear makeup and expensive clothes. Charlotte thought of her body as something other people would examine and judge. How her body appeared to others, not how it felt to her, was what mattered.
    A girl who remains true to herself will accept her body as hers and resist others’ attempts to evaluate and define her by her appearance. She’s much more likely to think of her body in terms of function than form. What does her body do for her? Lori, for example, was proud of her body’s ability to dance and swim. Her self-esteem didn’t revolve around her appearance. She eschewed diets and time spent in front of a mirror. Interestingly, even as her friends primped and dieted, they envied her her casual attitudes about beauty. Lori cared more about being than seeming. She was lucky because, as De Beauvoir writes, “to lose confidence in one’s body is to lose confidence in oneself.”
EMOTIONAL SELVES
    A friend once told me that the best way to understand teenagers was to think of them as constantly on LSD. It was good advice. People on acid are intense, changeable, internal, often cryptic or uncommunicative and, of course, dealing with a different reality. That’s all true for adolescent girls.
    The emotional system is immature in early adolescence. Emotions are extreme and changeable. Small events can trigger enormous reactions. A negative comment about