The Way of the World for Girls

By Cheryl Dellasega, PhD
Author of nugrl90 and Girl Wars: Twelve Strategies That Will End Female Bullying and Surviving Ophelia



In 1992, psychologist Mary Pipher analogy between today’s teenagers and Hamlet’s hapless Ophelia sparked a keen interest in the budding female psyche. As an epidemic of eating disorders, depression, cutting, and peer-to-peer violence overwhelms young women, we watch each new extreme with horror. There are girls who literally starve themselves to death, while others carve, multi-pierce, or supertattoo their bodies. In an affluent suburb, verbal aggression between girls explodes into physical assaults that voyeurs videotape rather than curtail.

Are today’s young women more troubled than their predecessors? Do we really still live in the “girl poisoning” culture Pipher first lamented? Let me tell you about two girls I know. Lesa is a charming twelve-year old who could pass for twenty from the neck down. Only the barrettes in her hair suggest that, despite her curves, she is still a little girl. Lesa has all the skills to be a leader, but she is not. Instead, she hurtles insults disguised as jokes at her peers, manipulates her friends, and frequently disrupts class with caustic comments. Other girls are intimidated by Lesa, but they don’t like her.

Get Lesa by herself and suddenly she’s a shy and insecure pre-adolescent, despite her B-cup bra and brash behavior. In a low voice, she’ll tell how humiliated and ashamed she was when her body began to develop two years earlier and her classmates responded with giggles and taunts. Lesa wanted to run away from school and never return, but instead, she became a tough girl, launching verbal attacks against others before they could hurt her.

Although most of us don’t think of words as weapons, for girls, they are. Lesa was victimized by them, and in turn used them to hurt others, as do so many young women. Ironically, both her tormentors and tormentees are other girls. How could Lesa’s early puberty, not so uncommon, set off a chain reaction that still disturbs her years later?

From early on, girls manifest an orientation on relationships that continues throughout life. Women are about nothing if not connections: we view our world through the lens of relationships, and solve our problems by figuring out how both we and those around us will be affected by a particular course of action. Unlike boys, an adolescent girl discovers who she is through those she knows. Friends replace parents as the point of reference, for better, and, as a spate of popular teen movies have shown, for worse.

Another girl I know, Renesa, described a different type of female gang in her urban neighborhood. To survive on the streets, girls rely on female relatives to stand with them against rivals. When an act of aggression, either verbal or physical, occurs against a girl, she rallies her gang, often composed of mothers, aunts, sisters, and cousins, and they retaliate. Shaking her head sadly, Renesa says she doesn’t know how she’d survive without “her girls.”

Mary Pipher is right. Young women today are bombarded with media messages that encourage all the wrong behaviors. Clothing styles for eight year olds reveal as much flesh as on the beach in summer, and female movie stars are not only buff and sexy, they break bones and shoot guns.

Ubersophisticated seventh graders initiate their peers into a world that adults shrug off as “just a phase.” Television shows feature young women competing against each other to win the favor of a man for a date or even marriage.

What Pipher didn’t acknowledge is that often, the source of destruction comes from within. Female singers strip down and croon about sex, victims recreate themselves in the likeness of their former bullies, and a continuum of girl groups from cliques to gangs inflict hurt. All of them, like Ophelia, encourage a relationship dynamic that allows others to dictate who you will be. The concern is not only that hurtful, artificial behavior damages girls, it shapes the women they will become.

All too often, teachers and school officials are encouraged to come forward and take control of aggression and other negative influences in their students’s lives. This approach is just as misguided as believing mothers are responsible for all the wrongs of a son or daughter—but we accept such panaceas because they leave the majority of us scot-free.

We all have a responsibility to girls, be they our daughters, neighbors, or students. We need to teach skills that support and celebrate positive connections between women, rather than destroy them. If we don’t, decades from now, the Lesa’s of this world will still be bullying others, and the Renesa’s may well be dead.

Cheryl Dellasega, PhD, is a faculty in the College of Medicine at Penn State University, and the author of Forced to be Family (Wiley, 2005), nugrl90 (Marshall Cavendish, 2007), Mean Girls Grown Up (Wiley, 2005), The Starving Family (Champion Press, 2005), Girl Wars: Twelve Strategies That Will End Female Bullying (Fireside, 2003) and Surviving Ophelia (Perseus Publishing, 2001; Ballentine, 2002). She is also the founder of Club Opehlia, an afterschool program for girls.