Henrietta Hay's Column

An Open Letter to Teenage Girls:

You don't have to let them do it to you.

I have been hearing friends and middle school teachers discussing a book called "Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls," by Mary Pipher, but I thought I was too old to be interested in it. Finally my friend the philosopher plopped it down in front of me and said, "Read." I read! Now I look at every young girl I see with a new vision.

Pipher says, "...Girls today are much more oppressed. They are coming of age in a more dangerous, sexualized and media-saturated culture. They face incredible pressures to be beautiful and sophisticated. . . As they navigate a more dangerous world, girls are less protected. As I looked at the culture that girls enter as they come of age, I was struck by what a girl-poisoning culture it was."

We thought that with the gains the women's movement has brought about in the past 25 years - few though they are -- things would be better for our daughters and granddaughters. Instead women are still coping with the emotional problems of uneradicated sexism in our culture - domestic violence, rape, poverty, lack of control over reproduction, And our girls today are more oppressed than we were.

One major source of that pressure is the invasive demand that all women be beautiful. Through the centuries women have undergone pain and mutilation and humiliation in the name of beauty. Today they are still doing it and the cost to adolescent girls has become staggering.

In China until the mid-nineteenth century little girls' feet were literally folded back and tightly bound so that women would have the three or four inch feet that were considered beautiful. In Burma little girls' necks are stretched by forcing them to wear as many as 24 heavy neck rings to give them long, "beautiful" necks. The Mangbettu in Africa wrapped the heads of female infants in pieces of giraffe hide to attain the cone shape considered beautiful.

Breasts have been "in" and "out" countless times through the centuries. In ancient Greece and 14th century Europe they were tightly bound and "in." In the 19th century Rubenesque curves were back and they were "out." In the 1920's when the flapper reigned, they were "in," and the "beautiful" women looked like boys. Today we have silicone implants and they are "out."

In America today you are being pressured by a media driven artificial standard to be tall and willowy like the models and movie stars and the women advertising hot dogs. Of course by the time you 7th graders are in college you may be told to be short and chunky, but for now "they" say that if you are not thin, if you are less than "perfect," you are ugly. The price you are paying is an increasing incidence of anorexia and bulimia, suicide and misery.

You do not have to be obsessed about how you look. You are beautiful already. Each of you is built according to a pre-arranged pattern in your DNA that was determined long before you were born. Humans come in a wide range of sizes and shapes.

For women and girls, however, it's not that simple. Our culture has established this artificial standard that says there is only one beautiful shape at a time. And you have bought into it. Buy out, please! You don't have to look like the models in Seventeen, or Princess Di, or your friends. You are beautiful right now for who and what you are.

Susan Faludi in her book, "Backlash," points out that as women achieve more economic power, the standard of female beauty becomes more childlike, more girlish. It is her belief, and mine, that the prevailing beauty standards are a sure sign that women have become too threatening.

Pipher says we as parents and a society must help each of you find your true self . "Our daughters deserve a society in which all their gifts can be developed and protected."