{"id":603,"date":"2014-12-02T01:23:41","date_gmt":"2014-12-02T01:23:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/?page_id=603"},"modified":"2014-12-02T01:23:41","modified_gmt":"2014-12-02T01:23:41","slug":"reviving-ophelia-book-review","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/?page_id=603","title":{"rendered":"Reviving Ophelia – Book Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Mary Pipher (1995, 2005)<\/p>\n

To Pipher, teenage girls occupy a lost, dead, chaotic world. \u201cGirls know they are losing themselves. One girl said, \u2018Everything good in me died in junior high.\u2019 Wholeness is shattered by the chaos of adolescence,\u201d Pipher begins. Girls are a miasma of \u201ceating disorders, school phobias, self-inflicted injuries\u2026 great unhappiness\u2026 anxiety\u2026 a total focus on looks.\u201d They are \u201cmoody, demanding, and distant\u2026 elusive\u2026 easily offended\u2026 slow to trust\u2026 sullen and secretive\u2026 depressed\u2026 overwhelmed\u2026 symptomatic\u2026 anorexic\u2026 alcoholic\u2026 in a dangerous place\u2026 traumatized.\u201d They \u201cbristle when touched.\u201d They are fragile \u201csaplings in a hurricane.\u201d And we\u2019re not even halfway into the first chapter.<\/p>\n

I find myself immediately sorry that Pipher has had such depressing experiences with girls and described adolescence itself as such a sad and tragic. But then, the girls Pipher sees are in treatment for problems. Then, of course, Pipher invokes the Universal Mind, a monumental conceit: \u201cMy clients are not that different from the girls who are not seen in therapy.\u201d<\/p>\n

How could Pipher know this? There are 19 million girls in the U.S. ages 10-19. There is no way she or anyone could know what \u201cgirls\u201d are thinking. I could counter that the hundreds of girls I worked with for years, in programs, families, weeks-long wilderness work projects, classes, and tutoring were overwhelmingly healthy, optimistic, and happy\u2014far from the one-dimensional mass of traumas Pipher depicts. Her gloomy characterization of a large, diverse population according to her personal experiences and lens-filtered observations involving a tiny number of girls is such a fundamental flaw that all we can really conclude is that Pipher is transferring her own dismality to girls.<\/p>\n

None of us can know what millions of girls really think, but we can look at measures designed to probe representative samples. I\u2019m no fan of surveys, but Monitoring the Future\u2019s 2005 survey of thousands of teenage girls at least objectively queried a larger population designed to represent all girls\u2014not the troubled girls in therapy that Pipher uses as her base. Monitoring the Future found that girls, allowed to respond anonymously to questions themselves rather than have a grim psychologist make claims for them, presented a much sunnier image: 70% of girls say they are happy with themselves (12% aren\u2019t, the rest neutral), 86% are happy with their friends (6% aren\u2019t), two-thirds get along well with their parents (19% don\u2019t), 70% were happy with their schools (13% unhappy), 77% were happy with their lives (14% unhappy), 66% were having fun (16% not). Seven in 10 girls wanted to make a contribution to society (4% couldn\u2019t care less), and 82% wanted their children\u2019s lives to be better than their own (2% didn\u2019t care). Four in five participate in volunteer work and community affairs, nine in ten wanted a job in which they could help others, and 62% exercise regularly (36% daily).<\/p>\n

Not perfect, but not the swamp of misery, peer torture, alienation, laziness, self-fixation, and pathology Pipher and other girlphobes insist. Indeed, MTF reveals girls in a great deal of complexity, a refreshing image compared to the one-dimensional view of girls held by Pipher (\u201cIt\u2019s totally simple what girls think,\u201d she sniffs).<\/p>\n

But are girls today suffering \u201ca more dangerous world\u2026 a more dangerous, sexualized, and media-saturated culture,\u201d as Pipher insists. \u201cWhy are girls having more trouble now than my friends and I had when we were adolescents?\u201d Again, if representative samples of girls themselves are asked, they directly contradict Pipher\u2019s claim that girls of the past had happier, more connected lives. Teenaged girls in the first Monitoring the Future survey (1975) were slightly less happy with themselves and their lives, less satisfied with peers and parents, and less civic minded.<\/p>\n

A second way to assess girls\u2019 risks today is to ask: how would we expect them to be acting if girls are, in fact, suffering mass inner turmoil, as Pipher insists? If girls are distressed, they are handling it much better than the rest of us. The suicide and lethal self-destructiveness rate among teenage girls is not only the lowest of any age or either gender (except preteen children), it has dropped sharply over the years and now stands at just one-third the rate of middle-aged women.<\/p>\n

One human limitation we all suffer is that our heads do not contain the sum of the universe. Yet, again and again, modernity-fearing commentators seem to think it constitutes \u201cevidence\u201d for them to say, \u201cI don\u2019t remember that happening,\u201d or, \u201cmy friends didn\u2019t do that when we were growing up,\u201d as if that proves such things didn\u2019t happen. Pipher indulges the Universal Mind fallacy: \u201cMany of us hated our adolescent years,\u201d she says of growing up in Nebraska in the 1960s, \u201cyet for the most part we weren\u2019t suicidal and we didn\u2019t develop eating disorders, cut ourselves, or run away from home.\u201d That\u2019s why Pipher thinks girls are in more danger today\u2014she doesn\u2019t \u201cremember\u201d girls having big problems in her youth. It\u2019s amazing how common the universal-mind fallacy is among youth-fearing authors.<\/p>\n

There were 18 million girls ages 10-19 in the United States in 1965. There were no measures of cutting or eating disorders back then, but vital statistics show that compared to today\u2019s girls, those in Pipher\u2019s supposedly protected girlhood in Nebraska in the 1960s were more likely to die from violent causes and to give birth while in high school.<\/p>\n

Across the board, girls are generally safer today than in past generations, but there are some nuances. Girls\u2019 self-destructive risks, at least of the lethal kind, have fallen rather sharply over the last four decades, reflected in the drop in fatal accidents. Self-inflicted deaths among girls, including suicides and accidents such as by poisoning or firearms, peaked around 1975 and have since fallen to record lows by the early 2000s\u2014though there was a rise in 2004. The fact that traffic fatalities have fallen much faster among boys than among girls\u2014both are down since 1965, with boys\u2019 rates falling by 45% and girls\u2019 by 10%–indicates more driving by girls due to their rising social status. Finally, murders of girls more than doubled from 1965 to 1980, leveled off in the 1990s, then fell back to pre-1970 levels by the 2000s. The dangers have shifted, but today\u2019s is not a more, but a less, dangerous world for girls. Check the reviews of books by Garbarino, Prothrow-Stith, and Wiseman for girls\u2019 real trends, which are far more optimistic than Pipher pretends.<\/p>\n

In short, there is no tangible evidence, either cited by Pipher or substantiated in real trends, to justify her melodramatically frightening assessment of modern teenage girls generalized from the severely troubled clients she sees in her clinical practice. Nor does Pipher address the fact that girls today are doing remarkably well, given that they are coping with the most difficult parent generation on record. Their mothers and fathers\u2014the ones Pipher insists were raised in more settled times\u2014have set new records for middle-aged drug abuse, serious felony arrest, imprisonment, HIV infection, and family breakup.<\/p>\n

None of the girlphobe authors address this crucial issue; all pretend it doesn\u2019t exist. The overwhelming impression lent by their writings is that it is not real hazards to real girls than concern them most, but the repugnance authors feel for modern society and popular culture. Yet again, I agree with a lot of their revulsion, though they seem not to recognize that \u201cpopular culture\u201d is very diverse, and girls are stronger and more capable of choosing affirming images than their worriers admit. What is inexcusable is their denigrations of girls as an easy scheme to denigrate offensive culture.<\/p>\n

Reviewed by: Mike Males, Youthfacts.org<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls Mary Pipher (1995, 2005) To Pipher, teenage girls occupy a lost, dead, chaotic world. \u201cGirls know they are losing themselves. One girl said, \u2018Everything good in me died in junior high.\u2019 Wholeness is shattered by the chaos of adolescence,\u201d Pipher begins. Girls are a miasma of \u201ceating […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-603","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/603","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=603"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/603\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":604,"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/603\/revisions\/604"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.youthfacts.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=603"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}