Entries Tagged 'Girl Culture' ↓

A new study involving the feelings habits of 2,000 children and teenagers was conducted by the University of Missouri that found that boys and men find talking about their feelings a completely unproductive waste of time.

Previously, prior to my actually having a son, I would have argued, like many currently are on the Internet, that this is a “learned behavior” and that we need to do a better job creating a safer environment for our sons to safely discuss their feelings.

Now, five years into parenting a perfectly normal, loving and affectionate son, I kinda think that all that “hating to talk about their feelings” that I’ve experienced in my brothers, father, boyfriends, male friends, coworkers, bosses is just somehow built into their DNA. Some more extreme than others, with those on Autism and Aspergers spectrum on one extreme and a sensitive metrosexual in touch with his feminine side on the other extreme.

“When we asked young people how talking about their problems would make them feel, boys didn’t express angst or distress about discussing problems any more than girls. Instead, boys’ responses suggest that they just don’t see talking about problems to be a particularly useful activity,” states the press release.

Not only do males think talking about their feelings is a complete waste of time, they think talking about OUR feelings is a complete waste of time, not to mention irritating, annoying and a total buzz kill, judging from my personal experience.

Girls, on the other hand, the study found, find incessantly talking about their feelings to be endlessly fascinating. But, is it really productive?

I’ve started to wonder this myself, as my daughter has lately sought more and more attention from her negative feelings, wanting me to care deeply about this complaint and that complaint, wanting me to put so much energy in things I really think she should learn to let go. I’ve often told her that people who focus so much on these types of feelings, never find happiness and gratitude. I’ve even made her do chores like clean the bathrooms for expressing her feelings (read: incessant complaining) so continuously that it starts to ruin my day.

The study supports what I had begun to suspect.

“Many girls are at risk for excessive problem talk, which is linked with depression and anxiety, so girls should know that talking about problems isn’t the only way to cope.”

The Girl Revolution is proud to announce the release of Love Distortion: Belle, Battered Codependent and Other Love Stories. 

Order Now for only $9.99.

In this compilation of blog posts, I draw a parallel between the reality of dating violence, domestic violence, molestation, rape, date rape (if there is such a thing) and cohesion with the messaging of todays culture and media. Taken from almost 900 blog posts, I’ve chosen 30 posts that draw a concise and compelling picture of the Girl Traps, most stemming from a distortion of the word Love. 

Love Distortion takes a critical look at the Disney Princess Culture and the messages within that set girls up for dating violence and disastrous expectations about transforming bad guys into loving guys, the messages encouraging girls to give up their voices, their talents and their families for the “love” of a boy or man.

Love Distortion also takes a harsh look at other girl culture phenomenon like the Twilight Series and Bella’s willingness to give up her mortality, family, education and future to be with Edward; Gossip Girls, and their emotionally violent and disastrous games to achieve “success” with boys; Hannah Montana and other extensions of the Disney Brand; and posts about dating and domestic violence and the ways in which the word Love is used to coerce and manipulate girls and excuses violent and sexually predatory behavior against girls.

Love Distortion clearly explains the distorted thinking about love on both the part of the girl or woman and the boy or man in a violent, manipulative or abusive relationship. The book makes the connection between the thinking of participants in unhealthy relationships and the cultural messaging we are all inundated with day in and day out.

So as not to leave readers with defeated feelings, Love Distortion provides resources for more positive messages about, what I call, Authentic Love. Readers are given concrete exercises to do with their sons and daughters so as to prevent the distorted beliefs about love that they are inundated with through television, literature, music, Internet, video games, movies, advertising, radio and even, other adults in their lives.

Order Now for only $9.99.

Life Lesson #1 – I do not have the power to control what other people do or how they feel.

Life Lesson #10 – I do not have the power to control what other people do or how they feel. Neither does Teacher.

Life Lesson #123 – I do not have the power to control what other people do or how they feel. Neither does Mom.

Life Lesson #563 through #1,010 – I do not have the power to control what other people do or how they feel. Period.

Until you really, really understand this lesson, you’ll keep learning it into eternity. If you’re emotionally bright, you might really get it and get to start learning something else after your second marriage in your late 30s. (Wait, that’s just me.) If your daughter is really, really emotionally bright, she might actually get it in the 3rd grade, which will spare her the painful lessons around boyfriends in her adolescent years. A mom can dream can’t she?

Bullies are there to teach us this Life Lesson:  I do not have the power to control what other people do or how they feel.

Happily, they are also there to teach us Life Lesson #2: I have the power to control what I do and how I feel.

If you’re alive, then you know how tricky it is to control how you feel in the face of a 3rd grade pack of girls who are screaming and running away from you every time you look in their direction. Still, it’s a prime opportunity to learn these lessons. Without this experience, a person might walk around for 50 more years believing they can control other people’s feelings by changing their own behavior and frankly, that’s the recipe for every abusive relationship ever experienced by any woman.

In other words: while it sucks to watch and you really want to stop it, as a parent, you really, really want to help your kid learn this lesson ASAP with the 3rd grade Mean Girls. Before the lesson becomes a battering boyfriend or a manipulative adolescent pressuring her to have sex. You really, really want her to fully grasp Lesson #27:  I have the Power to control what I do and how I feel.

So that if that guy shows up , she already knows “he’s lying when he says he will love me IF I have sex with him,” because she already has learned, “I can not control how another person behaves or how he feels. So if he doesn’t love me now, he won’t love me then.”

So, rather than telling your kid you’ll figure out a way to stop the bullying, drill this into their heads: Honey, you can’t control how another person acts or how they feel. You just don’t have that power and neither do I. What you can control is how you react to their behavior and how you feel. You could let yourself feel bad about this, or you could decide that you only want loyal and kind friends, and these kids obviously don’t know how to do that yet. You could chase them and try to make them like you, but that will likely make them meaner. You could just ignore them, and that will likely make it less interesting for them. You can only control how you let this effect you. You don’t have to let it make you unhappy.

More tomorrow.

On Wendsday I tuned in to a Twitter Chat sponsored by @parentella on bullying, girl bullying specifically. Ainsley’s having a rough year. She’s being “shut out” by all the other girls. It’s been going on for a couple of months now.

I’ve asked hundreds of grown women and younger girls about “girl bullying” and while everyone thinks this is a horrible and terrible thing to experience and someone should do something to stop it right now, before more girls get hurt, I have yet to meet a single woman or girl who has said, “that happened to me and here’s how I stopped it.”

The consensus appears to be that there really isn’t an effective way to stop it. Not as a whole. Not as a broad social problem. I, certainly, have never experienced an effective way to stop it. I’ve never met a teacher, principal, parent or girl who has had a simple formula to stop this distinctly feminine social hell.

Ainsley’s school does everything one might think would work, there are workshops about bullying, classroom discussions, “no tolerance” pledges taken by students, a “girls lunch” where the teacher keeps the girls in the classroom to have an open discussion about what kinds of bullying or annoying and hurtful behaviors are going on. On paper this works. In reality, it appears to have little effect. Or maybe it does – maybe things would be 100 times worse without these efforts.

I often hear women say, “then you meet these girls’ mothers and you realize where they got it.” While this appears logical, I have to question the theory because I have yet to meet the woman who has said, “oh, I never experienced anything like girl bullying in my life.” They ALL say, “yeah that happened to me in 3rd grade or in my senior year or at my first job.” Which means that it is so profoundly widespread that one would have to assume that all mothers across all cultures, tribes, ethnicities and religious belief systems essentially suck or have a tendancy toward meanness and actively teach this to their children.

No, I’m positive that the parents of many bullies are nice people, or have learned to become nicer people at least.

Which leads me to another questioning of bully assumptions: that bullying is learned behavior.

I question this because if you hang out with a room full of two-year-olds they are all selfish, bullying little monsters. Every last one of them is a terrible friend. They bite, they steal toys, they punch, they jocky for position at games, insist that they are always right, thrive on praise for being the best at even the littlest thing, can’t take the slightest competition or criticism at all, demand that everyone bow to their whims and if they don’t they will use manipulative methods like tantrums and screaming fits to get their way.

It’s the people around them who teach them how to be good friends, get along with others, share and cooperate. The adults around them are motivated by not wanting their two-year-old to be a social outcast for such deplorable behavior. They are also motivated by not wanting the other parents to shun them for raising such an A-hole.

Based on this, I believe it is friendship that is the learned behavior. Kindness toward the weird, different, better, worse, annoying human is the learned behavior.

My theory, and please test this and let me know if you come to a different conclusion, is that girls have no idea what they are doing socially and they are kind of bad at it, until they get better at it. The girls who stay bad at it account for the frequent comment, “God, adult women are even worse,” which is something I hear many adult women say about their coworkers and sisters-in-law.

Sometimes it takes a parent, teacher, principal or counselor saying, “You’re being awful and no one is going to want to hang out with you if you keep acting like this.” On both ends. Maybe, the pack of girls is annoyed by a particular trait – bragging, bossiness, whining, crying, secret violating – that is making it feel really, really good to be mean to her. This trait, right or wrong, will likely always lead to social danger unless the entire scope of culture changes, which isn’t likely to happen quickly, at least not while she’s still in the 3rd grade. Maybe it’s motivated by pure unadulterated jealousy – a natural human emotion that takes conscious effort to overcome. You know, like the time I recieved a press release about a book being published by a college senior, who had already scored better writing credits than I have in 15 years of diligence and brilliance and the subject of her book was how F#$% hard it is to be so F#$%& PERFECT. I steamed in pure jealousy for days and never did that book review, even though it might have been applicable to The Girl Revolution.

My conclusion is that we all have a little bit of Mean Girl in us, and we all have the capacity and the responsibility to overcome it.

Later, I’ll give you ways to help you daughter develop a core self that can withstand her turn in the Mean Girl Firing Range. Ways to instill a deep sense of self that won’t crumble in the face of girl bullying. As a parent, you don’t have the power to stop girl bullying in all its forms. But, you do have the power to help your daughter navigate it, stand up to it and insulate herself from it.

Ainsley’s 3rd grade friendship troubles around bragging and I’m guessing, vying for the position of “queen bee,” possibly taking the wrong tone with people, gave us another opportunity to discuss friendship – what it means and how to get it.

At first, I admit, I was completely and totally without advice for her. Remember when a young Matthew Broderick played Tic Tac Toe with the computer (back when the invention of a computer inspired awe and amazement in us) in War Games? Joshua, the computer, learned “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.” It’s unwinnable. That’s how I feel about girl drama and frenemies.

What was your earliest heartbreak? Was your first experience of emotional devastation caused by a guy? Unlikely. If you are a woman, chances are your first experience of emotional treachery was at the hands of another girl.

Naomi Wolf says in her Bazaar article, Black Swan and Female Rivalry, which looks at the various terrible ways we sometimes treat each other, vying for position, sometimes vying for the same man, sometimes just out of pure spite, envy and boredom.

As a woman, it took me a good 30-something years to really understand what I wanted and needed out of friendship and figure out how to get it, and how to avoid the wrong people (drama-makers, takers and emotional-vampires). I’ve had bad friends, bad crowds, frenemies, been way too forgiving and loyal to people who weren’t deserving. I’ve also, at times, been a bad friend and screwed up in some major ways.

Like every parent, I’m hoping and praying that my daughter will learn from my mistakes and let me teach her how to both choose good friends and be one. I, personally, adore having friends. I think it’s so fun and intimate. I feel blessed by my current friendships: online and in-person, on the other side of the world and right next door, those from my early years and those I met yesterday.

Tips for Attracting Only the RIGHT Friends

The trick, in my experience, is avoid deciding WHO you want your friends to be. We get fixated on certain people and then hope they are what we want or expect. We might decide that Ivy, the cool, popular girl, is the one that should be our friend. That, we think, will make us happy. But, if Ivy is a gossip, a bully, a mean girl, is jealous or spiteful and always tries to steal your boyfriends, make the other girls side against you, or informs you that your clothes are ugly – well, obviously this is not a person who will make you happy.

Far more effective, is to decide what QUALITIES you want in a friend and how you want to FEEL in a friendship.

This will give you a sort of check-list to refer to when you meet someone. You might have “honest” and “loyal” on your list of qualities, meet someone and realize after you’ve hung out a few times that they lie and gossip about their other friends. The fact that “honest” and “loyal” is on your list will make the lies and gossip stand out like “red flags” and you are less likely to ignore such a warning. Maybe this person isn’t meant to be your BFF.

Writing down the feelings you want to feel when you’re with your friends gives another sort of check list. Say, you’ve had a few girls-night-outs. Ask yourself, “how do I feel when I’m around this person?” Is it really fun? Do I feel excited? Does time fly and I wish it weren’t over when it’s time to go home? Do I feel understood? Do we talk about things that I find interesting or exciting? If so, this is a fantastic friendship to pursue and will probably bring blessings to your life.

But, if there are other feelings . . . maybe an anxiety tickle in the pit of your stomach, maybe an urge to get up and leave several times, maybe your inner-self whispers “be careful” or “don’t cross her,” such feelings are likely NOT on your list of feelings you wish to have in a friendship and one should run, not walk, away from that person.

Learn it and Teach It

Writing this down, or putting it on your Dream Board, has magical qualities that cannot be intellectually explained. It’s a form of spiritual power. It’s a form of prayer. Is there a bigger power than the personal power of being able to create your own life?

You can’t teach this to your daughter unless you learn it first. If there are drama-makers, gossips, liars, emotional-vampires, “dementors,” joy-stealers or other intolerable people in your life, ask yourself, “what they are doing there?”

The list or Dream Board has another useful magic power, it can make people, who don’t possess the qualities you’re looking for, get suddenly busy or move.

At first, you might think you’ll be sad about this, then you’ll notice how much lighter, happier and more joyful you feel now that someone’s not sucking the joy out of your life with their incessant complaining, gossiping or back-biting. You might feel pity for your “friend,” but let me assure you there are plenty of other complainers, gossips and back-biters who will fill the void of “friendship” for them. Whatever you do, Dear God, please resist the urge to “fix” or “help” them.

Girl Culture and friendship can be rough and emotionally scarring, especially for girls, where it’s a form of currency or capital. The stakes (your heart and your daughters’) are high and that makes friendship a crucial discussion point with girls.

Sit down with your daughter and talk about your past friendships – the mistakes you made, how it made you feel, what you would have done differently. She can’t learn from your mistakes if you don’t share them.

Sit down with her and make the list of qualities and feelings you want from your friendships, put them on a dream board, pray for them, wish on a star, throw a penny in a fountain. When she meets someone new ask her how she feels when she’s around that person (which is not the same as asking how she feels about that person).

Then sit back and trust that great friendships are coming your way.