Entries Tagged 'Girl Culture' ↓

Ainsley has been doing great in school. She is a high achiever and she loves school. We celebrate her accomplishments at home, encourage her to be proud of her achievements and create expectations for her to exceed them.

She has 41 accelerated reading points, due to reading the first three books of the Harry Potter series this term. The goal the teacher set for her was 7.7 points. She’s over-the-moon excited. It’s the most points in her class. She’s proud. And she should be.

She told her friends.

That’s where the trouble comes in.

They’ve been giving her the cold shoulder. Don’t want to play with her. Shutting her out. Excluding her. You know, that girl thing that girls do when they are mad at other girls (and don’t pretend like you don’t know what I’m talking about or that this is an unfair or untrue stereotype). There are four of them that play together and three of them are now banded together.

Banded together against The Bragger. In this instance, The Bragger is my daughter.

The subject of feeling proud of ourselves comes up frequently in women’s self-help and personal-growth books. Leslie Bennetts, in The Feminine Mistake, writes about of how women are afraid to tell their friends, too loudly or excitedly, that they made a huge deal, got a promotion, accomplished a goal or achieved a raise. Women are far more likely to complain to each other than to brag about our major achievements and successes to each other.

Why? There’s a steep social price that begins in the early days of school. Most girls and women have experienced it at one point or another.

The subject of bragging comes up at our dinner table quite frequently. Ainsley’s little brother, Zack, has a habit of goading his sister every time she gets corrected or in trouble. If I tell her to pick up her after-school mess by the door, he will chime in, “I always pick up my stuff, right Mom?” This makes Ainsley’s head spin with fury. How dare he point out the ways in which he believes he is better than her. The other night, when Ainsley said it makes her feel bad that he thinks he is better than her I asked him, “Do you think you’re better than Ainsley?” He simply replied, “Yes.” We were hysterically laughing at his genuine four-year-old response.

Maybe it is just because he is four, or maybe it is because he is male, that he unequivocally believes this. My husband, for instance, will unequivocally state that he “is a great father and a great husband.” No amount of evidence to the contrary will sway his belief about himself. I’m not saying he’s not, but when was the last time you heard a woman say, “I am a great mother and a great wife,” without pointing out her own lack of perfection or her fallibility? Never. Why? A familiar phrase from school rings in my head when I ask the question: “You’re so conceited!”

Naively assuming that girls today are more mature and evolved than my generation of girls at the elementary level (being influenced by my current more mature friends who are genuinely happy for me when I accomplish something), I recently told Ainsley that being proud of one’s accomplishments and telling others about them – otherwise known as bragging – was okay and not rude. I was soundly told that I was wrong because “her teacher said it was rude.”

Far more powerful, effective and potentially damaging to one’s self-worth and innate feeling of accomplishment (or innate desire to accomplish) than her teacher’s opinion, or mine, is a click of girls making it clear, “bragging will not be tolerated.”

I have to wonder how much ambition and accomplishment is lost in the world due to grown women continuing to abide by these playground rules.

The Spark Summit hosted experts on body image and girlhood, who fielded some complex questions and came up with some great answers.

Q1: Brooklyn, NY: What do you have to say about sports, for example, competitive cheerleading, which are broadly feminized and ALWAYS over-sexualized by media?

Q2: From Wellesley, MA: Have any of you brought your research results to media industry producers in hopes of affecting positive change in media images?

Q3: From NOW, NYC: Has anyone done any research on the relationship between sexualized images of women and violence against women?

Q4: From Alabama: How do we address the female athletes and actors/celebrities who make the choice/say “yes” to being sexualized in photo shoots, etc? Can educational efforts be targeted to the subject?

Q5: From San Francisco, CA: Have there been any studies on the relationship between early sexualization of girls and the trend of homo-erotic images and teen girls kissing girls primarily for the pleasure of boys?

The answers were interesting, visit the Spark Summit website to read them.

Some things never change. But New Moon Girls ISN’T one of those things. In 1992 it came on the scene as the first girl-edited magazine for 8-14 year olds. Now it’s meeting girls’ 21st century needs with a safe social network for girls worldwide.

Happy Birthday New Moon!

I have a confession to make. . .

I think I’m beautiful.

Because I am.

I honestly can’t comprehend why women hate their bodies, their faces, their hair, their boobs, the minuscule details that they pick apart in the mirror.

I’ve tried to get it. But, I don’t. Maybe that’s a good thing.

I think I’ve made a conscious choice. I think there have been a lot of influences that have convinced me I am beautiful, hot, attractive, etc. Many of those influences have been men. Many of them have been women.

When I was in 7th grade, I was in a carpool and I was sitting on a 9th grade girl’s lap (the car was very full) and she said, “You have the perfect thighs. They aren’t too big or too small. They are just perfect.” I considered her super-beautiful and beyond cool. So I took the compliment, figured she was probably telling the truth and just accepted that my thighs are perfect. Until that moment I hadn’t given my thighs a thought. I still feel pretty good about them.

Over the course of my 15 year dating career, I was told by boys and men that I “had the perfect breasts,” one man even said, “those will never sag because of their unique shape.” I still believe to this day that my breasts are perfect. The sagging is minimal. Perhaps because that man was right or perhaps because I accepted his statement as prophetic and my body, happily, didn’t feel the need to disappoint me or prove him wrong.

My thick blond hair, my beautiful blue eyes, my tanned skin, my ass, my bow lips and even my feet have received compliments.

I don’t reject these complements, I never did. I accepted them as true, and as I age, I still consider them true. I’m happy to see most of these features appear in my son and daughter. Lucky DNA.

Of course, others in my family share the exact same DNA, the exact same lovely features, and still choose to hate and criticize them.

Through childbirth and aging, I’ve had some weight issues. OK. But, as I lose weight, I’m realizing that I don’t feel pressure – social or cultural – to be more beautiful. I feel social and cultural pressure to be less beautiful, to criticize my body or my looks, to downplay my beauty and to say it’s unimportant or irrelevant or ridiculous or that the truth about me is that I am not beautiful no matter what compliment you give me.

Why?

To make the other women who feel bad about themselves feel better about themselves.

Which, I admit, I tried to do.

I acknowledge that the extra weight protected me from two things I genuinely needed protection from as I transitioned into the roles of marriage and motherhood: the criticism of other women and the unwelcome advances of men.

Except when I was overweight and not claiming my beauty I noticed that it had absolutely zero effect on whether other women felt beautiful or not.

Last year I had an incredible experience at a self-improvement workshop. We played a game where we sat across from a total stranger. We didn’t even know their names. We knew nothing about who they were or what their issues were or their families or jobs. Nothing. Except what we could see.

Then we were told to be harshly critical and tell the other person what we really thought about them.

I was very uncomfortable with this exercise because I did not know this other woman at all. I didn’t want to criticize a stranger and would have preferred to say something kind about her. I wasn’t sure this exercise was going to be useful or helpful.

She said to me a paraphrase of this:  ”You’re cold and untouchable. You’re fake and phony and mean and shallow.”

What?

I think I said to her a paraphrase of this: “You’ve given up. You’re a victim. You’re not trying. You’ve put up boundaries.”

Based on?

I was wearing my nicest jeans and favorite shirt, my favorite red scarf, bold earrings, make up and I had recently had my hair done. I had put my best self forward for the first day of an unknown and honestly frightening experience.

She was wearing sweat pants, an ill-fitting shirt, her hair was unkept and in a pony tail, sneakers, and had not bothered to take care of some unfortunate facial hair.

My take-away from the experience was this: how I felt when she said those things was not a new feeling. It was a very, very familiar feeling. She felt inferior sitting next to me. She felt angry about that. I was representative of all the girls in high school who she had felt less beautiful and less worthy than.

I asked myself after that experience, “Tracee, how many years have you been fat or played down who you are and tried to gloss over and hide your true beauty to gain the acceptance of women like her? How many women have you allowed to be mean to you and diminish your value as a smart beautiful woman because she felt bad about herself?”

And the honest answer was a lot of years. In some ways, my whole life.

So what is the point of playing small if it’s not even going to make them feel great about themselves?

I recently saw a statistic that only 2% of women would describe themselves as beautiful. It was on that Jessica Simpson show, The Price of Beauty.

The “price of beauty,” in some ways is the contempt of other women.

I see it in my friends who have lost weight and been subjected to harsh criticism from coworkers and family members and friends. When they hit a normal BMI people call them anorexic or skin and bones and unhealthy. I’ve experienced it myself.

Logically I know that way more than 2% of women actually are beautiful. Yet, only 2% of them believe it.

I believe they’re beautiful, but when I tell them so, they insist that I am wrong. Or they insist that beauty is unimportant, trivial or a harmful influence of the culture and the unreachable and unrealistic beauty ideal.

I am beautiful.

I wish you felt beautiful too. I genuinely do.

But, if you don’t, that absolutely doesn’t give you carte blanche to be a mean girl and try to make me feel bad about myself to somehow make yourself feel better.

I hope, my daughter doesn’t cave to the pressure of feeling less beautiful than she inherently is. I hope she accepts compliments. I hope she feels beautiful. Because she is. Just like her mother.

Ainsley comes home nearly every day with a story about girl drama on the play ground.

It’s a long, drawn-out story about she said, then she said and I didn’t do anything and she’s lying so she can break up our friendship.

You know this story.

I wish I had a winning strategy to deal with this kind of nonsense.

But, I don’t.

My best strategy is to not hang out with mean girls and girls who like drama.

Except, it took me something like 34 years to be able to identify and avoid all the drama games girls can play. Am I a slow learner or does it take all girls and women this long to figure out girls’ very complex, nuanced, social games?

Currently, I have an amazing group of girl friends who don’t feed on drama.

But as late as last year, I was struggling with guilt over abandoning a person who had been toxic to my life for 17 years. I tended toward ridiculous amounts of loyalty. I see the same tendency in my sweet daughter.

I also tended towards ridiculous amounts of generosity in the face of takers masquerading as friends. Then my feelings were hurt when they kept being who they are – takers – and never returned my pattern of giving. I see the same tendency in my generous daughter. Just the other day, she was contemplating letting her best friend in class pass her in reading points so she wouldn’t feel bad. Do not do this, I told her. You always do your best. Your friend can try harder if she wants to be the best reader. You do not quit to let other people win. I want to see your friend do well. But, you don’t do less than your best for friends or boyfriends just so they can feel good.

How many years was I fat so other people wouldn’t feel bad standing next to me? I ask myself.

I attempt to hand-down the benefit of my very hard-won girls lessons to my daughter. Obviously, I’m wishing I could spare her some pain and heartache.

Ainsley will say something like, “_____ said her cousin,  _____, doesn’t really like me.”

I’ll say, “Usually when a girl tells you another girl doesn’t like you, then the first girl is trying to hurt your feelings or keep your friendship to herself for some reason. She’s causing drama. Maybe she’s not really your friend.”

Then Ainsley gets upset – with me – for saying something bad about drama-causing girl #1 and making her feel disloyal to her true friend. This is sometimes followed by a lecture from daughter to mother about how her friend is “the nicest girl in the world and one of her best friends.”

What is your strategy for helping your daughter distinguish between the mean girls and the drama-makers and her true friends?