IV. Excerpts from Mary Pipher's Interview
with MEF
Print Resources
Advice for Parent
Don’t
Stop Loving Me: A Reassuring Guide for Mothers of Adolescent Daughters.
Ann
F. Carson.
Father’s
Daughters: Transforming the Father-Daughter Relationship.
Maureen
Murdock & Fawcett Columbin.
The
Little Girl Book: Everything You Need to Know to Raise a Daughter Today.
David
Laskin & Kathleen O’Neill.
Parent/Teen
Breakthrough: The Relationship Approach An End to Battles with Teens.
Mira
Kirshenbaum and Charles Foster.
Body Image and Eating
Disorders*
The
Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women.
Naomi
Wolf.
The
Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls.
Joan
Jacobs Brumberg.
Hunger
Pains: The Woman’s Tragic Quest for Thinness.
Mary
Pipher.
Surviving
an Eating Disorder: Strategies for Family and Friends.
Siegal,
Brisman, & Weinsher.
Unbearable
Weight.
Susan
Bordo.
*For
more information regarding eating disorders see the Recovering Bodies study guide.
Books for Girls
Girls
Know Best: Advice for Girls From Girls On Just About Everything.
By
Girls Just Like You. Beyond Words Publishing.
Great
Books for Girls: More Than 600 Books to Inspire Today’s Girls and Tomorrow’s
Women.
Kathleen
Odean.
Tatterhood
and Other Tales.
Ethel
Johnston Phelps (folk tales with strong central female characters).
What
Are My Rights: 95 Questions and Answers about Teens and the Law.
Thomas
Jacobs. Free Spirit.
Communicating with Youth
How
to Talk So Kids Will Listen and How to Listen So Kids Will Talk.
Ade
Faber, Elaine Mazlish & Kimberly Ann Coe.
What
Children Can Tell Us: Eliciting and Interpreting and Evaluating Critical
Information From Children.
Garbano,
James, Stott, Frances & Faculty of the Erikson Institute.
Community
The
Shelter of Each Other.
Mary
Pipher.
Bridges
of Respect: Creating Support for Lesbian and Gay Youth.
Kathleen
Whitlock.
Gender*
Are
We Winning Yet: How Women Are Changing Sports and Sports Are Changing Women.
Mariah
Burton Nelson.
This
Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color.
Eds
Cherrie Moraga & Gloria Anzaldua.
The
Difference Growing Up Female in America.
Judy
Marvin.
Girl’s
and Women’s Lives.
Carol
Gilligan and Lyn Mikel Brown.
You
Just Don’t Understand.
Deborah
Tannen.
*For
additional books about women and beauty, sexuality and social pressures see
Jean Kilbourne's Resources for Change List.
Masculinity
"Advertising
and the Construction of Violent White Masculinity."
Jackson
Katz. In Gender, Race and Class in Media. Eds. Gail Dines & Jean M. Humez.
1995.
Reaching
Up for Manhood: Transforming the Lives of Boys in America
Geoffrey
Canada
Media Criticism
Media
Literacy.
Gloria
De Gaentano.
Minorities
and Media: Diversity and the End of Mass Communication.
Clint
C. Wilson II & Felix Gutierrez.
Screen
Smarts: A Family Guide to Gender, Race and Class in Media: A Text-Reader.
Eds.
Gail Dines & Jean M. Humez (a comprehensive anthology).
Where
the Girls Are: Growing Up Female With the Mass Media.
Susan
Douglas. Random House.
Self-Esteem
Girls
Talk: Staying Strong, Feeling Good, Sticking Together.
Judith
Harlan.
100
Ways to Build Self-esteem in Children and Adults.
Full
Esteem Ahead.
Schoolgirls:
Young Women, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap.
Penny
Orenstein.
The
Shared Heart: Portraits and Stories Celebrating Lesbian, Gay and Bixsexual
Young People.
Adam
Mastoon.
Sisters
of the Yams.
bell
hooks.
Things
Will Be Different for My Daughter: A Practical Guide to Building Self-Esteem
and Self-Reliance from Infancy through the Teen Years.
Mindy
Bingham and Sandy Stryker.
Sexual Harassment and Abuse
Dating
Violence: Young Women in Danger.
Barrie
Ley, Ed.
Hostile
Hallways: AAUW Survey on Sexual Harassment in America’s Schools.
AAUW
Eductional Foundation.
Safe
at Last: A Handbook for Recovery from Abuse.
David
Schopick and Suzanne Burr.
Secrets
in Public: Sexual Harassment in Our Schools.
Nan
Stein, Nancy Marshall & Linda Tropp. The NOW Legal Defense Fund and the
Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, Wellesley, MA. 1993.
Sexuality and Health
The
Journey Out: A Guide About Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Teens.
Rachel
Pollack.
The
New Our Bodies Ourselves.
Boston
Women’s Health Book Collective. (practical information about women’s health,
sexuality, birth control, sexually transmitted disease).
Promiscuities:
The Secret Struggle for Womanhood.
Naomi
Wolf.
Social Action and
Volunteerism
Bridges
of Power: Women’s Multicultural Alliances.
Eds.
Lisa Albrecht & Rose M. Brewer.
Kids
with Courage: True Stories About Young People Making a Difference.
Barbara
A. Lewis.
The
Kids Guide to Service Projects: Over 500 Service Ideas For Young People Who
Want to Make a Difference.
Barbara
A. Lewis.
The
Kid’s Guide to Social Action: How to Solve the Social Problems You Choose and
Turn Creative Thinking into Positive Action.
Barbara
A. Lewis.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
ORGANIZATIONS
American
Academy of Pediatrics
www.aap.org 847-228-5005 (many media
literacy resources)
Blacklist
www.blackstripe.com/blacklist (for the African-American
gay, lesbian, bisexual community)
Center
for Media Literacy
www.medialit.org 213-931-4177
CityKids
Foundation
www.citykids.com 212-925-3320
Full
Esteem Ahead
www.europa.com/~kmasarie 503-297-8742
Girls
Inc.
www.girlsinc.org 212-689-3700
GLSEN
(Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network)
www.glsen.org 212-727-0135
G.I.R.L.S
Conference Homepage
www.gis.net/~adena/girls.htm
Girl
Power
www.girlpower.com/
Go
Girls!
www.goldinc.com/gogirls 206-382-3587 (national
eating disorders-related project designed to empower teens to voice their
influential opinions to advertisers)
Girl
Scouts
www.gsusa.org 847-640-0500 ("Making
Choices" program)
NGTLF
(National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce)
www.ngltf.org 202-332-6483
Media
Education Foundation
www.mediaed.org 800-897-0089 (provides
educational videos on media, culture, gender, race and sexuality)
Planned
Parenthood
www.plannedparenthood.org
Teen
Voices
www.teenvoices.com 888-882-TEEN
PUBLICATIONS
New
Moon Magazine
www.newmoon.org
Teen
Voices
www.teenvoices.com 888-882-TEEN
Vibe
Magazine Online
www.vibe.com (celebrates urban music and
the American youth culture)
Wings
www.europa.com/~kmasarie/bugrep.htm 503-297-8742
MEDIA COMPANIES: Where to
send your comments
ABC
Entertainment
2020
Avenue of the Stars
Los
Angeles, CA 90067
CBS
Entertainment
51
West 52nd Street
New
York, NY 10019
(212)
975-4321
NBC
Enterprises
3500
West Olive Avenue
15th
Floor
Burbank,
CA 91505
Fox
Broadcasting
PO
Box 900
Beverly
Hills, CA 90213
PBS
Corporation
1320
Braddock Pl.
Alexandria,
VA 22314
MTV
1515
Broadway, 23 Floor
New
York, NY 10036
Nickelodeon
1515
Broadway, 20 Floor
New
York, NY 10036
ESPN
935
Middle St.
Bristol,
CT 06010-7454
For
more information about media ownership see MEF's MediaSpace: Project on Global
Media and Public Space www.mediaspace.org
Below are a series of questions and
exercises designed for educators by Reviving
Ophelia video producer and media educator Susan Ericsson. The topic
headings are the same as those used in the video. Click on the images to jump
to particular topic.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
TEEN PRESSURES
1.
Have girls list the activities they
enjoy or would like to try (sports, politics, reading, art, music, science,
writing, games). Inquire about how regularly they participate in them. If
students do not participate with regularity, a common trend that Mary Pipher
notes, suggest they pick a couple to try. Provide them with resources that will
help them in their pursuits. Create an awareness of the rewards of volunteer
work (helping with environmental clean up, health services, human rights, soup
kitchens, animal care).
2. Discuss reasons why girls may want to join a self-defense class.
Link self-defense to (1) the need for girls to learn to protect themselves and
(2) the social expectations placed upon girls’ behavior and bodies (i.e. not to
be aggressive or strong, but to be thin, passive, beautiful).
3. Have students write down the qualities and values that they
believe are important for friends to possess and then compare this list to the
qualities of the friends with whom they actually spend time. Are they similar?
If not, discuss the possibility of shifting patterns to spend time with people
with whom they share interests and values. [This exercise is geared for
one-on-one discussions or for groups of people who are not well acquainted.]
4. Have students list the qualities they like and dislike about
themselves. Have them discuss the ways friends, family, media and society
influence their judgments. If dislikes include criticisms of looks, body, and
eating habits, help participants construct challenges to their assumptions.
Attempt to locate the specific sources of negative messages and counter them.
For example, "rather than feeling bad about my body, I’m going to
criticize the media and people who tell me I’m supposed to look a certain
way." Or "I’m going to be offended by weight loss ads, instead of
thinking I should use their products. I’d rather be strong than skinny."
Or "I feel bad about my looks after watching this sitcom; I’m not going to
watch it anymore."
5. Create a student theater group which could act out various
scenarios about issues students have experienced. Role play situations that
have ended poorly and then perform them again with a more satisfactory outcome.
MEDIA PRESSURES
1. Record an hour of prime-time television.
a) Count the number of thin women
and the number of women who aren’t thin. Then go to a public space and count
the number of thin and non-thin women there. How do the numbers compare? What
message is the media giving women about body weight? Do the same thing for men.
How do media messages about women and men differ?
b) Further break down women and men
by racial categories. How does the racial representation on television compare
to the population distribution? What message is the media giving about people
of different races?
c) Identify what activities women
and men are doing. Compare the similarities and differences. Are they equally
as active? If not, who is less active and what specifically are they doing?
What jobs do the women and men portrayed have? What jobs are Asian women and
men doing? Latino? Black? White?
d) Write an article for the school
newspaper presenting the results and implications of the media analysis.
2. In a group of girls and boys, have everyone anonymously write down
on a sheet of paper how they feel about their looks and identify their gender.
Swap sheets and read them aloud. Discuss the differences between what girls and
boys say. Explore the many ways society gives the message that beauty and
thinness are the most important characteristics of girls/women. Discuss WHY
girls are given these messages about beauty. Discuss ways both girls and boys
can counter these damaging messages.
3. The media regularly give girls and women the mixed message that
they should consume many different kinds of "fattening" foods and
that they should be thin to be considered beautiful. Mary Pipher notes that
these conflicting messages are one reason for the high prevalence of eating
disorders. Create a cut-out collage with images and words from fashion
magazines that pass along messages about food and beauty. Then write down and
add to the collage messages more important for girls.
4. Have students identify an offensive advertisement and compose a
letter to the company, explaining the criticism. Discuss the reasons why
consumer boycotts can affect company actions and have students consider taking
such action. Have students collect signatures for their letters. If the ad
appears on television, consider sending the letter to the station. (See the Resources List for major
television network addresses.)
5. Representations of violence in film have victim/perpetrator trends
that fall along race and gender lines. Watch several films which contain
violence and note who play the role of victims and who play the role of
perpetrators. Also observe how characters express or don’t express feelings.
What messages do these trends in film create about violence and emotional
expression in relation to race and gender? Who generally express what kinds of
emotions? Who tend to be perpetrators? Who victims?
SEXUAL PRESSURES
1. In order to be persuasive, advertisements frequently couple a
product with an abstract quality or feeling. The goal is to create the message
that if you use this product you will find romance, become sexually attractive,
achieve happiness, etc. These messages frequently are about sexuality, love,
and relationships. Analyze a group of ads and identify what quality or feeling
is being sold with the actual product. Deconstructing media messages is an
important tool for resisting consumer manipulation.
2. Develop a discussion about romance and sex. Have students
anonymously write on paper responses to a question you pose, swap sheets, and
read answers aloud. This can be a good way to begin a discussion such that no
one feels criticized for their opinion. Encourage students to determine their
own desires and limits and discuss ways to communicate these. Have students
imagine or role play difficult situations and what they can do and say to
maintain their chosen boundaries. Have them think about who are safe people
with whom they could discuss concerns and seek advise (parents, peers,
counselors, teachers). Let them know that if their boundaries have been or ever
are violated, they should tell an ally who can help them be safe and take
appropriate action. Provide them with some specific local resources (school
counselors, rape crisis centers, confidential teen health advisors at clinics
and HMOs).
3. Frequently in the media women are depicted as sexually attractive
and men are depicted as desiring those sexually attractive women. One result is
that it is virtually always men, and not women, who are seen as having sexual
desires. Women are represented as the objects of sexual attention and men are
represented as the sexual actors. When women are depicted as having desires,
they are usually shown as wanting to be a sexual object.
a) Analyze a movie, sitcom,
commercial, or music video, paying attention to how women and men are sexually
depicted. Count (separately for women and men) the number of whole bodies and
fragmented body parts. What are the many visual ways that women are gazed upon
and men are the gazers?
b) How do media representations of
sexuality vary by race?
c) Identify ways that sex becomes
confused with sexual violence.
d) Compare media forms to address
the different ways they sexualize women -- sitcoms, music videos, movies,
sports magazines, fashion magazines, commercials. Do some objectify women more
than others?
e) Howdo media representations of
sexuality normalize heterosexuality?
4. Humor is an important way that values are conveyed. Have students
recall jokes they’ve heard in school or seen on television about gender, race
and sex. Analyze how the humor in them functions and what values are being
conveyed. For example, jokes frequently criticize fatness, equate blonde women
with ignorance, and devalue gay people.
Below is advice Mary Pipher gives to
parents, therapists and educators in her workshops regarding adolescent
development, professional practice and social change.
COGNITIVE ERRORS OF ADOLESCENCE
1. Black-white thinking. Parents are considered either awesome or
awful.
2. The need to categorize people into geeks, preps and cool.
3. Over-generalized thinking. "No one else’s parents make them
walk to school." "Everybody else is getting a car for their sixteenth
birthday."
4. Imaginary audience syndrome. This is the adolescent's feeling that
everyone is watching and preoccupied with the smallest detail of her life.
Example - being upset over a bad hair day.
5. Egocentric thought. It’s difficult to focus on anyone else’s
experience. Example - " I do all the work around here."
6. Emotional reasoning. If I feel something, it must be true. Example
- " If I feel unpopular I am unpopular."
7. Historical shift toward feeling vulnerable. Example -
historically, girls would feel that they could have sex without birth control
and get pregnant. This is no longer true. What has changed is that teenagers
experience directly so much more tragedy that they don’t feel invulnerable.
Instead, they feel scared.
8. Preoccupation with right and wrong, fairness. Teens have long
lists of shoulds, high expectations for others, especially parents.
9. Present-oriented. Focus is on short-term not long-term
gratification.
10. Serious miscalculations about adult wisdom, or stated differently, they believe that
adults know both more and less then they do.
GOALS FOR THERAPY
1. We need to protect.
2. We need to connect.
3. We can be purveyors of hope.
4. We can be purveyors of respect.
5. We can clarify thinking.
6. We can help families develop strategies for making good decisions.
7. We can teach empathy.
8. We can promote authenticity and creativity.
9. We can fight secrets, promote openness and encourage family
members to face pain directly.
10. We can help families diffuse anxiety and cope with stress.
11. We can help families control consumption , violence and
addictions.
12. We can help family members find the balance between individuation
and connection.
13. We can promote moderation and balance.
14. We can foster humor.
15. We can help people build good character.
THERAPY'S MISTAKES: Ten Mistakes That Therapists Make
1. Therapists have often labeled family as the cause of all problems.
2. Therapy has been hard on women.
3. Therapy has pathologized ordinary experience and taught that
suffering needs to be analyzed.
4. We have focused on weakness rather than resilience.
5. Some of our treatments have created new problems.
6. We have encouraged narcissism and checked basic morality at the
doors of our offices.
7. We have focused on individual salvation rather than collective
well-being.
8. We have confused ethical and mental health issues, empathy and
accountability.
9. Some therapists abuse their power.
10. We’ve suggested that therapy is more important than real life.
DOING AMBULANCE WORK: Therapy with adolescent girls
My two main goals are:
1. to attend to the deep (rather than surface) structure of messages
in order to assess needs.
2. to further cognitive and emotional development.
Many kids don’t need a person with a
Ph.D. as much as they need someone who knows them, is a good listener and is a
good problem solver.
A. Intra-personal Skills Exercises
1. Centering: North Star Therapy
Questions: Who are you? How do you
know what you truly think? Who do you most respect? How are you different from
your mother and father? How are you alike? What are your deepest values?
Assignments: Diaries,
autobiographies, and poetry.
2. Thinking vs. Feeling. Stabilizing feelings. Relaxation training
and rating system, modulating thinking. If A is 1 and B is 10 what is C?
Questions that foster cognitive
growth: Last week you liked X and this week you think he’s a jerk, how do you
reconcile those two positions? How do you think Y felt when you called him Z?
What rights do you think parents should have? Do you think if two people
disagree one of them has to be wrong?
3. Managing pain and anger—at one of my speeches I overheard a mother
say "Every summer my daughter is Okay and her nails grow out, then with
the school year, her hands become bloody and mangled."
4. Self-validation skills.
5. Wellness program.
B. Inter-personal Skills Exercises
1. Conscious choices—For example, neighbor whose sixth grade daughter
shoplifted or girl who loved to play the clarinet but the band kids at her school
were isolated and labeled geeks, teased a lot by peers. Should she join?
a) Boundaries:
b) Position statements:
c) Defining relationships:
d) Sexual decision making: As one
teen said, "I’m so sick of sex I wish I lived on a dessert Island."
Another said "I know that having sex can mean having your funeral."
e) Perspective Skills:
f) Time Travel:
g) Altruism:
h) Anthropology field work: Many
issues, such as lookism, consumerism, sex, role of women, violent media with
women as victims.
i) Resistance
training:
TIPS FOR A CHANGING WORLD
1. Establish parent support and community groups.
2. Create city wide activities for youth that have adult supervision
and guidance.
3. Begin letter writing campaigns to companies that exploit children
or have offensive ads.
4. Refuse to buy products from companies whose ads offend.
5. Develop mentoring programs.
6. Seek self-defense training.
7. Devise training for preteens on proper ways to relate to each
other.
8. Organize supervised activities for teens to gather, such as coffee
houses and also settings where teens and older people could gather, talk, play
games and work.
9. Establish community programs to turn off televisions.
10. Regulate the amount of television and other media in the home.
11. Cancel subscriptions to child hurting magazines and explain why.
12. Encourage reading, especially stories about people who have made a
difference and made good choices.
13. Learn about the childhood’s of Famous Americans.
14. Pledge to do good work.
TIPS FOR PARENTS
1. Adolescents are influenced by relationships and rules. Rules are
important, but in the absence of relationships, rules are hard to enforce.
2. Validate your daughter's adult behavior whenever possible.
3. Encourage honesty and authenticity rather than niceness and
popularity.
4. Encourage your daughter to do something she loves.
5. Encourage your daughter’s educational pursuits, especially in math
and science. Praise her intellect.
6. Examine your own sexism and gender-based assumptions. Try to model
androgyny.
7. Talk to your daughter about your sexual values and about how to
handle real sexual situations.
8. Help your daughter make wise choices about media, tools and
consumption.
9. Help your daughter develop a wellness program. Wellness includes
nutrition, exercise and stress management.
10. Help your daughter form a plan for dealing with drugs and alcohol.
11. Sign your daughter up for a self-defense course.
12. Form a support group of parents in the community.
13. Take your daughter to the mountains.
ASSIGNMENTS: Some Ideas for Family Homework
1. I ask families to record their victories.
2. I encourage families to orchestrate "corrective emotional
experiences." With adolescents, corrective emotional experiences work
better than punishments. Relationship-oriented reparations are often the most effective.
3. After families have experienced trauma, I help them design healing
ceremonies.
4. I recommend ceremonies of acknowledgment and forgiveness after a
extramarital affair. Many marriages can be saved, but the couple must deal with
what happened, express their painful feelings and resolve to move on. After
betrayals, violence and losses, ceremonies can help with healing.
5. I encourage families to make conscious choices about media.
6. I encourage clients to read some self-help literature. I recommend
works about overcoming adversity.
7. I encourage the gifts of attention, lessons, encouragement and
experiences.
8. I encourage families to develop rituals. These can be for seasons,
significant family events and rites of passage.
9. I encourage families to increase their expressions of affection.
10. I design experiments to help people sanctify time.
IV. Excerpts from Mary
Pipher’s Interview with MEF
A clinical psychologist in private
practice in Lincoln, Nebraska, Mary Pipher has been seeing adolescent girls and
families for some 25 years. She and her husband, Jim, also a clinical
psychologist, have raised two children, a boy and a girl. Dr. Pipher received
her BA in cultural anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley
in 1969 and her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Nebraska in
1977. Reviving Ophelia was published
in 1994 to help parents understand the pressures teenage girls face in this
culture. It struck a responsive chord, and largely by word of mouth from one
parent to another, it hit the number one spot on the bestseller list by the
following year. She is also author of The
Shelter of Each Other and Hunger
Pains: The Modern Woman's Tragic Quest for Thinness. In 1998, Mary Pipher
was awarded the distinguished Presidential Award from the American
Psychological Association.
The three books cited above can be
obtained in paperback from Ballantine Publishing Group, Random House. For
Direct Orders call: 1-800-733-3000.
Her newest book, to be published in
March 1999 by Riverhead Books is titled, Another
Country: The Emotional Terrain of Our Elders. $24.95. For Direct Orders
call (Credit Card accepted): 1-800-631-8571.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
What has changed since you were a teenager?
I was a teenager in Beaver City,
Nebraska, little town of about 400 people. My mom was a doctor in that town. I
knew everybody, and I knew the name of every dog in that town. And so when I
walked around that world, I was moving among people who I knew well, and who
knew me well. Increasingly, that's not the experience of children. They aren't
growing up in communities of adults who care about them. They're constantly
meeting strangers, and they've been socialized to be frightened of strangers.
So they're moving among people they have some reason to fear. They don't get
nurtured the way children were nurtured thirty years ago. And they don't get
corrected and informed about their behavior the way I did. Now, some of the
rules I learned were silly. Some of the rules I learned, I could hardly wait to
cast off when I left home. But the fact of the matter is, there were a lot of
adults deeply invested in my becoming a well-behaved civic citizen. And that's
something children don't experience as much. So loss of community is one thing.
Another thing that's changed, of
course, is children have a new community. They're being raised in an electronic
village. They grow up -- all the children of the world know Sting, know
Madonna, know Princess Diana. There's an international community now, of
personas that children know very well. They all listen to the same music all
over the world. There's an international language that children know. But it
doesn't connect them to real people. And furthermore, many of the stories
children hear from the people in this electronic community are stories not
about raising healthy children.
What I like to see is stories told to children by people who love them. When you think about it, we've been in human families for about four million years. Telling stories is an old, primal business. For four million years, at the end of a day, parents, adults have sat with the children they knew, maybe had their arm around them, around a fire. They told them stories that reflected the needs of the tribe, the events of the day, the developmental needs of the child. If the kid looked scared, they'd maybe, like, tone the story down. If the child was going to sleep, they'd maybe zip it up a little bit. The stories were about helping people relax, entertaining the children, instructing people on the things they needed to know to grow up. Those are the kinds of stories that we still need now -- stories told by people who are deeply invested in the rearing of particular children, in part