Just For Girls is an outstanding innovative program that is solidly grounded in contemporary theories of women's development. It focuses on the experiences of girls that underlie negative self-labeling such as "feeling fat" and it gives girls room to find their voices within a validating and respectful small group context.
Niva Piran, PhD
Professor, Associate Chair
Counseling Psychology Program
University of Toronto
Young girls need to be given opportunities to believe in themselves. If I could give every girl a gift, I would give her a chance to be part of this program. It is precisely what most girls need to withstand the social pressure to be useless and beautiful.
Marion Crook, PhD
author of The Body Image Trap and Looking Good:
Teenagers Talk about Eating Disorders
Facilitator’s manual for a program to help girls safely navigate the rocky road through adolescence and avoid pitfalls such as eating disorders and preoccupation with food and weight.
by Sandra Susan Friedman, BA, BSW, MA
Published by Salal Books at Smashwords
ebook ISBN# 978-0-9698883-9-0
© 2000, 2003, 2010 Salal Communications Ltd.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
First ebook edition: November 2010
A group of girls saunters down a hallway. They jostle each other and giggle as girls are apt to do. The lilt and cadence of their adolescent voices drift through the air punctuated by shrieks of ‘awesome,’ ‘totally,’ and ‘cool.’ The girls are excited because they are all participants in a JUST FOR GIRLS group—an eating disorder prevention program where they can engage in girl talk and share their issues, fears, laughter and concerns.
It is impossible to grow up female today without ever worrying about weight, without sometimes apologizing for eating or restricting what you eat or without ‘feeling fat.’ Six and seven year old girls express concern with how they look. Nine year old girls talk about wanting to be thinner even before their bodies have begun to change. At ten and eleven girls who have begun to go through puberty will tell you they ‘feel fat.’ No matter how many times we tell girls that people come in a range of sizes and the shape of their bodies is really determined by their genes, it’s hard for them to take us seriously. Girls are seduced by relentless messages from the culture that everyone wants to be thin, that being thin automatically endows you with perfection and eternal confidence and that they can change their bodies if they try hard enough.
While most girls worry about their weight, not all girls worry to the same extent and not everybody develops an eating disorder. However, ‘feeling fat’ and worrying about weight extracts a high price from girls. It affects their self-esteem, their relationships with others and their performance in school. It also affects their health. The same societal conditions that teach girls to base their self worth on how they look will also make them vulnerable to other risks that stem from a lack of connection to their selves and their bodies—such as depression, smoking, teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases.
In 1992 I had the opportunity to develop Girls in the 90s—an eating disorder prevention program for pre-adolescent and adolescent girls. It involved a lot of trial-by-error work, as well as learning to listen carefully to girls’ voices—even when I was sure I knew best. It meant understanding that prevention has little to do with eating disorders and the behaviors associated with them and a lot to do with addressing what happens to girls in the process of growing up female that makes them feel fat.
Developing a prevention program meant taking the focus off food and weight and instead addressing the realities of girls’ lives and experiences. As the girls themselves said, ‘Even if we sometimes worry about our body image and self-confidence—that’s not what it’s about. It’s about what we do and what we want—all the things that concern us as girls.’ And so the Girls in the 90s discussion group program was born.
As 1999 drew to a close, I changed the name of the program to JUST FOR GIRLS and rewrote the manual incorporating the feedback I received from group facilitators, participants, their parents and my own learning and experiences. In 2003 I revised the manual once again and added energy breaks and physical activity. In putting together this ebook I have once again updated the material in the manual and have refined the program so that it focuses not only on eating disorder prevention but on promoting well-being and resilience in girls, helping them develop a strong sense of self and encouraging them to be healthy and active at whatever size they are.
JUST FOR GIRLS draws upon my lifetime of personal experiences and the professional skills I developed working variously as a teacher, a psychotherapist working with girls and women with eating disorders and body image issues, and through developing programs and facilitating professional training workshops in eating disorder prevention/intervention and getting girls physically active.
In 1997 I wrote When Girls Feel Fat: Helping Girls Through Adolescence which I revised in 2000. To my delight the book became popular not only with parents and professionals but also with adolescent girls. Nurturing girlpower: Integrating Eating Disorder Prevention and Intervention Skills into Your Practice (2000, 2003) evolved out of the professional training workshops on prevention and on intervention that I developed and facilitated for Eating Disorder Project North in British Columbia and from the subsequent professional training I have done in Canada and in the United States. Body Thieves: Help Girls Become Physically Active and Reclaim Their Natural Bodies (2002), brought together health promotion, prevention and physical activity. In 2005 I developed the JUST FOR BOYS program to provide a parallel gender-appropriate program to help boys develop resilience and learn skills to deal with the stressors and health risks of adolescence. Descriptions of all these publications are on my website www.salal.com. With the exception of When Girls Feel Fat, these publications are also available as ebooks.
JUST FOR GIRLS is an open discussion group program that looks at what feeling fat means to girls and addresses this dynamic before it can become a fixed (or internalized) way for them to respond to situations in their lives—or escalate into dieting and other disordered eating and eating disorder behaviors. JUST FOR GIRLS teaches girls to recognize the grungies—a term coined to describe the negative voice they develop as they grow up. While the most common grungie is feeling fat, feeling stupid and feeling ugly are close behind. The program helps girls recognize when they have been hit by a grungie and encourages them to talk about what else was happening to them at the time—to tell the real stories that lie underneath. In this way JUST FOR GIRLS addresses the silencing of girls’ voices in adolescence and their subsequent loss of self.
This JUST FOR GIRLS manual is made up of interconnected sections which can be combined or used separately:
CULTURE will provide you with an understanding of the philosophy behind the JUST FOR GIRLS program. It is based on the work of Carol Gilligan, Jean Baker Miller, Lyn Mikel Brown, Anne Moir and David Jessel and others in the fields of brain sex and gender culture. It describes how girls and boys develop and grow up in two separate gender cultures with different languages and different ways of responding to the world. It looks at how gender differences begin in the brain and at the effect that psychological development and societal influences have on behavior.
FEMALE ADOLESCENCE looks at the changes girls experience in their bodies as they go through puberty and at how girls disconnect from their bodies as a result of the pressure on them to conform to a rigid body ideal. It addresses the changes in girls’ lives as a result of the societal pressures for them to be ‘kind and nice’ that cause them to disconnect from their selves. It provides information about eating disorders and depression so you can recognize the warning signs and find the appropriate resources for girls at risk. It provides a context for obesity so you can understand the current 'war on fat' and its contribution to developing eating disorders.
CORE provides everything you need to know to set up and facilitate your own program. It explains the goals of the program and provides a blueprint which you can adapt to your own interests and skills and to the interests of the age group of the girls in your group. It explores what we as women bring to the process of working with girls and how we can strengthen our connection with girls and help them nourish their connections with each other. It describes the role of the school in helping girls make a healthy transition through adolescence.
CONTEXT provides a context, rationale, learning outcomes and appropriate learning activities for each of the topical modules that you can use to stimulate discussion, deepen awareness and teach skills.
Module 1: Solving the Grungies - When Girls ‘Feel Fat” teaches skills to identify and decode the grungies so that girls are able to reframe their experiences into real life experience instead of ‘fat’ talk.
Module 2: Managing Feelings and Letting Go of Stress teaches girls to identify and expand their range of feelings and to talk about them in the context of their lives. It teaches skills to express anger constructively and to identify and manage stress.
Module 3: Building a Strong Sense-of-Self teaches girls to identify and validate the different parts of their selves including their skills, abilities and talents. It teaches girls how they lose their self by focusing outward and putting themselves down and how to regain and strengthen it with the power of “I”.
Module 4: Strengthening Relationships examines the qualities of a best friend. It teaches girls good communication skills including those needed to deal with conflict. It addresses alternative aggression, bullying, cyberbullying, violence and abusive relationships. It helps girls identify the elements that make up healthy and unhealthy relationships.
Module 5: Celebrating Our Bodies helps girls understand the bodies they have. It addresses puberty and growth, genes, metabolism and why diets don’t work. It promotes Health at Every Sizes, teaches body awareness skills and promotes and encourages physical activity.
Module 6: Food, Glorious Food! teaches girls what food does, what foods they need for balance and energy, what ‘normal’ eating is and how they can trust their own bodies around their food choices.
The JUST FOR GIRLS manual contains 15 Session Plans and 26 Reproducible Handouts as well as a full Bibliography and a topical Resource section. The session plans can help you structure your weekly groups until you are comfortable enough to do so yourself. If something doesn’t work the first time, try something else. Pick and choose among the session plans, handouts and activities that you relate to most comfortably, and which best address the concerns of the girls you are working with. Adapt them to your own style and to the needs of your group.
You don’t need four PhDs and three training program certificates to facilitate a group. What you need the most is a willingness to share yourself, a lot of curiosity and the ability to listen to the voices of the girls (and, if possible, a co-facilitator to share the experience with).
As facilitators have told me over and over again, the best part of the program is the opportunity that they receive to learn about the girls and to contribute to their growth. For the girls the most valuable part is always the opportunity to talk about their concerns and to know that other girls feel the same way. In the end, that is what matters most.
The JUST FOR GIRLS program is even more necessary now than when it was originally developed. In the past 30 years the incidence of eating disorders has increased and the age of onset has decreased. At the same time there are so many more manifestations of the same issues. Girls experience powerlessness, loss of voice and erosion of self before they even reach adolescence. Binge drinking is prevalent as is disconnected sexualization in the form of rainbow parties and LGs. Cell phones and texting has created a babble of conversation without connection. Cyber bullying reduces any form of human interaction. Girls grow up in a cacophony of sound and stimulation which reinforces disconnection from the self and from others. Despite research studies and more sophisticated technology, girls are still seeking their self. And they need a safe place where they can learn the skills to find and maintain it.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
The Influence of Gender
Biology—the differences begin in the brain
Psychology—effects of development and societal influence
When Gender Cultures Clash
The Changes Girls Make in their Relationships
The Changes Girls Experience in their Bodies
The Adaptations Girls Make in their Behaviour
How Girls Deal with Distress
Speaking the Language of 'Fat'
Major Risks to Girls
Disordered Eating and Eating Disorders
Obesity
Depression
CORE [the JUST FOR GIRLS program]
Core Structure of the Group
Setting-up the Program
Planning Your Sessions
Facilitating Your Own Group
Evaluation
Coordinating Prevention Efforts with School
About the Learning Activities
Module 1: Solving the Grungies and Letting Go of Stress
Identifying Stress
Module 2: Managing Feelings
Dealing with Anger
Module 3: Building a Strong Sense-of-Self
Module 4: Strengthening Relationships
Learning Good Communication Skills
Bullying
Violence and Aggression (optional)
Choosing a Partner (optional)
Dating Violence / Relationship Abuse (optional)
Families (optional)
Module 5: Celebrating Our Bodies
Body Awareness and Diversity
Puberty (optional)
Body Image
Why Girls Have the Bodies They Do
Dieting
Size Acceptance
Module 6: Food, Glorious Food!
Exploring Our Relationship with Food
Eating for Energy
Normal Eating
THE LAST WORD...ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
S-1 Introduction to the Program
S-2 Detecting and Solving the Grungies
S-3 Understanding and Expressing Our Feelings
S-4 Expressing Anger
S-5 I, Me and Myself
S-6 Learning Good Communication Skills #1
S-7 Learning Good Communication Skills #2
S-8 Friendships
S-9 Bullying
S-10 Body Image / Body Awareness #1
S-11 Body Image / Body Awareness #2
S-12 Our Relationship with Food
S-13 Puberty
S-14 Families
S-15 Choosing a Partner
H-1 Inviting Girls to the Group
H-2 Letter to Parents
H-3 Tell Us about You
H-4 Dealing with Grungies
H-5 Detecting the Grungie Clues – Finding the Secret Stories
H-6 Building a Feeling Vocabulary
H-7 I, Me and Myself
H-8 Valuing My Personal Strengths
H-9 Best Friends
H-10 What Girls Want to Know about Friendships
H-11 Making Assertive Statements
H-12 Responding Assertively to Situations
H-13 Giving Feedback
H-14 Win-Win Ways for Dealing with Conflict
H-15 Choosing a Partner
H-16 Consider these Questions Early in a Relationship
H-17 All Kinds of Families
H-18 How I Feel about My Body
H-19 Understanding How Genes Work
H-20 Understanding Metabolism
H-21 Exploring the Myths about Dieting
H-22 This is What Really Happens When We Diet
H-23 Stretching for Flexibility
H-24 Learning about Food
H-25 Exploring Your Eating Habits
H-26 JUST FOR GIRLS Feedback Form
RESOURCES (by subject)
Two babies lie sleeping in their carriers. ‘Look how cute and delicate Jennifer is,’ boast her parents. ‘She’s so quiet. We’ve never seen such a good baby.’ ‘Michael lets us know what he wants,’ his parents proudly exclaim. ‘He’s so strong and sturdy. He’s going to be some guy!’
THE INFLUENCE OF GENDER
Gender has a profound influence upon us from birth. Though Michael and Jennifer above are barely one month old, the fact that they are differentiated as female and male respectively has already begun to play a major role in shaping their lives. Adults will handle and treat them each differently depending upon their perception of the baby’s gender.
Gender socialization determines what we are named and how we are treated, the clothes that we will wear, what toys we will be given and the games that we will play. It molds us into what society defines as masculine and feminine. It teaches us how to act and behave separately as girls and boys, and later as women or men. It instructs us in the different roles that we are thus expected or required to play. As we mature, gender socialization will influence the kinds of jobs we will have and the amount of money that we will get paid for doing them. Factors such as our race, ethnicity and socio-economic class will reinforce these differing standards of behavior for us as girls and boys, and women and men. So too will our relatives, friends, childcare workers, school and institutional officials, employers, the media and our peers influence and reinforce these differences.
Some people believe gender differences are only the result of socialization, and therefore what is learned can be unlearned. Yet despite their efforts to treat boys and girls the same, little boys make guns out of dolls and little girls relate to their trucks as family—with the large truck as the daddy, the middle truck as the mommy, and the rest of the trucks as babies. The notion that we can narrow the ‘gender gap’ between them by teaching girls competitive sports and encouraging boys to be more sensitive doesn’t begin to address the fundamental differences in the ways in which girls and boys experience and respond to the world.
Girls and boys inhabit two distinct gender cultures with quite different languages and different ways of interpreting and responding to situations. While they may as individuals do the exact same things, they will likely experience and describe them differently. If we are going to work with girls and with boys in ways that bring out the best in them, then we need to have an understanding of their respective gender cultures—how these cultures determine behavior and influence perspective, what role they play in how girls and boys come to view themselves, the value accorded to each by the larger society in which we live and how that society limits or nurtures the potential of girls and boys. We have to recognize and acknowledge that our strengths as women in working with and relating to girls come from the gender commonalties we share with them. Because these characteristics can often make it difficult for us as women to work with boys, we also need to identify and understand those areas of the male culture that make us uncomfortable.
As I describe the female and male gender cultures you might find that some girls and boys (or women and men) you know don’t fit precisely into these categories—such as aggressive girls and nurturing boys. Please keep in mind I am describing averages and medians, or talking about the polarities of the continuum of human behavior. While as women or men we share characteristics that are common to our sex, as individuals we are all different and exhibit behaviors across the wide continuum of human traits.
BIOLOGY—DIFFERENCES BEGIN IN THE BRAIN
From conception, girls and boys are programmed to march to different drummers. Fusion between the egg and sperm determines genetic sex—whether they will be a chromosomal XX girl or an XY boy. Steroid or sex hormones called androgens and estrogens act as chemical messengers to ensure that these genetic programs are carried out. For the first six weeks of gestation all fetuses develop along female lines. Then the androgen testosterone separates the boys from the girls by stimulating the development of embryonic male genitalia in XY fetuses. At a certain point in the development of the fetus, it interacts with the nerve cells or neurons that make up the brain and signals for dramatic changes that alter the brain structure into one that is male. In the female fetus the ovaries also produce tiny amounts of testosterone which is required by the developing female brain. It is estimated that twenty per cent of girls have boy brains and vice versa. Regardless of the sex of the fetus, the more testosterone that bathes the brain at this time, the more that adult will exhibit male behavior. The lesser the amount of testosterone the brain receives, the more feminine the behavior will be.
Gender differences between girls and boys are evident shortly after birth and are most pronounced until the age of 8, by which time the gender gap begins to close. Girls show a tendency to be interested in people and communication, while boys tend to be interested in dynamic activity and in inert objects. Studies of babies 2-4 days old show that girls pay attention longer when adults are speaking and spend almost twice as long maintaining eye contact. While girls lose interest when the connection is broken, boys are equally happy to jabber away at toys and look at abstract geometric designs. The female brain responds more intensely to emotion. Feelings, especially sadness, activate neurons in an area eight times larger in the female brain than in the male. Even before they can understand language, girls seem to be better at identifying the emotional content of speech. As girls grow older they can detect the emotions of others more accurately than boys can. Because the male brain is specially designed for logical problem-solving, it can often take boys up to seven hours longer to process emotional data.
From infancy, girls have a longer attention span than boys who look at objects for shorter but more active periods. Boys take in less sensory information than girls. They smell less, taste less, and get less input and soothing feedback from tactile information. They hear less well, but hear better through one ear than through the other. Because they receive more testosterone and less seratonin—the neurotransmitter that inhibits aggression—boys are more aggressive and impulsive than girls are.
Girls and boys have different perceptions, priorities, behaviors and skills because of differences in their brains and in the ways that they process information. The female brain is 10 to 15% smaller than the male brain but the regions dedicated to higher cognitive functions such as language are more densely packed with neurons. It is more diffuse than the male brain. The functional division between the left and right sides of the brain is less clearly defined so that both sides are used in verbal and visual activities. This means that girls learn to speak earlier than boys do and develop more skill at verbal memory, which helps them master grammar and the intricacies of language at an earlier age.
Male brains are more compartmentalized and therefore more specialized than female ones. The left side is almost exclusively set aside for the control of verbal abilities including speaking, writing, reading and language. The right side controls visual abilities including spatial relations and abstract thoughts. The focused structure of the male brain means that boys can concentrate more intensely than girls can on one thing at a time. They have better hand/eye coordination. They are better able to visualize and manipulate objects in space—which makes them more efficient at interpreting maps, solving mazes and doing the kinds of mathematics that involve abstract concepts of space, relationships and theory. Because their brain does the task and then turns off, boys are more task-oriented than girls.
It is important to remember that neither brain structure is ‘superior’ to the other. Nor are girls and boys restricted in what they can do because of the structure of their brains. Girls can excel in math and boys can develop a high proficiency in verbal and communication skills. However, because different parts of the male brain grow at different times and at different rates than the corresponding parts of the female brain, girls and boys may not develop the same skills at the same times in their development. As well, the ways in which they learn these skills and perform these tasks are different.
PSYCHOLOGY—THE EFFECTS OF DEVELOPMENT AND SOCIETAL INFLUENCE
Societal culture and socialization build and expand upon what we bring into the world. Biology and culture form a circle in which one influence feeds the other, making it difficult to pinpoint if something is exclusively biological, cultural or the result of the interplay between them. As a result, theories which attempt to describe the psychological development of girls and boys evolve out of and are influenced by the biological proclivities of each gender and the cultural beliefs of a particular time.
Understanding Boys: Popular theories of male development—such as the ones put forth by Freud and Erikson—tend to be congruent with and reflect the values espoused by our society which is also male in perspective. These theories are hierarchical, goal-oriented and individualistic. They see development as occurring in progressive stages, with each stage in turn reinforcing certain qualities that are considered to be more appropriate and mature than those previous. These theories are based upon an assumption boys develop an identity and sense of self that is based on their individual accomplishments and on how well they perform in the world. In order for them to become independent and able to stand on their own two feet, boys need to separate from their mothers at an early age. Until recently it was thought that separation meant severely altering this relationship.
The activities that boys are involved in and the ways that they carry them out serve to reinforce their goal-oriented sense of self and form the basis for their self-esteem. Boys play in large groups. Their play is as much about the game itself as it is about hierarchy, power, defense of territory and physical strength. They are a lot more physical with each other than girls are. Team sports teach boys about rules and about winning and losing, about being the best—being on top. Competition offers boys a way in which to feel worthy. Boys are better able to tolerate conflict than girls are. Conflict often becomes the basis for their friendships and their games and is often a way for them to relate to one another, check each other out and take a first step towards friendship. Loyalty plays a big part in their friendships as boys learn to bond with each other in ‘us-against-them’ scenarios. Interpersonal communication is often most comfortable when it takes place in the context of an activity—when boys interact and work side by side rather than face to face.
Boys assess each situation in terms of how adequately they perform in relation to one another. Their comfort level comes from knowing where they fit in and what they must do to improve or maintain their status. Possession of information allows boys to gain power over someone else. Male language, which is based upon logical reasoning, serves as a way for boys to capture and hold onto another person’s attention and to put forth their opinions and views in such a way that they ‘win’ the discussion (or at least hold their own).
Recent research on boys shows that our society encourages boys to separate from their mothers prematurely. This creates an impasse in their emotional development as boys shut down their feelings in order to become self-reliant. Because relatively few fathers are involved in the immediate care of their children, most boys grow up having no one with whom to develop lasting emotional connections. Since intimacy is not addressed in this developmental scheme until boys reach adolescence, it is often intertwined and confused with sexuality.
Understanding Girls: Psychologists Jean Baker Miller, Janet Surrey and other researchers at the Stone Center at Wellesley College, and Carol Gilligan and her colleagues at Harvard University have studied female development for more than thirty years. Their theories of female psychology demonstrate the divergent paths that girls and boys follow as they grow up.
Girls grow up with a perception of the world that is less individualistic and more contextual than that of boys. Because they are not encouraged to separate from their mothers at an early age, girls develop a core structure (or ‘self-in-relation’) which evolves out of this early relationship. Their identity is based on their experience of themselves in relationships. Healthy relationships involve mutual understanding, emotional support and the commitment of both individuals to the development of each person and to the relationship itself. Girls grow up to be interdependent. They learn to evaluate situations not only in terms of their individual responses, but also within the context of whatever ‘others’ may be involved. It is because the world of relationships makes up so much of female experience that girls grow up concerned not only with their own individual well- being, but also with the well-being of all those systems in which they participate.
The relational and contextual perspective that girls develop forms the basis of their female gender culture. It influences how they learn, the stories that they tell (and the ways in which they tell them), what they think is important and how they get things done. Girls play in small groups that are based on communication and connection. Their games teach them empathy and sensitivity and have fewer rules than those of boys. Girls will change the rules to accommodate situations that arise. While competition can be a part of their games, they tend to place more emphasis on inclusion and on taking turns. Girls handle conflict differently than boys. They will try to compromise and negotiate with one another. If there is no resolution, they will find indirect ways of showing disapproval. For example, threatening to exclude the other person is generally more effective (and more hurtful) than using physical force.
When girls interact with one another they feel nourished by their common experiences, common language and relational bonds. Relationships play a major part in their sense of well being and social development. Girls have a best friend. They tell each other secrets. Their friendships are based on intimacy, connection and sharing. Girls use language and communication as a way of drawing people closer to them. The exchange of similar experiences ensures that girls are equal in vulnerability and therefore in power. Attempting to offer advice before establishing equality places the person giving the advice on top, and impairs the balance of the relationship.
Because girls are interdependent they travel in pairs. Whenever they need to solve problems and make decisions they talk to a friend. If the problem or decision is a big one, they talk to two friends (or more). Talking allows them to try out different solutions and to ask for and receive feedback before they make up their mind. When girls enter new situations they assess how close or how distant they are from the other person. Their sense of security depends on feeling connected. Girls perceive danger in their lives as isolation and abandonment. When they experience distance, they become anxious and often blame themselves for the failure to connect. Girls work best together through a process that involves verbally sharing things about themselves to establish intimacy and connection, then working to discover a commonality in order to develop equality, then finally addressing the task at hand.
WHEN GENDER CULTURES CLASH
When girls and boys move out of their respective cultures they experience the difficulties of trying to relate to others who have a totally different perception of and orientation to the world than they do. When I first met my husband, our telephone conversations were fraught with gender misunderstandings. Dan would call and ask about my day. I would give him a blow by blow account of every interaction I had and everything that I did. As I showered him with details I would become aware of silence at the other end of the phone. ‘Are you listening?’ I would ask, beginning to feel anxious. ‘Yes, yes, go on,’ he would respond. And so I would continue until once again I would feel that the phone had ‘died.’ This man really doesn’t care about me, I would think as I checked one more time to see if he was still there. ‘Yes, yes, go on,’ he would respond, frustration evident in his voice. I eventually came to understand this dynamic as a gender difference.
When we as women talk to one another, we continuously interject with empathic exclamations such as ‘uh huh,’ ‘cool,’ ‘that’s awful.’ We interrupt each other frequently in order to make sure that we understand one another. We share similar experiences of our own. Our conversations never follow a straight line but meander through the process of our interaction. When I talked to Dan, I expected him to respond in the same way. When he didn’t, I misinterpreted his silence as disinterest and therefore as his desire to create distance between us. I didn’t know that conversation had a totally different function for him. Men enter into conversations not to create intimacy but to try to define the problem so that they can fix it. Dan was silent because he was patiently waiting for me to get to the point. When I didn’t do that, he became more and more frustrated. How was he going to let me know that he cared for me if he couldn’t tell me what to do? Once we were able to recognize the gender differences, we could deepen the relationship between us.
If only we could become bi-cultural we could more easily learn from one another and bridge the gap between women and men. We could move freely back and forth along the whole continuum of human behavior and open up a wide range of different behaviors and options for all of us. We could structure activities and institutions so that they served the needs of both cultures, not just one.
The continuum of human behavior is lopsided because not all gender characteristics are considered equal in all situations. When girls and boys attempt to enter into areas that are governed by a gender culture that is not theirs and which attempts to impose this other view upon them, they reach an impasse or crisis in their development which profoundly affects their sense of self. The next chapter will describe what happens to girls at adolescence when they seek to enter the larger world, which is predominantly male.
[see Bibliography for Blum, Erikson, Gilligan & Brown, Moir & Jessel, Sheldon, Surrey, and Tannen.].....return to Table of Contents
Adolescence is a crucial time in female development. During this period between childhood and adulthood girls experience profound biological, cultural, social, emotional and behavioral changes in their lives. They suffer more than boys do from depression, concerns about appearance, fear for personal safety, social and emotional stress, and other signs of psychological distress. Many girls lose their sense of self as well as their self-confidence and self-worth.
In the early years of elementary school, most girls feel good about themselves and about their abilities. They mature faster than boys, develop better control of the small motor skills which enable them to write and draw, develop math and reading skills earlier, and have good social skills which help them get along with others. Girls flower in this environment, because it is congruent with their stage of development and because it emphasizes cooperation, communication and learning in small groups. At eight years of age, girls are as tall as boys are and, because they weigh more on the average, they are physically stronger. Because they are still relatively free from the full impact of socialization, they have access to and express the whole range of their feelings. Their behavior is relatively unrestricted. Until the age of 10, girls are psychologically healthier and have fewer behavioral problems than boys.
As girls reach adolescence they experience conflicts and obstacles in the basic healthy expression of their need for connection with others—connections which form the basis of their identity. Because the model the adult world is based upon stresses self-sufficiency, autonomy, assertiveness and competition, the relational qualities, characteristics and skills that give them their sense of self and self-worth are devalued and seen as deficient. Girls are led to discount and negate these positive qualities in themselves.
THE CHANGES GIRLS MAKE IN THEIR RELATIONSHIPS
About thirty years ago Carol Gilligan and her colleagues began studying the psychological development of girls over time. They found that during adolescence girls experience profound changes in the way that they negotiate their friendships and relationships that impact greatly on their identity and sense of self. Girls begin to struggle with the loss of their voice (that is, their ability to speak out and to voice their opinions) as well as their ability to take their own experiences seriously. Gilligan points out a fundamental paradox that develops in girls’ (and then women’s) lives: though the desire for connection and mutually responsive relationships make up an integral part of female identity, adolescent girls and adult women learn to silence themselves in relationships and negate their own selves rather than risk open conflict that might lead to rejection, isolation and even violence against themselves.
As girls grow up they are bombarded with messages from the culture (including messages from grown women such as ourselves) that it is better to be kind and nice and not hurt anyone’s feelings than to be honest and say what they really think and feel. A good girl is nice before she is anything else, including honest. Girls are faced with a psychological dilemma: if they say what they are feeling and thinking they are in danger of losing their relationships—but if they don’t speak their minds and their hearts, they lose the authenticity of their relationships and therefore their connection with others. In the process, they lose themselves.
Because the ‘popular’ girl is the one who is nice and fits in, girls’ censor themselves. They say to themselves: ‘I shouldn’t say that’ or ‘They don’t agree with me so I’ll just keep my mouth shut.’ They feel guilty when they have thoughts and feelings that are not ‘nice’. Not only are their friendships profoundly altered, they also take on a dark side. The fear of hurting someone else or of not being liked leaves them with no way to deal directly with anger and conflict so girls express them indirectly. They tease and bully each other. They develop secrets. They form cliques. They learn alliances are elusive and that it is not safe to be direct. As girls begin to please others at the expense of themselves they have a difficult time with boundaries. If they say ‘no’ they will be rejected and if they say ‘yes’ they will be seen as selfish. Girls who become interested in boys may have sex when they don’t really want to, have unsafe sex because they don’t want to hurt the boy’s feelings by asking him to use a condom, and get into cars with guys who are drunk.
The ‘tyranny of kind and nice’ causes girls to cover their strong feelings, hold back their opinions and hide their own truths from themselves. As the real self becomes buried and the false one takes its place, girls move from being the center of their own experiences to looking outward for definition. The more that they please other people the more they lose their inner voice, their awareness of their own needs and their ability to form and trust their own perceptions. As a result they dissociate from their experiences, their feelings and their true selves.
THE CHANGES GIRLS EXPERIENCE IN THEIR BODIES
At the same time that girls are experiencing changes in their behavior, their bodies change. Their hips get bigger during puberty and they accumulate the fat necessary for them to become sexual women. The discrepancy between the narrowly defined cultural ideal and their genetic and biological heritage begins to widen. Lacking information about the changes in their bodies and unable to find a safe place to express their deepest fears, girls come to believe they are not normal and their bodies and unacceptable or deformed. Because the ‘ideal’ weight is lower than what is normal or healthy for them, girls who do biologically conform to this ideal begin a life-long struggle against the needs of their bodies to be comfortable at a higher weight. Although they are hungry—especially during this period of growth—many girls become afraid to eat. Their self-esteem becomes bound up with weight-control rather than with developing their personal qualities, skills, talents, interests and all of the other components that make up a well-rounded sense of self.