In order for a girl to reach her potential, her developing self must know that it can master its environment outside the family. She has to feel that her options are wide open. She has to believe she has an equal shot at achieving what she wants. If there are cultural messages that limit her potential, a girl - particularly one astute enough to know she is limited - will flounder, no matter how resilient her other developing selves.
The environment in the United States does not support this social development. In fact, U.S. culture discourages girls from becoming their authentic selves. For example, the culture does not encourage the emotional self to express anger. A girl may cry but not lash out. And the culture frowns upon her sexual self. She may bleach her hair blonde and sway her hips cutely, but what would happen if she wanted to discuss a subject such as masturbation, which is taboo in the cultural mainstream? Our culture limits her academic self. She may get a doctorate in computer science, but not earn a salary equal to that of her male counterpart.
In other cultures, the prohibitions on women are even greater. The news is full of stories about women being silenced, having their faces covered, being married off as children, being raped by husbands, being stoned and slain for reasons having to do with gender.
In short, much of culture obliterates parts of girls' selves. A girl without a strong social self responds to the imperatives by boxing up those offending pieces and stowing them away in a psychological attic. The situation is worsened when a culture is too restrictive or at odds with a girl's developing sense of self; the girl may rebel as if she has an authoritarian parent. Girls growing up in cultures in transition or as the daughters of immigrants often experience clashes in values: their mothers adhere to traditional values while they try to embrace new ones.
Perhaps the most striking global illustration of this dynamic has come from anthropologist and psychiatrist Anne Becker's work with teenage girls in Nadroga, Fiji. In 1995, the village chief introduced television into the village. Within three years, almost a third of the girls had developed eating disorders, wanting to diet, vomit, or exercise excessively. More than 11 percent of those surveyed became fully bulimic. The majority, 83 percent of the girls surveyed, blamed their change in attitude on the media.
While it would be easy to blame this startling change on "culture," Becker, who is now director of the Adult Eating and Weight Disorders Program at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, investigated the problem further. She noted that the country is undergoing a dramatic shift from an agrarian to a Westernized economy. Fijian girls want to go to work. Employment as a flight attendant on Air Pacific is a dream job. These girls cannot rely on their mothers to help them navigate the new cultural terrain, so they are turning to TV characters for a blueprint of how to make it, equating her body shape with her power as a woman of the world. "I want to be like Xena so that I can protect myself by getting all those manly skills," says one Fijian girl. "When I come across some kind of different, difficult situations, I can just use them in order to defend myself."
This situation echoes that of young women in the United States in the early 1970s. American girls at the time were faced with new opportunities in the world but had few skills or female mentors to guide them, including their mothers. This generation of mothers had been schooled in "femininity," using appearances to please others. Girls who experienced this collectively had more trouble developing their social selves and therefore their whole selves.
Thus, developing a cultural self, in this context, means not only developing a physical self apart from fashion images of models, actresses, and ballerinas, but also realizing a desire to succeed. Girls want to have a voice in their societies. If society will not let them, the result can be an eating disorder, a weapon against oppression.
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