Lana, just a little older than Faith, was always an exceptionally pretty girl. Her father, especially, took tremendous pride in her round, blue eyes and blond curls. When she was little, he liked to bring her to the fire station where he worked and show her off to his coworkers. His friends told him he better be careful when she grew up, and he laughed and rolled his eyes, but Lana could tell that he liked that they thought this. She was quite aware of all of this, actually—her father’s admiration of and pride in her looks. And she was equally aware of her mother’s jealousy over the way he treated Lana. From a very young age, she did what she could to be extra pretty. She smiled sweetly. She spoke politely to her father’s friends, answering all their questions.
When she started puberty at ten years old, though, her father distanced himself. It was subtle, but it was clear: where once she had been her father’s daughter, now she was handed off to her mother. Lana continued to do everything she could to be pretty, and—following cultural guidelines—sexy. She wore shirts that showed off her young breasts. She wore skirts that exposed lots of leg. She wore makeup and nail polish and perfume. Her mother felt she was out of control. Her father became stricter and told her she needed to focus on her schoolwork, not boys, which only made Lana feel betrayed.
So, at the young age of twelve, Lana began to pursue boys. She let them touch her however they wanted. She gave blow jobs regularly. She worked her way through the boys at school. At the same time, she grew withdrawn and depressed. She fought with her parents. She started bringing in bad grades. One day her mother said to her, “Where did my Lana go? I don’t even know who you are anymore.” Lana didn’t know who she was anymore, either.
Before girls become women, they are whole, energized, excited. They take on the world without hesitation. They are their own directors, in charge of their lives. But then things almost always change. Mary Pipher famously described this seismic shift that comes about as girls enter puberty. She writes, “Just as planes and ships disappear mysteriously into the Bermuda Triangle, so do the selves of girls go down in droves. They crash and burn in a social and developmental Bermuda Triangle.”{11} As girls enter adolescence, they also enter another culture, one in which how they appear to others becomes how they exist. “Girls stop being and start seeming,” Pipher notes, quoting Simone de Beauvoir.{12}
Sally Mann, my favorite photographer, captures this transitional time in her collection At Twelve: Portraits of Young Women. In each photograph, girls are on the cusp of something. They are both children and too knowing. In some, it is obvious by the ways they hold themselves that they know too much. In others, you can see the light that has begun to fade. Ann Beattie writes in her introduction to the images, “Twelve-year-old girls know what brought them to the present moment, but that’s as far as they’ve gotten.”{13} In other words, they fully know themselves, even as they have begun this change, but they can’t see where they are headed.
Boys and girls enter adolescence—they become “tweens”—already amid challenges. They go through their greatest physical and emotional growth since infancy. Puberty—a well-known test for most—comes earlier these days. Although the average age of puberty onset is 10.5, with most girls entering puberty between the age of 8 and 13, there is evidence that this age is dropping.{14} In 1997, a landmark study of approximately seventeen thousand girls found that 15 percent of Caucasian girls and 50 percent of black girls already started to show signs of puberty by age 8.{15} More recent research suggests an even further drop to age 7. A fifteen-year study out of Denmark published in 2009 determined that the average age of breast development for girls has dropped a full year—from 10.88 years to 9.86 years.{16}
Age of menarche, a girl’s first period, does not seem to be lowering, however. In other words, many girls’ secondary sex characteristics—breast development, pubic hair growth, and widening hips—are developing early, but first menstruation, which means ovulation and hence the ability to get pregnant, does not arrive with those secondary sex characteristics. (Researchers theorize that increasing amounts of obesity and estrogen in our environment (via Bisphenol A [BPA], pesticides, compounds in cigarettes, and phthalates) cause the earlier onset, but no studies have been conclusive.){17} Caucasian girls’ average age of menstruation is 12.6, which is not significantly earlier than it was in the 1970s. We do know, though, that black and Mexican American girls’ median age of menarche has always been lower—12.06 for non-Hispanic Blacks and 12.25 for Mexican Americans.{18}
As I alluded to briefly in the introduction, when adolescence hits, there is also a vast overproduction of brain cells and neuronal connections. It is during the early teen years that kids prune out the connections they don’t use. At the same time, their frontal lobes, which control judgment, logic, and organization, are not yet well developed. New teens have access to most emotions, but they don’t yet have the skills to deal effectively with them.
For girls, these developmental changes are particularly affected by what happens in the environments surrounding them, and most particularly in the ways they are sexualized by our culture. The images that control our understanding of girls are, in fact, so pervasive, such an ordinary part of our lives, that they are almost unseen. To even say that girls are sexualized in our culture verges on not saying anything at all.
Images of womanhood, of who we are supposed to be, are fed to us from infancy—go to any store that sells toys and there is a distinct “girls’ aisle” where everything is pink and tulle and satin. It doesn’t matter that there are also career-themed Barbies, or other dolls and playthings meant to encourage independence. The point is simply that everywhere a girl looks, from the moment she comes out of the womb, but then especially once she reaches adolescence, the media establishes clearly that it owns her sense of self.
What we speak of less, though, is how that wave of objectification and those mixed messages—“be sexy but not slutty”—are so strong that girls really don’t have a fighting chance. Magazines, billboards, commercials, Internet ads—these are just the tip of the iceberg. Take a quick glance at some of the top teen girls’ magazines and you see these headlines: “How to Get a Guy’s Attention,” “383 Ways to Look Hot,” “Look Pretty,” “How to Get Perfect Skin,” “Get Pretty Now,” and “Be Irresistible.” Girls see more than four hundred advertisements per day telling them how they should look.{19} The images are so pervasive that we barely notice them.
Naomi Wolf calls the sexy-but-not-slutty images “flattened beauty,” attractiveness defined by a cultural ideal that has nothing to do with girls’ organic, individual beauty.{20} Airbrushed bodies and flawless faces sit on the cover of every popular women’s magazine. The television runs a reel of size zeros and twos, of symmetrical faces and perfectly styled hairdos. Such people populate some of the most popular shows teenagers watch—iCarly, Gossip Girl, The Vampire Diaries, and Glee. Models, celebrities, and pop stars plaster advertisements, billboards, and screens. These people are all we see, which is a constant reminder to average-looking people that we are not that, but that we should certainly spend every moment trying to be that if we, too, want to be seen.