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As children, we all knew the traditional reply to teasing. A stand of defiance in the face of derision, the chant is intended to show that cruel comments cannot affect our fragile psyches. But children know the truth. Words hurt. Children do not have the discrimination that most adults have developed, the ability to discern whether a speaker should or should not be listened to. Children will take comments at face value no matter who speaks them. As they grow older, they will decide who they listen to, and who they listen to may not have their best interests at heart. | |
| "Parents know what the cultural rules are. Seeing their daughter put on a few pounds, they may worry about where it will lead, how it will affect her popularity, how this might ultimately make her unhappy and depressed. She'll be discriminated against at work, she won't have a boyfriend. All of these are realistic fears." (1) |
I remember, as a small child, being told that I'd have to watch what I ate when I became a teenager or I would get fat. For me, it was an isolated incident, but for many girls entering their teenaged years, this is a message they have heard time and again, over and over as they are growing up. Sometimes it is the parents who put the pressure on their daughters to be thin. Sometimes it is a revered sister, and sometimes it is an older brother who makes fat jokes. Sometimes the pressure isn't explicitly stated, but is more subtle, such as the mother who diets or the sister who bemoans gaining a few pounds. And then there is the peer pressure. There is enormous pressure to be popular. Popular is usually equated with pretty, which in turn must be thin. Popular girls often forsake their former friends for an 'in' set. After seeing girls with a few extra pounds passed over for social activities of all forms, a fear is created that something similar can happen to oneself. |
| "Generally girls have strong bodies when they enter puberty. But these bodies spread out and soften in ways that our culture calls fat. Just at the point that their bodies are becoming rounder, girls are told that thin is beautiful, even imperative." (2) |
At the onset of puberty, girls begin to develop a figure. Mary Pipher, in Reviving Ophelia, tells how teenaged girls are confused when their developing bodies are suddenly seen as objects about which boys can make comments. Breast size, or lack thereof, becomes a public topic. (Remember, this is junior high, already known for its lack of sensitivity.) Girls who develop early and girls who develop late are equal targets. Comments at this stage are very rarely complimentary, and all these girls have to look forward to are more problems; the ideal body, as presented by our culture, is close to that of a fourteen-year-old girl's. As girls go through puberty, they will progress further and further from that ideal. And by age fourteen, it's already too late for most of the girls. |
(1) Bordo, Susan. No One is Immune to Cultural Imagery.
(2) Pipher, Mary. Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (USA: Ballantine Books, 1994), p. 55.