Reviving Ophelia – analysis

Book Review

“Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls”

I highly recommend this book to all girls,  parents of an adolescent girl, and any one who wants to learn more/gain insight  about what adolescent girls go through.

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Sociological Perspectives Found in “Reviving Ophelia”

In the book “Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls” by Mary Pipher, Ph.D., many sociological perspectives are mentioned. Each perspective helps explain why adolescent girls have become such troubled individuals. Pipher, through her book, explores personal stories from a variety of adolescent girls, each with a different background and family life. As a therapist, she sheds light on the reasons why many young girls act out, do drugs, have sex, and inflict personal harm, along with many other concerns that land them in therapy.
Even though this book was written in the early 1990’s, many of the issues it addresses are still overwhelmingly common today. There are still suicide attempts, alcohol is still used as a way to escape, sex, especially under the influence of alcohol, is still being had by girls barely in their teens. Young girls are still experimenting with drugs as a way to find their place. Females are still stereotyped as being less important than males and hold lower positions in the corporate world. The battle of sexism is still being fought.
While there are many different sociological perspectives mentioned in the book, some are more prominent than others. The first of these is sexism, more specifically, the Global Stratification and Status of Females. In such a technologically advanced world, one might think that the issue of sexism would be far less common than it was throughout history, but that is not the case. Many young girls are losing faith in themselves as a result of what they are seeing in the world around them. Girls are seeing men holding higher positions than women and feeling a sense of inferiority. Pipher addresses this periodically though the book. “By junior high girls sense their lack of power…[t]hey see mostly men are congressmen, principals, bankers, and corporate executives. They notice that famous writers, musicians and artists are mostly men” (41).
To many young girls, it is not only the political aspect of male preference, it is the personal problems girls face in their everyday lives. “Girls complain that they do more chores than their brothers. Or that they make less money baby-sitting than their brothers do mowing lawns. Or that parents praise brothers’ accomplishments more than theirs” (41-42). The combination of the political and personal aspects of sexism in these girls lives leads them to feel insignificant in a male dominated world.
Sometimes the sexist messages sent to these girls are not very obvious until they are pointed out. Pipher recalls “…one client brought in a magazine from my own waiting room. It was an alumni magazine… there were forty-five photographs, forty-four of which pictures males” (43). Parents can unconsciously magnify their young daughters feeling of linferiority by having something as simple as that magazine in their home.
Of course, there are other sociological perspectives mentioned in the book that also have an enormous influence on these young girls lives. Many girls use reference groups in order to evaluate their behavior and, based on their observations, change it accordingly. The problem with this is they often evaluate themselves against their fellow classmates, who are also struggling to find their true identity as well. When girls are young, they often feel that popularity is the only issue in their lives that matter. They start focusing less on things that used to be important to them, and more on being like the popular kids, because that is what they observe. One of Pipher’s patients was a fourteen-year-old girl named Rosemary. Rosemary used to be “interested in everything and everybody”. But once she got to high school “she stopped making good grades because she felt grades didn’t matter. Popularity was all the counted. She obsessed about her weight and her looks” (97).  “She did things she didn’t agree with to fit into the popular crowd” (98).
When these girls use reference groups at such a young age, they hide who they truly are with a hard outer shell of what they believe they should be in order to be considered cool. They do this by not only changing their behavior and attitudes, they also try to change their appearances. Some change their hair, or their clothing, while others try to attain the perfect body. Rosemary said “[s]he felt she needed to lose ten pounds…she had tried dieting” (98).
Other girls do just the opposite. They too use reference groups, but instead of changing themselves to fit in with the popular crowd, they change themselves to stand out. The problem with this is they are still changing their true selves, and often they are still changing to fit in with some group, even if it isn’t the popular one. One of Pipher’s patients “was dressed in a way that signaled ‘I am different’ with her head half shaved and half purple punk” (161). While these girls have made some progress by understanding they do not want to be part of the in crowd, they still end up changing their true selves to stand out.
The changing of themselves can sometimes be attributed to Cooley’s Looking Glass Self. He said that our sense of self develops from interaction with others. We imagine how we appear to others, interpret others reactions, and based upon this, we form a self-concept. This self-concept can be positive or negative. Often times the girls develop a negative self-concept and thus feel a need to change who they are to gain approval. Pipher says, “girls are socialized to let others do the defining” (257). By judging themselves solely on interactions with others, girls give up the ability to be who they truly are.
One sociological perspective that is mentioned but is not incredibly prominent in this book is genocide. Some girls who are savvier with the events going on in the world react to things such as genocide with the emotion of a young child. This often leads them to depression or cynicism about the world. Pipher had a patient who said she “felt that [she didn’t want to be part of a species that produced Nazis] when she read that Stalin killer even more people than Hitler….She said the ‘Holocaust wasn’t an isolated event. It happens all over” (163).
These girls are mature enough to know about genocide and be disgusted by it, but are not emotionally mature enough to respond to the problem in an adult way. Instead, they channel all that negativity onto themselves and lose their faith in the rest of the world. With this lost faith comes the “I don’t care attitude” that leads girls to take drugs or use alcohol at a very young age.
In groups and out groups also play a huge role in this book and in the lives of young girls. Often, young girls feel an incredible urge to be a part of the in group because they want to feel a sense of loyalty to a group  and have people with whom to bond. With in groups, however, comes tension and often peer pressure. Rosemary “hated the pressure”. She “felt close to her friends, but she admitted that friendships were difficult. She worried about betrayal and rejections” (98). Many girls want to be a part of the in-group so they are not targeted for being in the out-group. Being in the out-group means being an outsider who is often seen only as having flaws. They become victims of hate and prejudice as created by the in-group.
Deviance plays a part in this book in a big way. Much of the behavior that lands these young girls in Dr. Pipher’s office is viewed as deviant by the parents of the young girls. Since it is the reaction to the act that makes it deviant, the girls themselves may not, and often don’t, view it as being deviant. Instead, they view it as simply fitting in. Parents view drinking alcohol, having sex, and partying as being deviant while to the girls, it is the norm.
These young girls also use labeling as a way to show that some fit in and some don’t. “People are assigned to groups such as geeks, preps and jocks. One girl’s categories included ‘deeper than thou’, a derogatory term for the sophisticated artists in her school. Another divided the world into Christian and non-Christian, and another into alternative, non-alternative, and wannabe alternative” (59). By ascribing labels to people, the girls often feel better about themselves. By having a label ascribed to them, they feel incredibly low and unworthy.
Piaget, in his theory for the development of reasoning, said that the ability to think abstractly begins roughly at age twelve. Many of the girls in this book are no more than two years older than this, and their ability to think abstractly has not fully developed. In fact, it has often been hindered by mainstream media, which dictates the way things should be to young and impressionable girls. “Most early adolescents are unable to think abstractly. The brightest are just moving into formal operation thought or the ability to think abstractly and flexibly. The immaturity of their thinking makes it difficult to reason with them” (59). “The concreteness of girls’ thinking can be seen in their need to categorize others” (59).
It is clear that many of these sociological perspectives blend into one another and together help explain the behavior of these young girls. They see sexism and begin to lose faith in themselves, which is often the point at which they lose their own identity and try to replace is with another. It is here that they try to become one with the in-group for fear of being humiliated daily. They feel the need to put people in certain categories to feel better about themselves. When they are feeling low they often turn to drugs and alcohol as an escape. If they aren’t using drugs and alcohol as an escape, they’re using it to fit in. This behavior often leads to sexual promiscuity since inhibitions are temporarily down.
The combination of these factors is seen as deviant behavior by the parents of these adolescents. They feel that their children are really crying out for help or attention. Since they don’t know what else to do, they send them to therapy for professional help. Mary Pipher, being a therapist, got a first hand look into the lives of these adolescents and through her book, is helping others remember what it was like to be young. She is helping parents to understand that these girls are victims of society and the pressures it puts on children, especially girls. She is helping these girls save themselves before it’s too late.