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Ornament

The Cult of Perfection

We are living in the era of girl power. From fiery Beyoncé anthems to powerhouse athletes like Serena Williams to badass literary and on-screen heroines like Katniss Everdeen and Wonder Woman, our culture is on a crusade to rally girls and tell them they can be and do it all. Of course we want our girls to know they can accomplish anything and everything they set their minds to! Right?

All this “positive” messaging, however, turns out to have a dark side. We hold up these larger-than-life women as role models with the goal of empowerment, but for many girls it lands as crushing pressure to excel in everything. We may be saying, “You can do and be anything,” but they hear, “You have to do and be everything” What we might see as inspiration, they take as expectation.

My friend Rachel Simmons, one of the country’s leading experts on girls and the bestselling author of The Curse of the Good Girl, points to this mentality as a factor contributing to the significant mental health crisis we see in today’s young women. Rates of depression and anxiety are skyrocketing, and she says part of the problem is the role conflict girls today live with on a daily basis. “We’ve only added on to what it means to be a successful girl,” she explains. “We didn’t update it. If you’re expected to be in the library for six hours studying, how are you also expected to have a really great body and great weekend plans?” Now they need to be nice, but also fierce; polite but also bold; cooperative but trailblazing; strong but also pretty. All this plus, in a culture that lauds effortless perfection, making it look like they’re not trying—not even a bit.

Sophie is a perfect example. At fifteen, she is tall and lanky, with unblemished skin and a gorgeous smile that reveals two perfect rows of straight, white teeth. She’s a star soccer player, she’s been on the varsity team since she was in seventh grade, played Belle in her eighth-grade production of Beauty and the Beast, and got elected to the student council in ninth grade—a highly competitive and coveted post in her school. No surprise, she also gets straight A’s. If you met her, you’d immediately be struck by how poised and articulate she is. Sophie’s mom, Dina, is proud—but also very worried. She talked about how, despite her parents’ urgings to take it easy, Sophie pushes herself relentlessly, waking up at the crack of dawn every morning to work out at the gym before she goes to school and often staying up until well past midnight to get her homework done (while wearing teeth whitening strips and acne-fighting face masks). To everyone else, it seems she’s got it together; it’s only her family that sees her cry nearly every night in frustration or sheer exhaustion. There isn’t a single minute of Sophie’s week or energy that isn’t consumed with practicing, studying, working on student council issues, and perfecting her appearance—all without ever showing anyone other than her parents what really goes into her all-star packaging.

Be bold and brave…but make sure not to step on any toes or offend anyone. Go for what you want…as long as it’s what we expect of you. Speak your mind…but make sure to smile when you do. Don’t settle for less than you’re worth…but ask for it nicely. Work hard…but make it look easy. This chapter is a glimpse inside how popular culture shapes the Perfect Girl, and what happens when she comes up against the confusing messages lobbed her way in the era of girl power.

Pretty Like Mommy

Remember, we can’t exclusively blame parents for creating generations of girls who are afraid of failing, or speaking up, or stepping out of line. The socially accepted gender beliefs that we—and our parents, and their parents—grew up with are so deeply etched into our psyches that it would be shocking if they didn’t show up in our parenting. No, we need to look deeper into the culture we live in to find where the gender expectations are still flourishing and reseeding themselves in the next generation.

The cultural indoctrination starts early, with toys. Kids learn gender roles as early as thirty months old, and the toys and other merchandise they are nudged toward play a big role in that education. Studies show that play choices for boys and girls can have lasting effects on how they view themselves and their abilities, including what they believe they will be good at professionally when they grow up. It’s almost hard to believe that child play can have that powerful effect, but it does. This goes way beyond trucks versus dolls or pink versus blue. The skills these toys teach set the gender narrative for what kids are “supposed” to like and excel at. The majority of toys and games created for boys like LEGOs and Minecraft are geared toward developing large motor skills like running and kicking and spatial skills, which are the 3-D visualization skills that are said to predict a child’s achievement in STEM subjects. Toys for girls, on the other hand, generally build fine motor skills such as writing and making crafts, language development, and social interaction. Just in case you’re thinking we’ve evolved past this, research from scholar Elizabeth Sweet at UC Davis shows that the gender marketing of toys is even more pronounced today than it was fifty years ago, when gender discrimination and sexism were as baked into our culture as apple pie.

We can’t talk about the influence of toys without mentioning princesses. The effect the princess movies and paraphernalia has on girls has been hotly debated in recent years. Of all the conversations and articles out there, it was a study done at Brigham Young University that resonated the most for me. Professor Sarah M. Coyne observed 198 preschoolers and found that a full 96 percent of the girls engaged with “princess culture” in one way or another. That’s not a huge surprise, but more interesting is how, when she observed these same kids one year later, she found that the more these girls watched princess movies and played with princess toys, the more they exhibited stereotypical female behavior like playing nicely and quietly, avoiding getting dirty, or being submissive, passive, physically weak, and valuing qualities such as being nurturing, thin, pretty, and helpful. This sticks with us in profound ways, whether we know it or not. A related study showed that grown women who self-identify as “princesses” are less interested in working, give up more easily on challenges, and place higher value on superficial qualities like appearance.

Here’s a particularly horrifying example of the messages girls receive from the world of toys. In 2014, Mattel released a Barbie book called I Can Be a Computer Engineer. Sounds empowering, right? But just wait. A few pages in, Barbie is having a conversation with her little sister, Skipper, about her robot puppy. Skipper says, “Your robot puppy is so sweet, can I play your game?” Barbie laughs and says, “I’m only creating the design ideas, I need Steven and Brian’s help to turn it into a real game.” No, I’m not joking.

In a few words Barbie told girls: “You’re not good enough or smart enough. Computers are a boy’s thing so if you’re going to build something technical, you’re going to need their help.” Leave it to Barbie to articulate some of the worst stereotypes that girls and women face when it comes to technology.

Eventually, playtime ends, but once we are done with toys, popular culture swooshes in to reinforce those gender constructs. For the majority of their waking hours, kids get bombarded with not-so-subtle images and messages about what’s expected of them and how they are supposed to behave. These messages are everywhere they look, from fashion to movies to headline news. They see T-shirts in the window of Gymboree emblazoned either PRETTY LIKE MOMMY or SMART LIKE DADDY, and older teenage girls (whom they idolize) wearing the popular T-shirt from Forever 21 that says ALLERGIC TO ALGEBRA. They watch a viral video of a principal in South Carolina telling girls that unless they are a size 0 or 2, wearing leggings will make them look fat, and they hear about how presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was called a “nasty woman” for speaking boldly during a debate.

Needless to say, media and pop culture support a completely different reality for men. The images that boys see, from Marvel superhero movies to HBO’s Silicon Valley, reinforce the same messages they get early in life: that they need to be daring and brave—physically, intellectually, and otherwise. That part isn’t news, but this gets interesting when we see how we can trace a straight line from the messages men have absorbed about masculinity to their behavior. In one experiment, a researcher at University of California-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business assessed his male subjects’ risk tolerance with a gambling assignment, then had them read about “masculinity.” Then he assessed them again. Just by reading about masculinity, the men, on average, become substantially more risk-tolerant than they had been before they read the material.

Comedian Amy Schumer highlighted the glaring differences in the messages boys and girls receive when she posted a photo on Instagram of a newsstand display showing Girls’ Life and Boys’ Life magazines right next to each other. The cover of Boys’ Life said in bold letters “Explore Your Future” and was covered in photos of airplanes, firefighter helmets, microscopes, computers, and a human brain. The cover of Girls’ Life featured a blond teenaged cutie surrounded by the taglines “Wake Up Pretty!,” “Fall Fashion You’ll Love: 100+ ways to slay on the first day,” and “Best. Year. Ever. How to Have Fun, Make Friends and Get All A’s.” These might sound like quaint vintage headlines from the 1950s, but nope, they were proudly displayed without a hint of irony in 2017. Schumer’s one-word comment neatly summed up the disgust I feel at this messaging: “No.” In my research for this book, I came across shortstoryguide.com, a website to help middle- and high school teachers and students find stories organized by theme. I typed in the word bravery, and of the seventeen stories listed, only four featured female protagonists. One was a princess who pretends to be ashamed for shooting a lion who lunged at her. Another, an aspiring astronomer, “has to help her family during the charreada, a Mexican-style rodeo. She is caught between her own desires and tradition.” Meanwhile, the male protagonists in the remaining stories bravely confront violent gangs and a Nazi spy, go bear hunting and capture a Russian fort—free of shame, or family obligations.

A study done by the Observer in conjunction with Nielsen that assessed the one hundred most popular children’s books of 2017 revealed a few casually sexist trends that stubbornly prevail in modern literature. Male characters are twice as likely to take leading roles while females play the sidekick; when the characters took the form of animals, the powerful, dangerous bears, dragons, and tigers were mostly male while the smaller and more vulnerable birds, cats, and insects were female. One-fifth of these books had no female characters at all.

Boys and girls will model themselves after what they see, and even what they don’t see; as children’s rights activist Marian Wright Edelman famously said, “You can’t be what you can’t see.” There’s a running theme in movies and on television about the nerdy guy who gets rejected and goes on to become Mark Zuckerberg, but there’s no similar narrative for girls. We muse and debate why there aren’t more girls interested in tech, but for one key factor, just look at the media’s depiction of the “brogrammer”—the brilliant but socially awkward white guy in a hoodie who is obsessed with computers—that girls look at and say, “Um, no thanks. I don’t want to be him.” Instead, they watch as women backstab and screech at each other while hurling over tables on The Housewives of New Jersey (and New York…and Beverly Hills…and Atlanta . .), and catfight their way to the final rose ceremony on The Bachelor. Needless to say, these are not the best role models. Women who take power roles on-screen are usually depicted as cold, ruthless bitches, like Daenerys Targaryen on Game of Thrones and Cheryl Blossom on Riverdale, or as volatile crazies, like Frances McDormand as a grieving mother in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri or Viola Davis as the formidable but unstable lawyer on How to Get Away with Murder.

When brave women are portrayed, they are often almost cartoonish in their depiction. Granted we had the amazing Wonder Woman movie, with a fierce and kind heroine who spoke twelve languages and literally did not know what the men were talking about when they told her she couldn’t do something, but she was a superhero demigod who isn’t exactly relatable on a human scale. Ditto for the lead character Bella in the Twilight series; she is a meek and needy mortal for the first three-quarters of the story, gaining supernatural strength and ferocity only after she morphs into a vampire. In the reboot of the cult-classic movie Tomb Raider, Alicia Vikander’s Lara Croft is a hard-bodied badass, but what real-life woman do you know who survives crash landings, parachutes off the top of a waterfall, and fights off machine gun attacks with a bow and arrow—all while managing to look camo-chic and sexy?

It’s important to see people like you on-screen; the unbridled, infectious joy we saw spread across the Internet after Jodie Whittaker was cast as the first female Dr. Who makes that clear. I decided I wanted to be a lawyer when I was thirteen years old and saw actress Kelly McGillis kick serious ass in the movie The Accused. That was the first time I’d seen a female character in a movie go up against the big boys without pulling any punches. As my father and I left the movie theater, I turned to him and said, “Dad, I want to be her.” Think about all the young girls now who know who Katherine Johnson is because of Hidden Figures, and who now see being a NASA scientist as a possibility; these are the kinds of realistic role models we need for our girls.

perfectgirl

Today, social media feeds the expectation of polished perfection, perhaps more than any other influence out there. Girls spend up to nine hours each day scrolling through endless feeds of their friends’ flawless photos and posts—all doctored and edited to show the world how popular, carefree, smart, pretty, and cool they are.

Listening to some of the millennial women I met with, I couldn’t help feeling terrified for them. It was astonishing to hear how relentless but utterly normalized the pressure is for them to project an image of perfection in their online life—way beyond what I even imagined. The “personal branding” phenomenon has become an obsession for them; taking and editing the perfect photo consumes their time and efforts like nothing else. I listened to a group of friends in their midtwenties debating who was most obsessed with getting the ideal shot; they were torn between Sasha, who practices her photo faces in front of the mirror every morning to see what works best with her “look” that day, and Layla, who routinely makes her boyfriend wake up with her at sunrise for an early morning photo shoot in order to capture herself in the flattering light of dawn. Other girls told me about how the “ugly” pictures that someone had posted of them haunt them, or about how they felt panicked that they need to positively document every little thing they do to stay relevant in the eyes of their peers.

Perhaps as a way to preserve a sense of their true self, they literally separate themselves into two identities: their polished, carefully cultivated online persona, and the real them. Many set up separate Instagram or Snapchat accounts, and it’s only on their private accounts accessible to only their closest friends that they’ll post pictures of themselves in sweatpants, share a goofy video of themselves learning to hoop dance (it’s a thing), or post a message expressing grief when a relationship ends.

They know this identity splitting isn’t healthy but feel powerless to do anything about it. Positive and pretty: that’s what’s expected of them, and if they don’t comply, it’s a one-way ticket to judgment city. Anna, a twenty-five-year-old grad student, used the phrase “negativity shaming” for the pushback they often get if they post anything too raw or real. Anna recounted a time when she was really down after a breakup with a boyfriend; she posted something about how down she was feeling, and instead of rallying around to support her, people commented that she was being “superintense.” She removed the post within an hour.

It’s safer and easier for girls to stick to the stuff that gets them the most likes, because that’s their currency. The more you play by the rules, the more followers and likes you have, and in perfect-girl world, the more followers and likes you have, the more valuable you are. Curating is everything.

So is comparing. According to Catherine Steiner-Adair, psychologist and author of The Big Disconnect: Parenting, Childhood, and Family Connection in the Digital Age, it takes only nine minutes of scrolling through everyone else’s profiles and pictures for girls’ anxiety to spike. Their FOMO—fear of missing out—is very, very real. Every post of a fun gathering they weren’t a part of makes them feel ostracized and unwanted, every perfectly polished photo causes paroxysms of inadequacy. They are constantly competing in the never-ending game of who has more followers, whose photo got more likes, and so on. Hey, I get it; I’m forty-two years old and I still find myself refreshing Instagram posts obsessively to see how many likes I have.

Catherine recalled one girl she interviewed who frequently goes on nice vacations with her family. After one such trip, she came back and told Catherine, “I had had this awesome vacation until I saw where this other girl went. I started thinking, Are we poor?” Catherine initially thought maybe she was kidding, but she wasn’t. “First world problems, of course, but the idea that the comparison would dampen the meaning and enthusiasm of her great family vacation is terribly sad,” Catherine commented.

Then there’s the truly nasty side of all this, the fallout that can range from hurt and embarrassment to serious psychological damage. Unfortunately, the shaming and bullying are not new; even shaming and bullying on social media are not new. But what is new is how young it starts. These days, girls as young as seven years old are on Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat, far too young to have developed strategies to cope with the judgment they find there. A mom of a ten-year-old told me a story about her daughter, whose first Instagram post two years ago was a photo of a bowl of chocolate ice cream. A girl from school commented, “Ewww…is that poop?” Shamed and embarrassed, her daughter hasn’t posted a single thing since.

Another mom told me—her voice shaking through her tears—that her thirteen-year-old is struggling with an eating disorder, which began shortly after she posted a picture of herself in a bathing suit and towel; a group of boys screen-shot and circulated her picture with the tagline, “Pig in a blanket.” I recently read about a horrifying Snapchat craze in which middle-school kids competed to see who could post the cruelest insult about another kid’s personality or appearance.

As if girls didn’t have enough to contend with, many can’t resist logging on to sites like www.prettyscale.com to upload pictures of themselves and receive the answer promised by the site’s provocative tagline, “Am I beautiful or ugly?” (the helpful small print below says, “Please do not start if you have low self-esteem or confidence issues,” which would seem to rule out all preteen and teenage girls), or sites where you can post anonymously like ask.fm, Kik, and Voxer. Anonymous sites, not surprisingly, are fertile ground for the cruel cyberbullying that has been linked to tragic suicides, such as that of twelve-year-old Rebecca Ann Sedwick, who killed herself at the repeated urging of a group of middle-schooler bullies. It’s heartbreaking. If ever there was a reason for us to learn to be brave, it is so we can teach the next generation how to make empowering choices in the face of messages and challenges like these.

Changing the Code

Looking at all this, we start to see how deeply we as adult women have been wired to play it safe and to color well inside the lines of perfection—and what it costs us. It’s like a code that has been programmed into us, over many years of perfect-girl training. But take it from someone who actually now does know a thing or two about coding: all code can be revised and rewritten—including the one that dictates whether you choose the path of perfection, or bravery.