Excerpt from The Wonder of Girls by Michael Gurian, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

In the feminist logic of raising girls, there is a high emphasis on female independence and social status, but the reward of relational stability is downgraded. Females are constantly embattled by having to make it on their own.

All this might not seem like a crucial issue to you or me were we not raising the next generation of daughters. But because we are, we must firmly establish where we stand, as parents, on how female independence from males will be encouraged in our house. Even if we don't spend time thinking about it, we are either pushing our girls toward competition with males or holding them back; we are either teaching them to trust males, or not. As parents in our era, we are in the thick of matters of female independence.

As we search for new logic for girls' lives, every parent and caregiver may find themselves challenged to develop a womanist vision -- one that is neither predominantly patriarchal nor feminist: one that provides for the equal status of girls and women without robbing them of the natural need for dependency on men. Meeting this challenge will be a major, and very practical, subject of this book. For if we succeed in meeting it, our girls will fully achieve personal identity, relational stability, and social success.

THEORY 3
GIRLS ARE VICTIMS.

Today's girls are, first and foremost, victims of a male-dominant society.

For about a year, between 2000 and 2001, I watched the popular nighttime crime drama Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. This program deals very realistically with some of the sickest perpetrators of sexual crime in our culture. In one episode, a fifteen-year-old girl from Romania is manipulated by a pedophile to not only become the au pair of his daughter, but a victim of his violent sexual fantasies. Her developing self is erased by his dominance; he withholds food from her, convinces her to become utterly dependent on him, locks her up, ties her up, constantly rapes her. When she is rescued by the detectives, she is nearly dead, locked in a coffinlike box in which she cannot move and can barely breathe.

This is only one episode of Special Victims Unit, and not even the most frightening.

I stopped watching the show because it was so effectively written, acted, and directed. As a father of daughters, it was constantly like watching my own girls being hurt, and I simply could not stand it anymore.

Like so many television shows, movies, and newspaper stories, Special Victims Unit displays the dangers that girls face, and the sickness, violence, and harassment that males are capable of perpetrating upon them. One in four females will experience rape or sexual abuse at the hands of males during their lifetimes, according to the FBI. Just under one in ten will experience domestic violence at the hands of men. Many will experience sexual harassment at school or in the workplace.

Some girls and women experience victimization, and many live in a kind of fear males do not understand. This undeniable fact was -- like the fact that some women felt second-class in marriage and society -- a foundation of early feminist thinking.

As feminism developed in scope and power, this fact-for-some women became a truth-for-all. Feminist theorists, such as Anne Wilson-Schaef, argued that not only are some girls and women victims of males, but that all girls and women are inherently victims of the male-dominant system. Very quickly the "victim theory" developed, teaching that male identity is linked to victimizing females, and that men, masculinity, male social systems, and "male-dominant society" are inherently hostile to girls and women. It also taught that female identity itself is largely based on girls' victimization by male systems; girls and women are victims or sisters of victims or former victims or potential victims of males or male systems.

Copyright © 2002 by Michael Gurian