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

Throughout this book, and especially in Chapter 8, I note how vigilant a girl must be about boys, men, and the masculine; but also, how equally vigilantly those of us who care about girls must focus on seeing human love for what it is: an adaptable, but also an established, dance between a flawed but essential feminine way of being and a flawed but essential masculine way of being.

When we explore girls' lives from a broader perspective than a set of feminist theories, when we listen to girls and boys -- and women and men -- with tender ears and eyes, we discover that most girls' lives are not dominated by their victimization and by misogyny; most males are not trained to hate women; and that all girls experience normal developmental crises which, by understanding female nature, we can best help without attacking and distancing males, but instead by noticing how they are ready to be our allies.

THEORY 4
GIRLS' LIVES ARE DOMINATED BY GENDER STEREOTYPES THAT LEAVE GIRLS ONE-DOWN AND POWERLESS.

Most of our girls' social problems, especially as adolescents, grow from the gender stereotypes females are forced into by our culture. These gender types -- Barbies, images of thin women, and female gender roles in the workplace and home -- are the primary causes of the low self-esteem we see in young women.

Kristen, fourteen, came into Gail's office with her mother, who confessed to being unable to help her daughter. "Kristen suffers from low self-esteem," she explained. "I think she's being stereotyped by everyone, not just boys but the girls too. She's pretty. It can be a problem." Kristen agreed that kids picked on for her large breasts, and even her model-like looks.

Kristen was tall for her age, and very developed physically. She had long brownish-blond hair that was cut high above her right eye but hung below her left. She wore a lot of makeup, in that way adolescent girls do, that makes us think they are trying to look adult. Within a half hour of talking with her, Gail ascertained that she felt anything but grown-up. She felt overwhelmed by life. Two years before, her parents had divorced. Her grandmother, with whom she'd been close, had died a year before. In school, she'd discovered she had to study harder now than before, but no longer had motivation.

"And my mother's on me all the time," she complained. "She wants me to be more like this or like that. It's always something." At some level she knew her mother was "on her" because she worried for her daughter; nonetheless, Kristen felt more inadequate in the face of her mother's love, rather than more safe and more accomplished.

Margeaux, twelve, a straight-A student, was just beginning puberty, talkative, self-aware -- yet seemed to be moving toward anorexia.

"I just hate food," she told me. "I hate everything about it. I'm sorry I make trouble for my parents. But I just don't want to eat." This had been going on for about four months, since just after her menses began. Her mother told me, "The problem is, she reads all the magazines about thin girls and wants to be like them." Many adolescent girls who struggle with eating disorders will not admit their compulsion. Margeaux admitted it, but couldn't change it, so she would eat for a few days, even a week, then starve herself for a few days.

In the cases of Kristen and Margeaux, Gail and I were both faced with adolescent girls about whom the conventional idea that gender stereotyping in school, in magazines, and in the culture was destroying self-esteem could have been easily applied. In this fourth feminist theory -- promulgated mainly during the 1990s through studies put out by the American Association of University Women, Carol Gilligan's research at the Harvard School of Education, David and Myra Sadker, and then spreading throughout the news media -- those who care for girls, whether parents or professionals, are warned of the destructive power of gender stereotypes on adolescent girls' self-esteem. In some cases, the work behind these theories is called "the self-esteem research."

Copyright © 2002 by Michael Gurian