RH: How did you decide to do this broad survey?
JJB: Remember, I'm a historian, a social historian of American
women and girls. My earlier book, Fasting Girls, a history of
anorexia nervosa, got a lot of attention. So I went around to colleges
and universities across the country, lecturing, and then did a lot of
speaking to women's groups. People would come up and speak to me
privately afterwards. From their comments, I became interested in
taking another look at our preoccupation with the body, but without
the emphasis on pathology in that earlier work. A lot of people
thought I'd write a history of bulimia, but I wanted to move on to
the normative. There'd been good books by many writers, like Carol
Gilligan and Mary Pipher, on female adolescence. I wanted to give a
historical context to what they were saying about "body angst."
RH: It's really fascinating to look at the broader cultural forces
behind something like, for example, the changing attitudes towards
acne. How the gradual placement of mirrors in the bathroom
combined with a growing emphasis on cleanliness as a marker of
class status to push young girls to examine their skin fervently, for
example.
JJB: Most people believe that the current preoccupation with
looks is all from the media. What I'm trying to show is that it started
long ago in basic social and economic transformations that define
modern life. Many of the causes are positive marks of progress, like
better attention to hygiene, improved middle class parenting, or the
rise of the medical profession. But there's a flipside to those things in
the escalating pressures they placed on developing young girls, who
are experiencing sexual maturation several years younger than their
counterparts a century ago.
I don't think there's anything inherently dangerous in earlier sexual
maturation. It's really a sign of affluence, proof of improved
nutrition, declining susceptibility to infectious diseases and so on. But
it puts these girls in a cultural situation that isn't equipped to deal
with those changes. Our social attitudes haven't progressed as swiftly
as the maturation process has.
RH: In the final chapter, you bring up 'girl advocacy' as a way to
help speed up the cultural process.
JJB: One of the things I talk about is the need for
intergenerational dialogue between women and girls about what it
means to grow up in a female body. Obviously, that same dialogue
could take place between men and boys, but it's critical for girls right
now because they're experiencing such a wide range of problems
across all social classes.
What makes me different from someone on the right is that in
addition to talking about ways that we can protect girls, I'm also
advocating that we develop ways to help girls become comfortable
talking about intimacy (no matter what the gender of their partner
is). Girls need to learn more than "No means no;" they need to know
how to negotiate, to tell their partners what they want or need. They
need to be able to say, "Yes, but not this way." If they don't feel good
about themselves, if they're dragged down by poor self-perception,
they can be more easily manipulated and coerced. There are girls
who, because they want so badly to be wanted, don't recognize
sexual harassment when they see it.
There are a lot more things I could have said in that chapter. I think
if the book has a weakness, it's that I'm not a social policy person
and I hadn't really had the time to think about all the interventions
we might make. Maybe we need more female-to-female
intervention, a lifting of some of the burden off girls' shoulders. Most
women don't interact with girls unless they're our own daughters or
if we're paid to do so as teachers or social workers. I've often said
that if women of the baby boom era would take the moral fervor
they showed in protesting Vietnam and redirect it to the cause of
girls, the results would be very interesting. But there's no quick
fix.
