On Mercator Net, Carolyn Moynihan reports on the latest book from Leonard Sax, a companion to his Boys Adrift. Girls on the Edge looks at how girls are coping – or failing to cope – with a society that doesn’t give them guidance in how to be female:
Sexual identity, the cyberbubble, obsessions, environmental toxins: these are the four factors driving the current crisis for girls that Sax describes in his latest book, Girls On The Edge. It could just as easily have been called Girls On The Surface, because that is the cumulative effect of the risks he is concerned about: girls focused on how they look, on performance, on what they do rather than who they are; girls insatiable for the next bit of gossip or the next A grade, and inconsolable when they meet with setbacks and failures.
That grim scenario represents only half the book, however; the other half is about solutions, and what those solutions have in common is the importance of gender — one of the most fraught issues of our age… In his new book he says:
But girls still want to know, What does it mean to be a woman? Boys still want to know, What does it mean to be a man? We don’t tell them. As a result, the marketplace fills the vacuum, providing “the ready-made masculine and the ready-made feminine” which are caricatures of the real thing; but young people don’t recognize them as caricatures, because they have received no guidance. (page 185)
Most enduring cultures of which we have any record have taken this process — the process of transition to a gendered adulthood — very seriously. We ignore it. Indeed American parents seldom speak to their children at all about the meaning of womanhood or manhood (as opposed to generic, un-gendered adulthood). Most parents today don’t know what to say.
Joyful Papist 