Adolescent Girls in Distress - Springer Publishing Company

18 adolescent girls in distress
Supergirl, aggressive and agreeable, smart and stunning, all the while
undergoing paralyzing pressure to be perfect. The nonprofit organization
Girls Inc. commented on the pressure for girls to be “supergirl”
in 2000 with the publication of the report, The Supergirl Dilemma: The
Pressure on Girls to Be Perfect, Accomplished, Thin, and Accommodating,
noting that these expectations for girls are unrealistic and can result in
negative outcomes for girls.
The pressure for perfection teaches some girls to work tirelessly
in today’s fast-paced culture to multitask her way toward the goal
of meeting unrealistic and contradictory goals, setting her up for a
sense of frustration and failure. For example, if a girl learns that she
should be highly concerned about others’ feelings and do whatever
she can to maintain her relationships, how can she simultaneously
be highly competitive on her volleyball team, competing against
her teammates and friends for the top spot on the team? If a girl’s
strengths are rooted in her ability to connect with and care for others,
how can she nurture this strength while also fighting to be the
“winner” both academically and athletically? She is wondering,
can she be expected to be a Diva, Bachelorette, or Real Housewife
while also running a Fortune 500 company or becoming the next U.S.
president?
In response, many girls are learning that they must overlook
these contradictions in order to do it all, and to be it all. In her book,
Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters (2007), Courtney Martin writes about
the pressures that current girls and women have learned to place on
themselves:
We are the daughters of feminists who said, “You can be anything”
and we heard “You have to be everything.” We must get A’s. We must
make money. We must save the world. We must be thin. We must be
unflappable. We must be beautiful. We are the anorectics, the bulimics,
the overexercisers, the overeaters. We must be perfect. We must
make it look effortless. (p. 18)
Susan Douglas (2010) also wrote about this conflict as becoming the
price for success that girls (and future women) realize they must pay:
We can excel in school, play sports, go to college, aspire to—and
get—jobs previously reserved for men, be working mothers, and so
forth. But in exchange we must obsess about our faces, weight, breast
size, clothing brands, decorating, perfectly calibrated child-rearing,
about pleasing men, and being envied by other women. (p. 16)
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