Being a Teen (4 page)

Much of the media is created by people and corporations whose main goal is to make money, and the ideas they put across may or may not be the right ideas for you. You don’t want them to “have” you, to have power over you, do you? Probably not, so this is a good time to think about who you are, who you want to be, and what the media is telling you to be.

Mainstream Culture

The general culture we live in is referred to as “mainstream” culture. It is not set in stone. Every decade or so culture tends to change—sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. For example, when I was growing up in the forties, fifties, and early sixties, we saw only white people in TV commercials and on popular TV shows. We never heard women speaking in TV commercials, even those that promoted products used by women. News broadcasters were all white men. White men and male
voices were considered more authoritative and were the only voices we heard. On the radio, in movies, and on television, women characters almost never worked outside the home. They did “women’s work,” which meant they were housewives—period! In the fifties and sixties, male models in magazines or TV ads were not all buffed up with six-pack abs and female models were not nearly as skinny as they are today. These are just a few examples of cultural change.

One huge change is how much more media teens are consuming today than ever before because of the new technologies—more TV channels, iPhones, iPads, and so forth. Because of this, the media is likely to have more influence over you than ever before.

Your Gender Identity

This is the time in your life when you begin to develop a gender identity. Sex is different from gender identity. Sex refers to biology—whether you have a penis or a vagina. Gender identity, on the other hand, is about how you feel about being male or female, how you feel you should behave as a male or female. Some people are asexual, meaning that they feel healthiest by not behaving as any one sex or engaging in anything sexual.

As I write about in
Chapter 12
, some people do not fit into these two distinct gender categories. They may be
transsexual,
transgender,
androgynous
(having characteristics of both masculinity and femininity at the same time), or still questioning their gender identity. Unfortunately, our mainstream culture will make that especially challenging for them by excluding
them or unfairly portraying those who don’t fit into “boy” or “girl” categories.

Regardless of how you identify, we are all very much alike. Whether you’re a girl, boy, trans, questioning, or androgynous, you probably want to be liked, to have friends. We all fear not being experienced enough, being judged, and sometimes suffer “performance anxieties” (not being able to live up to expectations). However, the media often focuses on the differences between girls and boys. There are some important differences—besides the obvious biological ones. Let me try to explain.

Culture and Girls

When they are younger, most girls (if they’re lucky) don’t think too much about how they look, or about being popular and fitting in. They’re just themselves.

What happens to many girls at puberty, when their bodies are developing and they become more aware of what girls are supposed to be like, is often described as “the loss of her true, authentic self.” This does not happen to all girls, and it doesn’t always happen at the same age. But it happens to many girls and they may not even be aware of it. The media plays a big role in this.

Losing Your True Self

Can you think of some way that the culture tries to make you hide or betray who you really are, in order to be what the culture suggests you should be?

Starting now, don’t waste time being anything other than your authentic, true self. Can you think of ways you might do this? I want to say it again: This loss of true self does not happen to all girls. And it doesn’t always happen at the same age. But it happens to many girls and it’s important to be aware of it.

Cultural Messages to Girls

Our culture can make a girl start feeling pressure to

• be sexy

• fit in

• silence herself

• be a pleaser

• wear the “right” clothes or brands

• look “good” and conventionally beautiful

• have the right hair

• be passive rather than active

• be nice rather than honest

• do whatever it takes to be popular

• be a “lady”

• be unselfish

• not show it if she is angry

• not let on how smart she is

• have (and keep) a boyfriend

• be thin

What others can you think of? What pressures do you feel?

Here’s another real-life example of how this can look: A psychologist named Catherine Steiner-Adair was doing
research on girls in a middle school and sometimes she’d invite her students out for pizza. When she would ask the girls what they wanted on their pizzas, the ten-year-olds would want double cheese with pepperoni, the thirteen-year-olds would say, “I don’t know,” and the fifteen-year-olds would answer, “whatever you want.” (Catherine Steiner-Adair and Lisa Sjostrom,
Full of Ourselves: A Wellness Program to Advance Girl Power, Health, and Leadership,
New York: Teachers College Press, 2005, pg. 61.)

Girls can lose confidence when they hide what they really want and who they really are.

How Do You Want to Be Loved?

During adolescence, I thought that only a small portion of myself would be lovable, that if I wasn’t perfect no one would love me. This made me very unhappy. I developed an eating disorder and suffered from depression. Later I learned to ask myself: “Do you want to be loved or do you want an image of yourself to be loved?” How you answer this question can have an impact on the rest of your life.

All of us want to be popular, to have friends. But you are at a time in your development when you need to decide: Is it worth abandoning your true self in order to be super popular or is it better to be true to who you are even if it means you may not be the most popular girl in your class? Notice if the values at this stage of your life seem to be way too much about the outside instead of the inside, where it really counts.

Culture and Boys

If many girls lose their true “voice” at puberty, for boys, it can be when they are very young. At five or six years old, at the start of their formal schooling, boys may have begun to receive messages from the mainstream culture that caused them to lose touch with their feelings.

Cultural Messages to Boys

It may have been from parents, teachers, a coach, or the media that boys got messages about what it takes to be a “real” man:

• Don’t be a sissy.

• Real men don’t cry.

• Don’t be a momma’s boy.

• Don’t show your feelings.

• Don’t ask for help.

• Be tough no matter what.

These are the messages that can make you start to act in the way that you think a man is supposed to be, maybe not who you really are.

A mainstream cultural message to boys is that it’s manly to bully people who are different—perhaps people who are smaller, unathletic, unconventional looking, nerdy, vulnerable, or poor. The boys who engage in bullying are often the ones who are uncertain about their own manhood and cover it by violence and bullying. Or they feel that they have to bully to be popular.

If a man thinks he has to shut down his heart, cut himself off from feelings in order to prove he is a man, it will make it
harder for him to have intimate relationships. Close, emotional relationships are healthy and fun. They make it easier to be happy, survive hardships, and enjoy life.

Make a list of all the messages you have received about what it means to be a man. (Some examples are to be brave, macho, tough, a leader, in control, to never walk away from a fight, not to cry, not to let others see your needs, to be a team player, and more.) Some messages are good ones and some aren’t. Write them down. Then, when you’ve done that, go down the list and think about where you got each message. Was it from what you see and hear from the media? Was it from your father or a coach or a teacher or other guys? It’s a good thing to realize that many of the ideas bubbling around in your brain come from outside yourself, and they may or may not be right for you. Maybe they are but maybe they aren’t, and it’s good to know the difference. It’s important to learn to look inside yourself and see the good person you are and then to see the difference between those good qualities and some of the not-so-good qualities on your list.

Getting in Touch with Your Feelings

Dr. Michael Kimmel writes many books for boys and men. Here is what he tells his son Zach when they talk about how a boy needs to manage all the cultural messages he is receiving about being a man: “I tell him to imagine a boat on stormy seas, buffeted back and forth by forces that are stronger than he is. You have to steer clear of danger, but you can’t just drift with the tide. You have to be active, steer the boat, take it where you want it to go, to that safe harbor.”

One way to steer your boat is to think about
emotions—your own and other people’s. When you do this it makes you more capable of
empathy.
¹
Here are three things that can help you do this:

• Try naming your feelings, such as sad, nervous, excited, or happy. Also melancholy and wistful—two examples of in-between emotions—not just happy or sad.

• Identify what other people are feeling by their facial expression, the tone of their voice, their body language.

• Try to identify what events or situations create certain emotions. For example, do you find that when you’ve lost someone or something important to you, you feel sad, or that it causes you to become angry or feel threatened?

Learning about your emotions will help you now, and also when you are older. It can help repair hurt feelings, solve relationship problems at home or at work, and maintain strong bonds with friends, spouses, and children over your lifespan.

Boys Compared with Girls

Another thing that our mainstream culture does is encourage the idea that boys are somehow superior to girls. This is apparent when a man feels it’s okay to hit a woman, to view her as a weaker or inferior person, or to have sex with a woman even when she has said “no.” It can cause boys to think girls should be available, passive, not too smart, always sweet, not strong
and assertive. Often, when a woman speaks her mind she is called a bitch. When a man does, he is called forceful.

Looking down on, disrespecting, females is a large part of our popular culture. It is all around us and it is harmful not just to females but ultimately to boys and men as well. If you grow up assuming this attitude is okay, you may have a hard time having a happy, loving relationship with a woman and with children and you will be numbing the human, tender, loving parts of yourself.

Boys are not better than girls just as girls are not better than boys. You are both wonderfully different. Yet, at the same time, each human being has a little of the male and a little of the female. This is normal and healthy.

Now is the time in your development when you need to become aware of aspects of mainstream culture that are disrespectful and dehumanizing and not let them influence you. This may not be easy. Boys who remain sensitive, emotional, and kind to girls may be teased and called names and may lose some of their female friends, too. You may be afraid that if you tell your friends to stop behaving disrespectfully toward girls they’ll stop being your friends. And maybe they will. But you are entering a time in your life when you are beginning to define your identity, your values as a person, as a man. Think about whether you want to hang with boys who don’t treat girls, or other people in general, with respect.

How to Move Forward

More and more men—athletes, doctors, teachers, actors, politicians, firefighters, all kinds of men—are fighting against the culture’s toxic view of masculinity. They speak out in many
ways—through organizations, books, documentaries, public policies, and in the way they raise their sons—about what’s wrong with the old myths about manhood. At the end of this chapter I give a list of some of these organizations and books. They point out that “real men” are those who are brave enough to respect and speak up on behalf of their female friends and other males who may be “different.”

Just as real girls can be strong, smart, and able to change tires and fix things, boys can be strong, smart, and sensitive. They can prefer to read a book or write a song or a poem than play football. They can be a girl’s best friend and not think they have to pressure her into having sex. They can walk away from a bully instead of feeling obliged to fight back. They can do all these things and still be masculine. A boy can be strong
and
sensitive, brave
and
vulnerable.

The Media and Sex

A lot of what is shown in the media relates to sex, and it is often an exaggerated, unrealistic view of it. Think about what this does to your own attitudes about sex. Do you feel that you should look and act sexy all the time to attract someone’s attention? Do you believe that you need to be sexier or to have sex to be popular and fit in? Do you think sex is the most important part of life? Has the media caused you to think about sex in a casual way so that you don’t worry about the consequences because you can just laugh it off?

In reality, sex can be a beautiful experience, but the media distorts it, blows it out of proportion, in order to manipulate
you into watching a particular movie or TV show, buying something that you think will make you sexier and more popular, trying to be like somebody you see in magazines, on TV, or in the movies.