Parents, teachers, and psychologists alike warn one another about the horrors of the teenage girl, directly transplanting the concept of infants’ “terrible twos” to “terrible thirteens.” With the entrance into junior high, popular culture states that the adventurous girl turns into an emotional, distracted teenager, more concerned with the number of likes she gets on Instagram than the homework teachers assign her. Though the majority of these ideas are gross generalizations left over from a misogynistic, patriarchal period of time, Therapist Mary Pipher perpetuates them, describing the teenage girls she works with as superficial and overly sensitive to the opinions of others. In her passage about working with adolescent girls, Pipher explores …show more content…
She ends her allusion to Shakespeare’s Hamlet with a description of Ophelia’s death: “dressed in elegant clothes that weigh her down, she drowns in a stream filled with flowers.” The river and elegant clothes serve as a metaphor for the stifling societal expectations of young women that sap them of their personality, drowning their old, adventurous selves. Furthermore, the juxtaposition of a flower-filled stream and elegant clothes with death shows the irony of society’s demands — hundreds of advertisements by multimillion dollar companies cater to teenage girls, each advocating for a separate type of individuality or creativity like wildflowers in an endless stream of suggestion, but they coalesce to prevent the growth of natural individuality and creativity. Furthermore, Pipher argues that increasing societal expectation of dependance promotes self-sufficient girls to give up their autonomy. She describes this phenomenon by referencing fairytales, illustrating princesses who “wander away from home, encounter great dangers, are rescued by princes and are transformed into passive and docile creatures.” The sentence itself transitions from active voice to passive voice, mimicking the mental metamorphosis Pipher describes, and the shift in the middle subtly suggests a separate storyline for those fairytales. Since it is the young girls that encounter the