In my class’s reading for this week in Reading Lolita in Tehran, one passage particularly stuck out to me. One of Nafisi’s students, Sanaz, will soon be traveling to Turkey to marry her fiancé, who she has not seen in over six years. Sanaz, while excited, is also quite anxious. Nafisi comments: “It was hard to tell if she was going to Turkey to please the others [ex. her fiancé, her family] or because she was really in love” (263).
This caught my eye because this past weekend, I began reading Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls. The book was recommended to me by a classmate (check out her blog here!), and so far it’s been very illuminating on the current problematic state of young women and how they came to be this way.
Mary Pipher, the author, introduces the book by explaining many of the possible root causes for adolescent insecurity and negative decisions. She explains that in the transition from girlhood to womanhood, “Girls become ‘female impersonators’ who fit their whole selves into small, crowded places… [they] stop thinking, ‘Who am I? What do I want?’ and start thinking, ‘What must I do to please others?’” (22).
I was startled by the parallel in these two situations. The uncomfortable phenomenon of teenager girls learning to put others before themselves is replicated in the lives of these Iranian women. I believe that this emotion in both situations is caused by the culture they grow up in. After the revolution in Iran, “women, under law, were considered to have half the worth of men” (Nafisi 261). To put this in another cultural perspective, in antebellum America, slaves were counted as 3/5 of a white person in a population census. In this patriarchal society, women were worth less than slaves, and therefore could be imbued with the belief that their only value was in pleasing those around them.
This might seem difficult to connect to in modern America, where we claim to have equal rights for all. On the radio this weekend, I heard a song (which I can‘t seem to find the name of) but to paraphrase, it consisted of a woman explaining how she only felt happy when she was making her man happy. I mentally shook my head in disgust. The song had to be about 50 years old, and I couldn’t imagine that message reverberating with any modern audience. Yet to my surprise, I discovered that everyone’s favorite ex-pop idol, Britney Spears released a song in the late 1990’s entitled, “Born to Make You Happy”. I think you can guess what it’s about.
While I don’t believe this is the prevailing mindset of most educated women AT ALL, it is a pressure that can be dangerous if left to run rampant, as seen in Pipher‘s conclusions. I look forward to continuing both of these books to understand more about developing identities amidst the adverse conditions that can be found in many different forms, all over the world.
Great post, Jenna! Reading this reminded me of this morning, when I was driving to school and "Single Ladies" came on the radio, and the line "If you liked it, you shoulda put a ring on it". Hearing this, I thought for the first time how the "it" in that phrase was referring to a woman, and how that works to objectify women. This realization was so surprising to me, because "Single Ladies" is used so often as an empowerment anthem by women, and yet it still has this "women as objects" mentality.
ReplyDeleteThanks for commenting, Kyle! I think it's really unfortunate how women are still regularly degraded and objectified in our modern culture, and hopefully we can all work together to notice it more and speak up against it.
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