116: Girls: Beauty standards, entitlement and misogyny

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Rachel, hello and welcome to teenagers.

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Untangled the audio hug for parents going through the teen years. I'm Rachel Richards, journalist, parenting coach, mother of two teenagers and two bonus daughters. Now whenever I invite people to talk to us, it's because they're working on something that genuinely matters to me. I've been trying to cover what's going on with boys in education and society, because I can see that things are going off track. And I started to think maybe I need to do more on girls. I did do an episode on why girls wear bikinis and take photos in them. But apart from that, given I've got four girls, it's time. So when I was contacted about the book called sexism and Sensibility by Harvard educated psychologist Joanne Finkelstein, my 18 year old daughter's response was, yes, please, Mommy. I really want to hear that interview. So welcome. Joanne Finkelstein,

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it's such a pleasure to be here. Rachel,

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thank you for coming now. You have more than two decades of experience working with girls in your practice and one of the and you have a daughter who's the same age as one of mine. And one of the things I love about your book is that you've included so many stories from your own practice that actually illustrate this. Because, you know, people go like, well, you know, it's over. Sex isn't over.

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And I think as a mother, I find it incredibly difficult to navigate, because I don't want to admit to my daughters that things aren't the way I'd like them to be. So there are times I know when I've looked at something and thought, do I how do I navigate that? And I've perhaps just pushed it to the side, rather than admitting, yes, that's really sexist. And I think your book The message is something a bit different to that. How would you view the role of a mother or a parent in navigating you know, when things come up and the kids go, Oh, it doesn't look right. You

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know, first of all, I empathize with you and all of the parents out there who don't want to talk about this stuff with their daughters, right? Because, you know, with my own daughter, I I felt very sheepish about talking about it. I actually felt more comfortable talking about it with my son, because he does have these privileges, and he wasn't going to feel as targeted. But with her, I really worried that she would feel inferior, or that I was sort of robbing her of the sense that she lives in a fair world. And so what happened is I started to notice all of these ways that she was noticing sexism without having any language for it, right? So, for example, in the book I talk about, when I first introduced sexism to her, right?

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We were watching Master Chef Junior, and we were watching several seasons in a row because, you know, they had already come out. And the first season, she was like, I think the girl's gonna win. The girl's gonna win, you know? And she was so excited, and then the girl didn't win, and she was sad, and then the next season, she's like, maybe the girl will win.

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And I sort of watched her hope dwindle, and at some point she said, Girls never win. And I and I was like, you know, what? What am I doing? She is begging to have this information. I'm not actually protecting her by not allowing her to know that this stuff does exist. And so there's all these ways that we can bring sexism into the conversation without overwhelming them, without scaring them, but with still giving them the language that they need, so that when they encounter it, they don't internalize it, right? They know something is wrong with the culture, not with them,

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right? And that's the critical thing, because I think a lot of girls tend to internalize and think, oh, it's something wrong with me. And I love that you mentioned that with your son, you feel more comfortable, but, but it's also valid to have those conversations with boys, because boys, because I think you said male privilege is very often it's invisible to them.

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And my husband, I think it was quite invisible to him until I started really pointing things out. And he was never a feminist, but he's become much more a thinker and from from a women's viewpoint, since we've started having these conversations. So let's have a look at some of the things that you talk about in the book, which really will help us parents see how we can navigate through this. So for example, things like dating rituals. We see so much about sort of marriage proposals and Prom proposals, which isn't such a thing in the UK, but there's this whole thing you see on social media where everyone goes, Oh, they're so lovely. You know, she's finally found the man, and that validates her. And there's this double bind that girls find themselves in,

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yeah. I mean, I think what you're getting at is this sort of passive role that we put girls in by sort of pushing this narrative of benevolent sexism, right? Like most of us know that hostile sexism is bad, right?

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But benevolent sexism can really seem courteous and like a compliment to women, but what it's pushing is narrative and heterosexual relationships, that the man that the man is active and the woman is passive and she has to wait around for him to ask the question. And to, you know, ask her out and then paying for dinner can feel really good. And I'm not suggesting you never, you know, you instruct your kids never let a guy pay for dinner. But the point is, is that if we're really looking for equality, then we're looking for other ways to to navigate relationships, right? So maybe, in the case of paying for dinner, maybe it's the person who did the inviting, maybe it's the person who makes more money, which, yes, very often, is the man, maybe it's they switch off and on each time. So, you know, I think as kids are growing up, you're really wanting to define what a good relationship is, right? Bell Hooks says love is a verb, right? And I really, I really hang on to that even with my own daughter, right? Because there's so, you know, there's so much nonsense out there with boys saying that they care without really showing that they care, without behaving like they care. And so we really want to teach girls what to expect. And so in the book I go through right, I have a whole section on how to teach girls what to expect, how to talk to them about relationships. And a very important one is the sort of unavailable man trope that so many you know young women fall into and, you know, I have a whole dialog with my daughter in the book about what does it mean when a man is unavailable and a woman finds that attractive.

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And you have said in your book that you can actually tell when your teenage patients are in healthy relationships because they feel inspired by their partners to become the best version of themselves, and a precise, good way of summing it up that it's actually, you know, they'll include other friends, and they're expansive, rather than kind of being sucked it down.

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And I think a lot of parents who I've spoken with, that's the thing they're fearful of, is when they see their child's life becoming smaller as a result of being in a relationship and being able to say, well, maybe, maybe it's it's not, it's not right. And these might be the reasons why, or let should we actually look critically at it?

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It's hard to do.

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And I always tell parents, right? It's and kids, right? I see a lot of girls in my practice, but if we're talking about that, it's not, not who he is on paper, but how he makes you feel? How, how, how he brings out the best in you.

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Yes, I love that. I think that's such a great tip. And I one of the interesting things just talking about love is, I think the Greeks had about six or seven words for love. So, you know, this is just one type of love.

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And I've actually found it's really helpful talking to my daughters about the different like the love of friends, the love your parents and and you don't need to be in a romantic relationship to be to be loved and to feel fulfillment and love. It's just a different type of love. And I think, you know, they get driven given this narrative that, you know, being in relationships everything. It gives them status. And, you know, I know that when my my girls were tweens, they became very, you know, the girls who started dating people had status. And yes, it's yes, I'm boys too, boys too.

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Well.

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You know, being in a relationship is like a romantic relationship can be wonderful, right? Like, we all know that.

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But the, I think the the problem is, is that we really do emphasize relationships for girls, from the time they're teeny, tiny, in a way we don't for boys, right? So we ask them, you know, we ask them who their boyfriend is, before they even know what a crush is, right? We start talking about looking pretty for boys. And, you know, meanwhile they, you know, this is sort of the antecedent to inequality in relationships, because they end up marrying boys who have not been thinking about relationships and obsessing over them their whole life, right? Boys sort of learn that it's secondary, you know, that they sort of have to put up with a relationship. It's kind of secondary to their career or whatever. And so we really want them to understand that they are whole in and of themselves right before they feel the need for a relationship.

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Yeah. And in a way, that's kind of this Disneyfication of a lot of things, where, because I remember my girls when they were little, they get for their birthday, they'd open their presents, and some of them would be those sort of Disney books that would push a certain narrative. And I go, Oh, that's nice. Put it in the cupboard.

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And then, yes, that would not be brought out again. You know, we'd watch the Studio Ghibli things, because they weren't, they weren't like that. Yes, do you? So coming back to the way that boys and girls will relate, there are many factors in a relationship, aren't they, so one of them is like, how do you find a mate? Oh, I need to look good. And right, very early on, they start worrying about the way they look. Why does it? Why do girls become obsessed with this where, for boys, it's just a kind of it's really not a thing for most of them, until a bit later. Well,

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I mean, beauty culture, right? Teaches girls that their most important asset is their appearance. And research, research shows. Is most girls believe that globally, right? So girls spend nearly double that of boys on their appearance, right? And you know that has implications for equality, right? Because while a boy is practicing his instrument or even his hand, even coordination and video games, girls are just trying to fix these so called flaws, but also, the more other people focus on on girls appearance, the more that they start to view themselves from an outsider's perspective. So they become more distant from a felt sense of themselves and instead focus on how others perceive their appearance, their sense, how they feel, rather than how it feels for them to be in their own bodies. In other words, they start to objectify themselves the way that others objectify them. And there's a whole section right in the book on self objectification, because it can lead to habitual self monitoring, shame and anxiety about their bodies, and that puts them at risk for eating disorders, depression, sexual dysfunction. But here's the thing, beyond the body, beyond how it makes them feel about their body, it actually steals their cognitive resources, right? So girls who self objectify, they have more difficulty getting into the flow states which you need for performance and achievement.

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Yes,

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yes. And I think we, we as parents, can make that quite a problem.

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Because I think you mentioned in the book that you notice that when your daughter had started to to kind of really blossom, like bro, everybody kept commenting on parts of her body, whereas there were way more comments about her, whereas your son, they would be there like he had grown a bit or, you know, right? Your voice was deep in we do this subconsciously. We're not. We don't I mean, I've had family members who said things about my girls bodies where I've done, no, can you not do that?

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But it's just part of the culture, in a way, isn't it? And that comes back to the weight as well, and the World Health Organization data that shows that we comment far more on on girls weight, yes,

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oh, yes.

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And, I mean, it's, it's commented on, like in the media, in cartoons, you know, they comment on girls weight more than they do boys. And, I mean, the interesting thing is, even when they were commenting on my daughter's body parts, you know, 99% of it was positive. But even if you just compliment a girl, right? Like I like to say, you might improve her mood, but you impair her mental capacity, right? So it's worth you know.

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So I like to tell parents when you're tempted to say, you look so cute as she's walking out of the house, think of that because she's going to school and you want her at full mental capacity. So what do we do for one we try as much as possible to practice body neutrality. Now I'm as tempted as the next person look. I think my kids are beautiful, and I want to comment on their looks too, but as much as possible, you know, first of all, I notice that I am commenting so much more on my daughter's body than my sons, or on her appearance or on what she's wearing, as to almost all parents, right? So we want them to understand that there are so much more to them, to their looks. We do not want their body image to be the center of their self image, right? And so if we're going to talk about bodies, we're going to be talking about what they can do, right? And, yeah, and how strong they are, but we're not going to really focus as much as possible on their appearance. And you know, teenage like anyone who's had a teenage girl and they found their kid balled up in tears saying she's ugly, like, it's so natural to say, What are you talking about? You're so beautiful, because to us, they are. But what it does is it make it, it emphasizes or it confirms that pretty is important. And we don't want to do that, right? We want to. We want them. And they don't buy it if we say they're beautiful, but they've gotten messages from elsewhere that they're not. So what we want to do is really help them become critical of of the culture that they're growing up in that makes girls think that makes even the most gorgeous, traditionally gorgeous, girls think they're not good enough.

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Yeah, and my daughter, when I interviewed her about this, said to me, what she found really helpful was that the saying, yes, you look wonderful, but that's the least interesting thing about you.

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Yes, because, again, it sort of just emphasizes what else they like to just go, oh, well, what else is it? Okay, one of the statistics I saw in your book really shocked me, which was and it's linked into talking to our kids about sexuality, another thing a lot of parents find super hard. And I've done an episode on pornography. I've done an episode on sexting, you know, and but I think a lot we there's still a lot of hesitancy about covering this. And the problem is our kids are seeing things that we don't have a lot of control over. And one of the things you said was that cosmetic vaginal surgery increased two. 262% between 2012 and 2018 and a huge spike among teens. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists had to issue guidelines to doctors saying, Can you please re educate these, these, these kids. But how do we talk to them about something as intimate as the sorts of things we're talking about, like intimate self concept, their feelings about their own body when they're being hyper sexualized by pornography and the media.

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What kind of ways in can you see for us parents to have those conversations? Yeah,

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you mean in terms of like, how to introduce the idea that they're sexualized? Yes.

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And example, hair, you know, what would you say to a child if you said, Oh, Mommy, I need to get my hair, x bits of hair removed. How do you have conversations with girls about that?

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Yeah, I mean, that's a great question.

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So I think, you know, it starts really young when you when you're starting to point. And, I mean, it doesn't have to if you haven't done it already. It's never too late. But basically, the younger, you can start the better, where you're pointing out on television, in the news, in the media, on you know, if you're at the grocery store and you see the checkout counter and you see a magazine, you're pointing out how girls in these situations are talked in way, talked about in Ways that boys aren't right, like we were saying before, that their weight becomes important, that how they look becomes important. That in in you know, characters on television, we see that their ability to get things done through stem and physicality is emphasized. But for girls, it's so often through their looks.

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And so you're sort of gently over time, bringing up the idea that they are sexualized, right?

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And then as soon as they start to become, you know, start to go through puberty, they're going to very quickly realize how sexualized they are, right?

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Because people are, you know, grown men are going to start to look at them differently. They are going to get called on the street. And so you're going to be really honest with your kid and say that as girls start to grow into women, sometimes their bodies become more important to some people than the rest of them, then their intellect and their mind, then what they can do, then their talents, and that that's not okay, and that there's a lot of women out there that are fighting to make that different, but it's something you want her to be aware of, right? And and you can talk, you can talk to them about their research, right? You can talk to them about how cosmetic surgery has increased, because girls are looking at people on the internet who have filters put on and have had, you know, or influencers that are getting, that are getting put in their feed, you know, because, because they are being promoted by the algorithm, right? And making girls think that, you know, everybody has these, like, long cartoonish eyelashes and, you know, big boobs and small waists, and you know, that they're going to start to think that that's actually attainable, and that most people have that, and it's really not true, and help them see out on the street, like look around you, people do not look like that.

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Yes, yes, it's so helpful. And it's you mentioned in the book that you know that some of the data that's adding up about Instagram is starting to be really clear, that it's not just that there's a coincidence, that actually Instagram is, or many of these apps, but Instagram, yeah, it's increasing anxiety amongst girls. And what I learned talking to my 18 year old about this was that she said, when I was a young girl, I would look on I would be looking at things on Instagram. So she got it about 1213, should I be looking at things on Instagram? I thought about them as girls, but I didn't think about the fact they were 20 year olds and that their bodies had already formed.

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And I kept thinking, what's wrong with my body? I don't look like that, and it's this. So I love what you're saying is this kind of actually being honest about them and being explicit about the differences between, you know, somebody who's an influencer and the way their body is going to look and work, compared to particularly young girls who are very vulnerable.

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Because I think they said that.

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I think is it the age group, 10 to 12 where they they don't even have that cognitive flexibility, where they can understand that things will be viewed differently? Am I right? Yeah,

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yeah.

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Well, right. I mean, they don't, they're they're just coming into more abstract thinking, Yes, and so that, that is why, like, co watching or actually having explicit conversations with your kids about what they're seeing on social media is so important, like, especially at that age or even earlier, because they're exposed, even if we think we're protecting them. They somehow get exposed to it, right and and they're just figuring out who they are, so comparing themselves to others, like, comes with the territory of adolescents, but as they scrutinize their posts of their people, like, as they scrutinize the posts of their peers, they're measuring their complex, imperfect, offline cells against the idealized online cells of their friends, yes, and others, which you know is this, like two dimensional, highly curated photo most of the time. You know when, when you when you and I were younger, right? We maybe COVID at the glamor of celebrities, but we mostly understood that it was unattainable. But our daughters are comparing themselves with their peers, and research shows that it's much harder to apply critical thinking skills to images of peers, so girls forget that it's Snapchat smooth, soft skin feature, you know, and so that's why we need to be there to remind them constantly that what you're seeing is not real.

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We love

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that absolutely, yes, it's very, very hard to put yourself in that position and understand that there. And also, I loved what you said in the book about being critical about it, in the sense of saying, Why do you think they posted that photo? What's, what's, you know, what? What do you what do you want to say about yourself, you post something. But I also think untrap I've fallen into, I know in the past, is when you're critical about you just go, oh god, why would she post that?

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And actually, I think we also need to be model polite, like being kind, being kind to other girls, because I think they hear it and then they internalize that as well, which is really hard. I love one of the things you brought up, which is the the Jane the Virgin piece, which refers to the, is it the Bechdel Wallace test?

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Yeah, the Bechdel Wallace test, yeah.

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Wallace test.

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So can you talk to us about that? Because it's one thing. I think we're talking about sitting side to side with our kids and and doing this with boys too. But just being able to say, let's look at this film.

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How can we, deconstruct it. Can you explain what the Bechdel Wallace test is? Yeah,

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okay, so the Bechdel Wallace test is, you know, to basically to pass the Bechdel right, a show must have at least two women in it who talk to each other about something besides a man, right?

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And some add a requirement that the women both have, need to both have names. And so it's really an amazing way to, if you're watching a movie with your kid or you're you know, does this pass the Bechdel Wallace test?

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And he also said that the the very simple way is, could you replace that character with a what a sexy lamp post?

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Yeah, that's another one. It's another way of looking at it. So would anything change? Yeah, it would anything change if you replace that woman with a sexy lamp shade or something like

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that? Yes, and I think coming back to just finally on the social media front, it's actually about becoming a force for good, because I know that I've done one interview in the past where we talked about being your best self online. And I think one of the ways that we can help our girls is just by saying, you know you wanted to present your best self, would it be this? And what are you trying to say about yourself when you do this? This is like your shop window. How can you make it something that influences other women and girls in a positive way? It's

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really an extension of the other parenting we do, right? Because, you know, I love to ask my kid when she's says she's finished with an essay or finished with an art project, okay, is that your best work? Right? Like, I want her to decide. And so it's like, is that your best self that you're putting out there on social media? Are you being kind to others, are you trying to focus on something else besides their appearance? Right? I know that girls do get a lot of self esteem, but it's very temporary self esteem when people put you know you're gorgeous and fire emojis. But we also want them to sort of focus more on the whole the whole kid so that they're because if they're doing it to others, they're also going to start to be able to focus more on the whole kid of themselves.

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Yeah, yes.

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Love it. And coming back to the sort of the pornography and the sexting, one of the things also that I saw in your book was that a 2020 survey asked 2000 kids aged nine to 17 about their sexting behavior.

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Queens nine to 12 years old, reported sending twice the number of nude selfies compared with similar findings of the previous year. And that's that's 2020, so that's several years ago now. And I've seen a lot of parents saying, you know, I've caught them, my daughter sent something. And there's an amazing book which is called when you lose it, which was written by a mother and daughter, where the daughter had sent selfies, sexting, and it had blown up and and the impact, the psychological impact it had had on everyone. So you know, you must have seen this if you were going to be talking to a girl about this, this topic, how would you broach it with them, and how would you deal with it if they had sent something?

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Nobody said, yeah, there's

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a, you know, there's a story in the book very similar to the one that you were just talking about, about this girl named Daphne, who, you know, she was.

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She was a really good kid. She had never done anything like this in her life, but she had gotten asked to send a nude she thought she was talking to a stranger. She had, she had, well, I won't tell the whole story, but it's a very compelling story and a very upsetting and sad story, but basically, you know, if I were talking to a kid who had actually done this, I would absolutely stay as far away from shaming as possible, right?

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Daphne, the reason I was bringing her up is she's a really good example of somebody who was just being curious about sex, who was it felt safer because it was someone she didn't know. And, you know, it turned out that it wasn't safe and it was someone she knew who spread it at school. And so the most important thing is to let your daughter know that you are there for her, that you understand, you know what compelled her to do it, but that it's not safe, and you know to really be there for her as much as possible and to not blame her, she will have learnt the lesson in so many ways that she doesn't need your punishment or your shame. And

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coming back to that narrative, that the sexist narrative, which is, you know, the guys. I've, I've, I've heard and witnessed young boys sending, you know, endless texts to girls saying, Send Me Nudes.

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Send Me Nudes. And the girls, so the girls are the ones going, Oh, and that's a really hard thing to be, to be a position to be put in, particularly if you're in a relationship with them. So understanding and being compassionate for the situation that they get in, and giving them ways to manage it and get out is really important. And I don't want to move without talking about women and girls being able to find their voice and being able to talk and feel that what they have to say is important. I read that you said university research found men interrupted their female conversational partners 33% more often than they interrupted other men. So I think men

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and women interrupt women more.

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Really, I didn't read, okay, I didn't capture that. So that's really interesting. So women, whatever you're doing, whatever you're trying to express, you're going to feel under pressure that at some point someone's going to interrupt you and and one of the things she pointed out was there is this double bind, where if a woman or a girl asserts herself more, then she's perceived bad.

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Right, right? We

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see that kind of behavior as assertive in boys and men, but aggressive in girls, right? And so, you know what I like to talk about, or what you know, a big section of the book is on entitlement, right? So we being called entitled is usually pejorative, and we use it when we think somebody expects too much. But over and over, I see girls in my practice who aren't entitled enough, right, who lack a healthy sense of entitlement, right? And so Rachel to put it into concrete terms, by third grade, girls begin to ask for less than boys, right? One study found that when children were given the opportunity to negotiate for their favorite stickers, the older girls asked for too fewer than the boys, but only when negotiating with a man, right? And that reflects the same gender gap in negotiation that we see in adults. So what lessons are we imparting to girls subliminally or directly that lead them to believe they deserve less, especially with regard to speaking up. Like you said, respect money well. For one, when they if they speak up, they're often interrupted. For two, we teach them being liked is more important than being respected in terms of money. We don't talk to them about money nearly as much as we do with boys. Research shows that across the board, and we don't give them as much money as we do with boys. You

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have some shocking statistics with that.

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And I've actually brought my daughters up with an allowance system where they have to negotiate with me every year.

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First time I did it, my daughter didn't want, she wanted to do on WhatsApp, and she cried, and she's like, I don't like this.

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And I said, I don't want the first time that you have to have a negotiation to be with your boss.

00:29:26.539 --> 00:29:30.740
You don't want it to be somebody I love that so much. I love that so much.

00:29:30.799 --> 00:29:56.920
So I have a, I have an episode on that, but I'll mention in the in the podcast notes, look, there's we could have covered so many things. I think your book's amazing. You don't have to read absolutely all the fine detail to find the great tips, because you kind of have a little you know, you point them out, like do this as parents do this. So it is actually written with us parents in mind ways that we can really support our kids. But there's lots and lots of detail there. And I think men reading it would probably be a bit shocked,

00:29:57.519 --> 00:29:59.920
like that, being in a patriarchal so.

00:30:00.000 --> 00:30:08.819
Society, it hurts boys and men too, right? We're robbing them of so much of their humanity. So it's not a good system for anybody. Yeah,

00:30:08.819 --> 00:30:39.619
and just just to finish on what you've just said, we did an episode looking at emotional maturity. And the thing that absolutely blew me away was the problem with lacking emotional maturity is a loneliness, the sort of just deep loneliness, because you can't actually have conversations with people about things that really matter to you. And when I read that, I just thought this sounds like so many men, which would explain why, you know, this is why it's so damaging to our boys and our men if they can't have these conversations, because they will be lonely. Yeah, and a lot

00:30:39.740 --> 00:30:55.359
well, and I mean, right, it's because that, like talking to others, connecting with others, being cooperative. We don't teach that to boys, because it's considered emasculating, and what it is is it's creating this real crisis of connections. Yes,

00:30:55.660 --> 00:31:03.420
no, I love that. Thank you so much. If the people want to contact you, is there a best place to go? I've seen you on Instagram. Are there other other places?

00:31:04.259 --> 00:31:16.920
Sure, I'm on Instagram. Like you said, i@joannfinkelstein.com'm I have a sub stack newsletter that's very active at JoAnn Finkelstein dot sub stack.com and I'm on tick tock, fantastic.

00:31:16.920 --> 00:31:21.259
Oh, I'm not on tick tock. Oh, I should check it out sometime. I just, I've just I've just haven't got

00:31:21.259 --> 00:31:22.759
that.

00:31:21.259 --> 00:31:25.160
It's kind of new. It's kind of new for me, but it's been really fun. Good

00:31:25.160 --> 00:31:47.380
for you, good for you, right? That's it. If you enjoy this episode, please, right now, share it with somebody else who might be find it useful. Go out and buy the book, and you can contact me on teenagers untangled@gmail.com or go to my website to search for every other episode, which is www.teenagersuntangled.com That's it for now. Have a great week. Bye, bye. You.