islanded in a stream of stars

The Supergirl Dilemma: Girls Feel the Pressure to Be Perfect, Accomplished, Thin, and Accommodating

(Many thanks to st_crispins for the link.)

I've posted up before this article on the overlooked psychological detriments of all women's secondary education, but I think it's an appropriate parallel article. And heck, while you're at it, did you know that women are outperforming men at the university level?

What's shocking me is the increasingly younger age at which girls feel the pressure to be perfect. Virtually everyone I knew in elementary school, both male and female, wanted to go to college, but I always assumed that was more a matter of class expectations. Of course girls should go to college; it's practically expected of all middle-class and higher. The trend now seems to be heading off to grad school.

This article is so frighteningly true. As the graduate of seven years of an all-women's school, I've probably witnessed more of my peers in the midst of breakdowns or near-breakdowns than not. (That's what happens when you spend too much time in the senior lounge.) The concept of pleasing others, though, has evolved; a lot of girls (myself included) think of fulfilling our families' and peers' expectations for success in that category while the study seems to imply that pleasing others mostly involves fulfilling others' personal needs.

More simply put, if you can't ace your 5 AP classes, tutor underpriviledged elementary school children, make banners for the graduating seniors on your soccer team and bake brownies for your depressed friend, you fail at life. I know of a fair number classmates who have done all the above and still feel inadequate. To be honest, I can think of relatively few who would say that. There's such a big push, really starting with my generation, to. We expect ourselves to volunteer in the community, pitch in during family crises, comfort friends having a bad week and create the most memorable six-month anniversary gift for our boyfriends (if we still have time to be in the relationship) while maintaining good grades in challenging classes. The group of people we want to please keeps expanding: parents, friends, teachers, mentors...you get the picture. I wouldn't call the expectations placed on girls as passive; it's a more dyanmic evolution of the approval seeker.

With older girls nowadays, there's a sort of perverse pressure to be really good at math and science; it's almost an understood requirement to take at least AP Calc/Stats and/or an AP science course even if you don't plan on dealing with those subjects much in college. I don't know about others, but I feel like I'm perpetuating the 50's housewife stereotype because I am not going into engineering, pre-med, pre-law or business. So many of my friends from high school are going into engineering, the hard sciences or pre-med (melee_melo, are you still considering gynecology?); they easily outnumber those who are studying the humanities and social sciences. The vast majority of my female friends in college now are business majors, some of whom are double-majoring in the humanities. The rest are majoring in bio, engineering, architecture (not known to be a particularly "feminine" discipline), communications or cinema/theater. Friends (you know who you are, *cough* dear eyepiece_simile) often joke that I'm taking a "fuzzy" courseload, and that psychology isn't a real science. Apparently the cognitive science and neurobiological requirements, never mind the prerequisite calc and statistics courses, for the major don't seem to count :P

The article doesn't really touch on the body image issues mentioned in the headline, but they're definitely an issue. It does feel rather simplistic to say that the general obsession with perfection extends to the body, but anorexics tend to be high achievers. eyepiece_simile, correct me if I'm getting this wrong, but our old high school hospitalized more female students than any other local high school. Our college admissions counselor told me that the anorexic students she encountered were A students. I could try tying in the article about anorexia I wrote a few months ago, but I don't have a copy, and virtually no one ended up reading it anyway. In simple terms, not only do girls have to perform perfectly, they have to appear flawless and effortless in the process.

I know I'm speaking in vast generalizations here; I'd love to hear any rebuttals or general comments. The post is locked for viewing by female viewers only.

Congrats to all of the Class Day prize winners! You all really deserved what you got :D

Good conversation always makes my day, especially when I get to talk to people with whom I normally don't have the chance to do so. At the same time I hate to realize that there are still so many people I'm only beginning to realize are very awesome whom I wish I knew better but have little time left now to spend with them. And yet I still hold on to the quixotic hope that perhaps it's not too late; it's never too late. We'll see how things turn out.

My ability to be distracted by completely pointless things is inversely proportional to the amount of class I have left. It's absolutely astounding. And this means that I will certainly regret putting off my Enfants du Paradis paper and comedy satire this weekend if I don't magically get around to it earlier.

We won the FIRST Spirit Award at robotics nationals and placed 48th overall! You robotics people definitely deserve it after all of the hard work you've put in this season. I am in awe of your collective robot repairing, driving, bs-ing, animating, website designing and business planning skills :D

Don't you hate it when no matter how much or how little sleep you get you feel perpetually exhausted?

That pretty much sums up the past two weeks or so. It explains a lot, at least in my mind.

The idea of Spring Break is starting to scare me. All that free time-I can't figure out how I'm going to fill up all of those hours. I really need to start preparing for AP exams or else I'll fail and screw up the rest of my life.

The weather bears a freaky influence over my emotions.

Robotics=major awesomeness

As just about everyone seems to know by now, we're going to FIRST Nationals in Atlanta! While I was a lazy slacker (the only vaguely useful purpose I served during the competition was to cheer our team on obnoxiously), I can honestly say that the rest of the team so deserved the Engineering Inspiration award. You guys rock. The saftey runnerup and entrepreneurship awards were a little more sketchy, but perhaps that's a tribute to our collective BS skills.

I've still kept the scout report sheets that Seana and I came up with just in case we want to keep tabs on the other SVR teams that will be going to Atlanta if anyone wants them.

And I can honestly say I haven't been to a wilder celebration party-the couch pile was priceless. Then again, my idea of a party generally involves intense board game playing and a lot of sugar.

Amongst other random things that have happened lately, my mother just gave me a very good argument about why I am a closet WASP and ought to move to Boston. The only minor flaw is that I'm Asian but I suppose we could overlook that.

I would be seriously tempted to sell my soul if it meant that I'd never be late to anything ever again. I must've unconsciously turned off my alarm clock this morning because I woke up at 7:40 instead of 6:40 this morning, and normally I leave twenty minutes earlier. I was already sort of late to another class earlier this week though not from sleeping in, so Ellie is really upset about it.

This is the point in which I should use all of my nifty behaviorism knowledge to reprogram setting events (the CD in my ) that will reinforce the prosocial punctuality behaviors of waking up and getting out of the house earlier. I've unfortunately unconsciously associated sleeping in with David Holmes's Ocean's Twelve soundtrack and therefore must use another wake-up CD. With new morning music, I must fight the temptation to hit the sleep button and wake up at a consistent time in order to form a solid association between the prompt (new soundtrack) and waking up on time. I can use old soundtracks (i.e. practically every one I own) on the weekends when hitting the snooze button is less detrimental. I should probably figure out some kind of system for reinforcement as well but I'm too lazy to think through all the details right now.

Oh, B.F. Skinner. We still love you even if you did stop using lab rats as experimental test subjects in 1943 (or was it '42? I don't remember for certain anymore).

Two freshmen randomly just burst into the Counterpoint office to rearrange their Top 8 ranking on Myspace and asked me about my college choices. They both like my loopy handwriting although Ellie thinks it's virtually unreadable. Most people I know are split on the legibility issue.

And I'm still really terrible at this whole remembering birthdays thing; I managed to remember one but not the other. And this is already with copious reminders/mental prodding; it's just embarrassing at this point. At any rate, many happy returns to Shirin and Elena!

Ach, my last 24 hour plays ever! This was probably my favorite experience, though the sophomore year ones (the romance novels, Genesis as told by the serpent, and possibly the Ricky Martin fanclub as well) were pretty fabulous. Yay for multi-role craziness and having all comedies! It's extremely difficult to do serious drama for these sorts of events, though Ingrid (and Jeeyon, come to think of it) could definitely make it work.

Perhaps I'll post my play here later after I cut out the bits that didn't work. It's not serious at all, but I'm not sure if you could really call it comedic. I'll list out all of the references/lines that I stole from other sources when I post the edited play. And I owe it big time to blofeldscat for STENCH (their rival was CHAOS; is this a real spy show reference? I'm not sure if I actually made that up), dragonfly66 for brainstorming ideas, and leflyingolive for giving me call sign ideas. People seemed to like the weird bird ones-I ended up picking flamingo and cockatoo.

I regret not hugging Sol and Xanthia for their uber-awesome performances. The only thing about the hugging would be that my sketchy costume was sort of backless, which would've been really awkward for everyone. The casting there was great-I couldn't have asked for anything more. The little fumbles were hardly noticeable during the performance, and they recovered from them well. And their rapport was pretty good. I feel bad that I gave them so much dialogue-originally I thought the play was too short until I realized I accidentally set the screen margins for a 11x17 inch sheet of paper. 7/4 of a page turned into 3.5 full pages. Whoops. There are a lot of little bits that I wish I had cut out now; my creative/editing skills are pretty lousy at about 2 in the morning, and I know that a lot of the references didn't make sense. I'm too used to talking about the Avengers, Danger Man, 007 and the like with fellow fans :P It was definitely more geared towards the adults rather than the students just because the former was more likely to know what I was talking about.

Looking back now, I wished I had more action going on than the straightforward interview exchange. The problem is that it would've been hard to actually act out some of the mission scenarios, and I didn't want to make it too hard on the actors who had enough to remember already. Nicola was mostly used to establish the framework/back story of what was going on; the second half of the play was my realization that Carla didn't have many interesting lines and became sort of bizarre compensation. I really had no idea what I was doing with Carla (the interviewee) because for the longest time I couldn't figure out what her name ought to be, and because it's really hard to do character development in ten minutes. Originally I expected to play the Nicola role because we had a shortage of actors and because the terminology was technically difficult, but I was very impressed with Sol and Xanthia.

The Alias season 4 title theme cue used at the beginning wasn't optimal, but I couldn't find the Top 100 Television Themes CD this morning containing the Get Smart title. I figured that more audience members would recognize Alias anyway.

Heh, I really muffed up in all of the rehearsals! What I love about the 24 hour plays is how much you can't stop laughing during rehearsals. My neighbor, who's an elementary school teacher, has a name that's extremely similar to the name of the dead hamster in Tess et al.'s play, so I kept on saying my neighbor's name instead. latina_business, I have no idea why you casted me in Myspace Romance, but I'll confess that I had a great time :) I'm sorry that I randomly truncated parts of the script during performance. I tend to be of the school of thought where forgetting the exact wording of lines is OK so long as you say the equivalent, even if shortened, in a natural-sounding manner. I managed to pin down the original breakup monologue-well, a sort of ad-libbed version-right beforehand. But it got really shortened when I did it as I was disoriented when the audience started laughing unexpectedly. And I suck at projection, but whatever. What scared me the most about Myspace Romance was that it was actually based on a classmate's exploits. The believability factor was freakily high.

Lesson of the day: fishnet tights are a pain to put back on after having to take them off, especially when you have quick costume changes. Thank goodness for Eneida and her magic hair spray skills. Let's just say bumping into the two teachers who wrote my college recommendations as well as the Dean of Students, i.e. teachers I like who know me, after the performance was awkward incarnate. I had to walk around in the myspace whore/showgirl getup for quite a bit beforehand so I wouldn't feel so self-conscious on stage. I'm just really glad I didn't do the kicking my leg up onto the other actor's shoulder maneuver after all.

Afterwards Elena and I went out to dinner at this great Mediterranean place on University, Cafe 220. This is the first time ever-besides Havard this summer-when I've actually gone out with a friend to dinner. My unofficial curfew is 10:45-11, and that's really pushing it for special occasions. My family is really big on having dinner together, and I spend more time at home, especially on the weekends, looking after my dad. Afterwards we got gelato. Only in California (or maybe just the West Coast) will there be a long line for ice cream in winter even though it's still chilly outside. Appropriately enough, we caught the last half hour of the first Austin Powers movie back at her house.

I had almost forgotten how awesome she is even though we had breakfast together just two Mondays ago during February break. I consider her to be my unofficial wifey.

Sometimes I think my brain is operating differently from what I want it to be doing. For some reason it's been randomly spewing out candidates and composers from the AFI's top 250 film scores of all time list that didn't make it. I have no idea why it's doing this, considering that I haven't looked at that list in at least two months. It's very distracting.

I couldn't fall asleep until 1:30 last night because I've started to work out ideas about what to write for the 24 hour plays. I really hope I will be writing after all; I've been wanting to be a playwright for the past four years and actually might have a decent idea for a satire/sort of dark comedy.

I think I've officially caught senioritis, or second semester senior slacker-dom. Help! I'm determined not to procrastinate too much yet; 3rd quarter is always the hardest for me because of the ensuing apathy, but at the moment I'm determined to break that spell. I was hoping that I wouldn't become infected until after AP exams, too.

Then again, I don't have to do all of the Euro unit reading tonight, do I? Will someone please be kind enough to reply "no" to my question?