Sounds Like Titanic

by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

What’s curious about this epidemic is that its adolescent female victims are middle class. They come from stable, loving households and have attentive parents. Even stranger is that, as people say in the 1990s, It’s the nineties!, meaning, “women are equal now.” A teacher tells your class, “You can be anything you want if you work hard enough,” and then adds, “This is true for girls now, too.” What no one ever says during your entire upbringing is that there has been a cultural price to pay for equality, a counterattack aiming its weapons at your fast-developing female body. The counterattack goes by various names—Backlash by Susan Faludi or The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf, who in 1991 writes, “These little girls, born around the time of Ronald Reagan’s first election, are showing third-generation mutations from the beauty backlash against the women’s movement. . . . This generation will have more trouble with life in the body than do daughters of the 1960s and 1970s.”