Sounds Like Titanic

by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

Best-selling how-to-save-Ophelia books aside, was it even possible for any parent of a daughter in the early 1990s to do much but watch from the boat as an entire generation of girls sank beneath the surface? After your trip to the gallery, you and your mom stop at a café for French onion soup. She tries to give you words of encouragement, words to help you navigate what she imagines to be the typically treacherous waters of middle school drama. You can’t bring yourself to tell her the real problem: You aren’t pretty enough. You will never be pretty enough. You can’t tell her because you are ashamed that you have a problem so clearly unfixable, a problem that can’t be solved by working harder. Everywhere you look—magazines, TV, movies, high school pep rallies—you see that not being pretty enough will mean your life will be much different—more difficult, more restricted—than you would have ever imagined a few years before. And even if you somehow did become beautiful, you know it would not be enough to put you on equal footing with the boys.

For the most enraging aspect of life in the body isn’t that you aren’t skinny or sexy enough, it’s that life in the body causes you to be dismissed as silly and shallow and stupid in a way that boys who are equally silly and shallow and stupid are not.

There is no way to know that the new America will have very little interest in learning anything accurate about the Middle East—that instead there are powerful interests that will need Americans to think of the Middle East as a homogeneous region full of terrorists. That Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia and Iraq and Iran are all the same. An acidic current of anti-intellectualism and prowar sentiment will corrode nuance, subtlety, and complexity into a dull, generalized fear.