How perfect do girls have to seem?

Two thousand years ago Jesus' birth heralded the glory of the human body. Today many young women obsess about their bodies at the risk of their souls. Patrick McCormick explores why society tells girls they're only as good as they look -- and wonders if the church has done quite enough to counter this line.

Last Christmas one of my presents arrived early when Jane Rinehart preached at the Vigil Mass. It wasn't just that Rinehart offered us a haunting and evocative homily -- forged of her impressive talents as a teacher and rich experiences as a mother of three. Or even that several of us left church that night wondering why we had never before heard a woman preach about the miracle of Christ's birth. It was that on the eve of the Feast of the Incarnation we had the (unfortunately rare) privilege of experiencing the Word made "woman-flesh."

Our present that Christmas night was being reminded -- by the sight and sound of a woman preaching -- that the "flesh" God made sacred in this mystery we were celebrating was "neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female" (Gal. 3:28). We were being reminded, as the theologian Sallie McFague notes in her book The Body of God (Fortress Press, 1993), that for those of us who believe in the Incarnation, an of our bodies are important. Even more, however, we were being reminded by the presence of an extremely gifted female preacher of something that the 19th-century reformer Elizabeth Cady Stanton used to tell her audiences of young women: "God has given you minds, dear girls, as well as bodies."

In The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (Random House, 1997), social critic and historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg isn't concerned that we have forgotten the bodies of young women but that we have effectively abandoned late-20th-century American girls to cultural forces that distort their experience of their bodies and thus of themselves.

"Although girls now mature sexually earlier than ever before," Brumberg notes, "contemporary American society provides fewer social protections for them, a situation that leaves them unsupported in their development and extremely vulnerable to the excesses of popular culture and to pressure from peer groups." As a result of this abandonment to pressures from modem marketing, medicine, and popular culture, "girls today make the body into an all-consuming project in ways women of the past did not."

Like Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia (Ballantine, 1995) and Peggy Orenstein's SchoolGirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap (Doubleday, 1995), Brumberg's book argues that contemporary girls are offered little help in dealing with cultural forces pressuring them to obsess over their changing bodies. "Girls today are concerned with the shape and appearance of their bodies as a primary expression of their individual identity."

Increasingly, dieting (which psychologist Judith Rodin describes as the "normative obsession" of U.S. women) is no longer reserved to adult or adolescent women but often begins as early as 9 or 10.

Teenage girls spend billions of dollars each year on fashion and personal care products, and companies like Victoria's Secret market their sexy underwear for girls just beginning adolescence. And the standards of female beauty continue to grow both more demanding and invasive. No longer is it enough to lose weight. Young girls today are expected to develop washboard stomachs and steel "buns' or "abs." The thin body must now also be the "hard" body.

Some of Bromberg's undergraduate students talk about piercing their very private body parts with jewelry from their boyfriends. Getting "pinned" has taken on a whole new meaning.

According to Brumberg, one effect of all these pressures to create (and share) the perfect body has been that young girls are increasingly encouraged to identify "the body project" as their most significant task, and pay less and less attention to their character or intelligence. Many find themselves obsessing over their various body parts -- getting little or no affirmation about the importance of their brains, talents, or passions. As Pipher notes in Reviving Ophelia, there is tremendous pressure on junior-high girls to dumb down and put on false, pretty selves that are pleasing to behold.

This deepening obsession with the body has left more and more young women ill at ease with their own bodies, and thus with themselves. Along with Pipher, Brumberg notes that although preadolescent girls do consistently better. than boys in standard physical and mental tests, as they move into puberty, girls suffer increasing rates of depression and attempted suicide and have more problems than boys with eating disorders, substance abuse, or staying in school.

"The body is at the heart of the crisis of confidence," Brumberg notes. "By age 13, 53 percent of American girls are unhappy with their bodies; by age 17, 78 percent are dissatisfied."

At the same time Brumberg notes that all of this attention to the body project is blurring the line between the private and the public. Practices like body piercing and the marketing of lingerie (often enough worn as either underwear or outerwear) send a message that girls' bodies are public property, or commodities and erode our notions of the boundaries that should surround sexual intimacy and protect vulnerable and immature adolescents from all sorts of harassment and aggression.

As proof of this eroding boundary Brumberg reports that "14 and 15 are two of the peak ages for becoming a victim of sexual assault," that about a quarter of all rape victims are between 10 and 15, and that "although teenage girls perform oral sex more often than in the past, they do so without pleasure, usually to please their boyfriend."

Meanwhile, Pipher notes that "the harassment that girls experience in the 90s is much different in both quality and intensity. The remarks are more graphic and mean-spirited." She goes on to describe a recent American Association of University Women study ("Hostile Hallways") that reported that "70 percent of girls experience harassment and 50 percent experience unwanted sexual touching in their schools."

The authors of both The Body Project and Reviving Ophelia argue that the pressures our contemporary culture places on the bodies of young girls constitutes a form of assault, threatening their emotional, mental, and physical health. "Instead of supporting our early-maturing girls, or offering them some special relief or protection from the unrelenting self-scrutiny that the marketplace and modern media both thrive on, contemporary culture. exacerbates normal adolescent self-consciousness and encourages precocious sexuality."

Unfortunately the assault on the bodies of women does not end with the close of adolescence. Dieting and the need to look attractive, for example, haunt American women throughout much of their adult lives. As Michelle Stacey reports in Consumed: Why Americans Love, Hate & Fear Food (Simon & Schuster, 1994), some clinicians report that as many as 80 to 85 percent of American women experience disordered eating as a problem at some point in their lives.

Furthermore, as more and more women have entered the labor force most have felt the weight and stress of carrying a "second shift" at home at the end of the day. Juliet Schor in The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (Basic, 1993) notes that, on top of the 4 hours a week these women work outside the home, they tend to put in another 25 to 45 hours a week doing household chores.

Still, the most deadly form of assault threatening the bodies of women continues to come in the form of domestic or partner violence. In Terrifying Love: Why Battered Women Kill & How Society Responds (Harper-Collins, 1990), Lenore Walker reports that "an estimated 50 percent of all women are battered at some time in their lives." Other studies indicate that violence will occur in two-thirds of all marriages. Even if only the most conservative reports of domestic violence were accurate, we would still be dealing with an incredibly dangerous epidemic, an epidemic threatening the health and lives of millions of women and girls.

What is to be done about this situation? Brumberg suggests that in an earlier era cultural institutions from churches to the Girl Scouts provided guidance, mentoring, and protection to young women as they journeyed from adolescence to adulthood. But much of the "Victorian umbrella" has evaporated in an era when we stress the autonomy and liberty of young women and girls without sufficiently considering the risks and dangers they currently face.

Brumberg argues that parents and other concerned adults need to recognize that "adolescent girls simply are not mature enough, or sufficiently in control of their lives, to resist all the social and commercial pressures they face in our hypersexual, televisual environment," and that there is aneed to provide the support, direction, and protection these young girls need. Our cultural, religious, and political institutions need to develop safety nets to counteract and respond to the pressures of the market, the media, and many young people's peers.

At the same time, it seems to me there's a need to ask if there are any ways in which our own Catholic imagination has aided and abetted the assault on women. Clearly Catholic teaching is opposed to all sorts of irresponsible and violent sexuality, and openly criticizes the commercialization of sex and the commodification of women's bodies in the media and in marketing.

Dioceses around the country run clinics and shelters for women in danger. Catholic social thought stands firmly against every form of oppression, injustice, and bias. And Catholic sexual ethics affirm the equality and dignity of women. But the experience of Rinehart's homily continues to haunt me. Is it possible that our inability to imagine women in roles of leadership in the church -- as preachers, priests, bishops, popes -- offers some silent assent to cultural messages that the minds and talents of women are not as important as their bodies? Is there something just a little questionable about our belief in the Incarnation?

Last week my stepdaughter Riley -- who is herself advancing into adolescence -- admitted that when she was smaller she had been convinced that Jesus was a woman. She wasn't sure what it was about the picture-book illustrations of Jesus that had convinced her of the Savior's femininity.

At any rate, her comment left me wondering just why it is that, as we sometimes sing in an old Christmas song, "some children see him" as black, brown, red, yellow, or white, but our own Catholic imagination finds it so hard to see Christ as Riley did:the Word made woman-flesh.