Lorena Garcia
1
In Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (1994), Mary Pipher explores
the links between culture and the development of adolescents by documenting clinical case
studies of adolescent girls. Pipher describes the society in which young women grow up in as a
“girl poisoning culture” and adolescent girls as “saplings in the storm.” An important goal of
Pipher’s book is to provide adults with guidance on empowering girls, specifically by teaching
girls to be more critical of the culture around them. The objective, while noteworthy in
contributing to the healthy social and psychological development of young women, also
underscores the need to account for the ways in which young women already attempt to
empower themselves. Research reveals that young women’s subjectivity is systematically
disregarded because adolescent girls are more likely to be seen as weak, passive, sick and in need
of help-especially as it pertains to their sexuality because they are assumed not to have embodied
sexual feelings (Frost 2001; Griffin 1993; Petchesky 1984; Tolman 1996).
The failure to acknowledge young women as sexual subjects is largely informed by the
“crisis” model that dominates the study of adolescent sexual behavior. In this model, adolescent
female sexuality is a problem. Promiscuous and engaged in unprotected sex, teenage girls get
pregnant, have children and thus find themselves socially, economically, and educationally
deprived and disadvantaged. This crisis does not impact all girls equally, though. Female youth
of color, generally African-American, have been the disproportionate subjects of this crisis
model and the object of intervention efforts to address this crisis (Dash 1989(2003); Erickson
1998; Murry 1996). But a 2002 report presented by the Center for Disease Control and
Prevention’s Division of Vital Statistics (Ventura et. al 2002) revealed a steady decline in overall
U.S. teen birth rates over the last decade. Until recently, much of the existing literature has been
limited to white, black, or black/white models of heterosexual adolescent sexuality, principally
Convention