The Nice Girl Syndrome (7 page)

garner the approval of others.

Nice Girls frequently go along with the crowd, whether it is drinking alcohol or taking drugs; agreeing to activities, including sexual ones, that they really don’t want to do; or even breaking the law to gain or keep the approval of a man or of a group.

My client Jennifer was referred to me by her mother, who dis- covered that Jennifer had been engaging in group sex with girls and boys from school. This behavior had been going on for some time and would have continued except that the mother had been con- tacted by the Public Health Department when it was discovered that Jennifer, along with several others in the group, had contracted syphilis.

At first, Jennifer refused to talk about her experiences, but grad- ually she opened up to me. Although she had a few close friends in high school, she always longed to fit in with the popular kids. “I just wasn’t in their league,” she shared with me. “My parents don’t have the money theirs do, and I can’t buy the kind of clothes they wear. They seemed to have so much fun; they were always laughing and kidding around with each other. I wanted to have fun like that.”

Then Jason, one of the popular boys, suddenly began to take an

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interest in Jennifer, and she was thrilled. He was great-looking and popular, and he came from a wealthy family. Even though he was only a sophomore, he drove a brand new Lexus. When he asked Jennifer to join him and his friends after school, she gladly agreed. They went to the home of one of his friends. There were no parents around and the kids helped themselves to the liquor cabinet and the beer in the refrigerator. Before Jennifer knew it, she was feeling no pain. Jason began to kiss her while they sat on the couch, and Jennifer felt as if she was in heaven. She was being kissed by one of the most popular guys at school! She couldn’t wait to tell her

friends.

But when Jason put his hand down Jennifer’s blouse, she pushed him away. She felt he was going too fast; besides, there were other people around. When she explained this to Jason, he just smiled and pulled her into a nearby bedroom. She didn’t resist. Within min- utes, Jason was penetrating her. Jennifer’s head was spinning, and she didn’t know what to do. She’d had sex before but never so quickly with a boy she didn’t know. However, she really liked Jason and wanted him to like her back.

Afterward, Jennifer felt a little embarrassed, but Jason reassured her that she was hot and that he really liked her. He was very polite and took her home. She hoped he would call her again.

The next day at school, Jason was cordial but certainly not friendly. When Jennifer went over to his table in the cafeteria he acted as if nothing had happened between them. Jennifer felt humil- iated and used as she slunk back to her table.

Much to Jennifer’s surprise, about a week later, Jason came by her table and asked her if she’d like to join him and his friends for a party after school. Jennifer jumped at the chance.

This time, they went to the house of another of Jason’s friends, again with no parents around. They all started drinking, and several couples started making out on the couches. Jason pulled Jennifer down on one of the couches next to another couple and started kiss- ing and fondling her. Jennifer felt really embarrassed to be acting like this in front of others, but when she tried to pull away, Jason said, “I should never have asked you here. You’re just too square.” This hurt her feelings. She looked around and noticed that several of the kids were having sex, right there in the living room. She so desperately wanted to be part of the group. If they could act like this

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and not be embarrassed, why couldn’t she? And so she allowed Jason to take off her blouse and touch and kiss her breasts. Then she allowed him to have sex with her. Once, when she opened her eyes, she noticed that other people were watching them.

This was to be the beginning of a downward slope for Jennifer. She went from having sex with Jason in front of the other kids to allowing Jason’s friends to have sex with her. Although she felt a lot of shame about her behavior, she feared that if she said no she would be kicked out of the group. At school she had became one of the popular girls, and she simply wasn’t willing to let that go, no matter what she had to do. It just felt too good to be treated like she was so special, to feel the envy of the other kids, some of whom had been her friends in the past.

The group eventually moved on from swapping partners to hav- ing group sex. This was the most degrading part of all. Jennifer felt she was a piece of meat to be passed around from boy to boy. Sometimes two boys would have sex with her at the same time, and other times they’d line up to have sex with her. One day she had sex with ten boys.

Although Jennifer always drank each time they partied, she never got so drunk that she erased the images from her mind. By the time she came into therapy, her self-esteem was at an all-time low. “I keep seeing these scenes in my mind—like something out of a porno- graphic movie. But instead of some slut being gang-raped by a group of men, it is me in the picture.”

In spite of the fact that she had contracted a sexually transmit- ted disease and had been humiliated when her parents found out what she had done, Jennifer was still having a difficult time giving up her association with the popular kids. “Do you know what it would be like for me if I wasn’t part of that group anymore? I’d have to go back to my old table with my tail between my legs. I wouldn’t get all the special privileges I get from being part of the popular group. People will look at me entirely differently.”

Jennifer was still willing to put her dignity aside and to continue damaging her self-esteem just to be popular. Even more concerning, she was still willing to endanger her health.

Jennifer’s case may seem like an extreme example to you, but think about this a moment: What have you done in your life to get

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or keep the approval of others? Have you gone along with the crowd, even when your instincts told you that what they were doing was unhealthy, perhaps even dangerous? This might include taking drugs because everyone else was doing it, driving too fast because your friends told you to go faster, or sleeping with a guy because you thought he would dump you if you didn’t. How many times have you put your own best interests aside to gain the acceptance of a group or individual, to be part of the group, or to look good to your group or to the public?

In
Odd Girl Out
, Rachel Simmons calls popularity an “addic- tion” for girls, “a prize for which some would pay any price.” Girls pour boundless energy and anxiety into becoming popular. This quest for popularity can change girls, causing many to lie, cheat, and steal. “They lie to be accepted, cheat their friends by using them, steal people’s secrets to resell at a higher social price.” One eleven-year-old interviewee told Simmons, “If girls have a chance to be popular, they will take it, and they wouldn’t really care who they are hurting.”

Mary Pipher, in her best-selling book
Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls
, observed that as teenagers, girls desper- ately want to be accepted. They are faced with an impossible choice: either to remain true to themselves and risk rejection by their friends, or to desert their authentic self and be socially acceptable. Unfortu- nately, the choice for most girls is obvious: to abandon a large part of themselves so as to gain acceptance.

When Simmons attended a leadership workshop for twenty-five middle-class teenagers (one-third of whom were nonwhite), she dis- covered some interesting things. When the girls were asked what made them uncomfortable about leadership, nearly every girl voiced a concern that related to how others would react to what they said or did. Over and over, the girls said that looking bad or stupid or “getting judged” was their worst fear. Whether it was meeting new people, speaking in public, reciting, or debating, the girls feared being “shut down.” As Simmons explained, “They worried that peo- ple would not give them a chance to explain themselves and that others would shatter their self-confidence. As a result, they worried, people would not like them, would not want to be their friends, and [would] turn their backs on them.”

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For many years, girls were raised to believe that if they were “good,” if they minded their parents and did what was expected of them at school, they would in turn be accepted and loved by others. This “sugar and spice and everything nice” mind-set continues into the present in some circles (for example, conservative or deeply religious homes). In these environments, girls are supposed to be sweet and caring, little caregivers in training.

In
Odd Girl Out
, Rachel Simmons cites a 1994 article in
Schoolgirls
, in which journalist Peggy Orenstein wrote: “A good girl is nice before she is anything else—before she is vigorous, bright, even before she is honest.” She described the “perfect girl” as: “The girl who has no bad thoughts or feelings, the kind of person every- one wants to be with. . . . [She is] the girl who speaks quietly, calmly, who is always nice and kind, never mean or bossy. . . . She reminds young women to silence themselves rather than speak their true feel- ings, which they come to consider ‘stupid,’ ‘selfish,’ ‘rude,’ or just plain irrelevant.”

After talking to hundreds of girls for her research project on girls and aggression, Simmons found that the girls she interviewed expressed their exasperation at being expected to be nice all the time and to be nice to everyone. One girl expressed her frustration like this: “They expect us to act like girls back in the 1800s!” Another said, “They expect you to be perfect. . . . When boys do bad things, they all know they’re going to do bad stuff. When girls do it, they yell at them.” Still another said, “They expect you to be perfect angels and then sometimes we don’t want to be considered a perfect angel.”

Some parents also instill in their children the belief that they have to be perfect. When my mother was alive, she sometimes told me this story: One day, as she dropped me off at the babysitter’s and gave me her usual admonishment—“Now you be good for Mrs. Jones today”—I turned to her and said, “I have to be good for Mrs. Jones, I have to be good for you, I have to be good for my teachers, I have to be good at church. When can I be bad?”

My mother always laughed when she told this story, since in many ways she loved my being precocious. But I doubt that she truly

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appreciated what I was trying to tell her—that I felt too much pres- sure to be good and perfect.

It used to be that the payoff for being sweet and nice was that one was taken care of and protected by the men and authority figures in one’s life. Girls and women were perceived as weaker and in need of protection from the “big, bad world” and boys and men took on the responsibility of making sure that nothing bad happened to them. But those days are gone, along with chivalry and manners. Most boys and men today do not feel responsible for protecting girls; in fact, many view girls and women as objects to be exploited. Today, partly due to the popularity of rap music in which girls and women are denigrated and called bitches, boys and men often view girls and women as mere sex objects.

Recently a story on the news related one more case in which sev- eral boys raped a girl at a party. As is so often the prelude to such vio- lence, the girl had been drinking too much and had passed out. Instead of the boys’ feeling protective of her, they took advantage of the situation. To make matters worse, they videotaped the gang rape and showed it to their friends the next day.

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t men who like taking on the role of provider and protector. But these men are not necessarily throwbacks to an earlier time—unfortunately, they often take on this role as a way of dominating women. In fact, these men often look for women who are passive, who appear naive and innocent, because such women are easier to control.

Those women who continue to believe that playing sweet, inno- cent, and naive will guarantee they will be financially provided for by men are also in for a rude awakening. This was the case with my client Maureen, who was raised by a father who instilled in her the belief that women are incapable of taking care of them- selves. She grew up hearing her father tease her mother about how inadequate she was, saying that he hoped nothing ever happened to him because he didn’t think she could manage without him doing everything for her. Maureen’s mother would sweetly laugh

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and agree with him, seemingly happy with her role as a ditsy wife and mother.

Maureen grew up following in her mother’s footsteps. She was attracted to men like her father—take-charge kind of guys who only expected her to look pretty and act sweet. At eighteen she married her Prince Charming, a man who was seven years older than her and already established in his career as a lawyer. Maureen relished her role of homemaker and wife, catering to her husband’s every want and need. She knew nothing about their finances, leaving all that “complicated” stuff to her husband, whom she trusted implicitly to look out for her best interests. But Maureen was to pay heavily for her naïveté. After five years of marriage, her husband left her for another woman. Because of his connections in the community with other lawyers, Maureen was unable to find an attorney in town who would represent her in the divorce case. The out-of-town lawyer whom she finally found to take her case told her that she was going to have a huge battle on her hands. Her husband had successfully hidden many of their assets and he was accusing her of being unfaithful to him.