Prime Time by Jane Fonda

retrospect. I moved out of myself and took up residence next door. The most authentic parts of me took a backseat to the girl (and then the woman) who tried—at least on the surface—to become whatever I thought the boy (or man) I was with wanted. I was beginning my Third Act before I felt I had recovered from this Act I conditioning. This phenomenon, by the way, is not unique to me … far from it.

    Taken at my high school graduation.
    Because of my work with adolescents, I have studied the ways in which this stage of gender-identity development in Act I is different for girls than it is for boys. For many girls, especially Caucasian girls, adolescence is when they try to hide what they know and feel; the code says, “Don’t be too strong, too outspoken, too sexual, too aggressive.”
    A perfect example of this was related to me by Catherine Steiner-Adair, an instructor at Harvard’s Department of Psychiatry and the former director of Eating Disorders Education and Prevention at the Klarman Eating Disorders Center. “I was doing research in a middle school,” she said. “Sometimes I’d invite the students out for pizza. When I would ask the girls what they wanted on their pizzas, the ten-year-olds would want double cheese with pepperoni, the thirteen-year-olds would say, ‘I don’t know,’ and the fifteen-year-olds would answer, ‘Whatever you want.’ ” In other words, girls lose their relationship with themselves and what they want in order to fit in and to be in a relationship, especially with a boy. Asking for double cheese and pepperoni might make them look like they’re pigging out or not “feminine” enough.
    Like many girls, I first began to experience anxiety and depression during adolescence. That is also when my twenty-year-long battle with anorexia and bulimia began. As I know all too personally, this doesn’t end with adolescence but is a pattern of disembodiment that, unless consciously broken, can make intimate relationships nigh impossible; we are not bringing our whole selves to the table—literally and figuratively! If we manage to break the pattern of anxiety, disembodiment, and addiction, then, in our Third Acts, we will be able, as the psychologist Carol Gilligan says, to find our way back to the spirited ten- and eleven-year-old girls we once were, before our voices went underground—only better, wiser.
    If you are a woman, think about your own adolescence. Did you feel you had to conform to culturally imposed stereotypes of femininity, or did you have an authentic relationship to your sexuality and to your gender? Did you own it? Were you able to embody your sexuality because someone made sure you understood that sexuality isn’t just about the act of sex, it’s also about sensuality and feelings? Were you made to feel you had to look and behave a certain way if you were to earn love? Were you supposed to be seen and not heard? Did you have someone who made you understand that your feelings and ideas were as valuable as a boy’s? That you could be strong and brave as well as caring and giving? What kind of role model was your mother? Did she express her own opinions? Take some time for herself? Did your father rule the roost and your mother always acquiesce? How did your father respond to your adolescence? Did you feel you weren’t pretty enough or good enough or thin enough?
    This is all so subjective, isn’t it? Some of the most beautiful women I know think they are unattractive because of early messages, and some not traditionally attractive women exude confidence and beauty because that’s how they were made to feel growing up. Did one or both of your parents act as a buffer to the misogynist media? Did they talk to you about how ridiculous it is that so often advertisements use ultrathin, stereotypically sexy girls and women or macho, super-buff men to sell things? Ads can make women and men feel anxious about how they are (real life) in order to persuade them to buy