Adolescent girls growing up in today's society have many more hardships and many more social issues to deal with than in years previous. For girls, as well as boys, adolescence in a dark and depressing period that at times, seems never ending. In "Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls," author Mary Pipher PH.D illustrates just how tough the teenage years are for young women. Even though Mary Pipher used to be a psychologist, one way she is able to get her ideas across to hear readers without losing any of the emotion and feeling is by using actual quotes by some of her adolescent girl clients. I feel that this was a crucial and very effective way to keep the reader's attention. Pipher sees America's culture as "girl poisoning". She talks about how girls are expected to look a certain way to be accepted and most of the time, the girl's own peer's act as enforcers of the destructive behavior.
             Female silencing has continues to become more and more real as years pass. No one can reason why seemingly perfect, happy girls can no longer appreciate things in life when perhaps even a year earlier life's simple pleasures could have made them smile. Early in the book, the author brings up the image of Shakespeare's Ophelia drowning herself due to numerous failed attempts to please both her father as well as Hamlet. She compares today's girls to this scene saying that they are also drowning as they try to sort out life details and decide whom it is that they want to please.
             I really feel the Mary Pipher emphasizes the major problems that adolescent girls are currently facing, the causes of the problems and how as individually as well as a society, we can deal and change the destructive pattern teenage girls are following.
             While the author blames parents and peers, she mainly puts the blame on society as a whole. She says that we are all guilty of becoming c...