Paradox of the Perfect Girl

By Courtney E. Martin, AlterNet. Posted March 29, 2006.

It's college admission season, that time of year when high school seniors and their parents await the day's mail with all the hope and dread of one awaiting the results of a pregnancy test.

To further the anxiety, Kenyon College Dean of Admissions Jennifer Delauhunty Britz recently wrote a New York Times op-ed, glibly titled "To All the Girls I've Rejected." It is an apology-of-sorts for the recent trend of what might be called "reverse gender discrimination" in college admissions. While a surplus of supergirls armed with ambition, impressive CVs, and expressive personal essays are knocking on the ivy-covered front doors of America's best colleges, admission officers are letting their slacker boyfriends and sheepish brothers slip through the backdoor.

Though Britz dresses this very public statement up in personal reflection about her own college-bound daughter's disappointment upon receiving a thin envelope, don't be fooled. This is not a quaint maternal reflection on the end of her daughter's innocence. It's the beginning of a national conversation, or at least it should be, about the legal and cultural implications of the growing imbalance.

The 2003 Supreme Court decision concerning U. Michigan's law school admission upheld previous rulings supporting admissions processes that aim at creating diverse communities on campus but outlaw formal quotas or point system admissions policies that privilege certain races. They argued that there is inherent social value to having diverse classrooms, and that an informal effort to encourage that composition is sound.

The Title IX Education Act of 1972, however, may prove more challenging to institutions, especially public, that are incorporating gender preferences into their admissions policies. It states, "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance."

Well-intentioned admissions counselors trying to create gender-balanced learning communities may find themselves in deep water if they can't prove that their policies don't violate Title IX. Unequal athletic programs that have been tried in courts and transformed are proof of that.

The cultural implications of gender-based college admissions is no less complicated. Britz writes, "We have told today's young women that the world is their oyster; the problem is, so many of them believed us that the standards for admission to today's most selective colleges are stiffer for women than men. How's that for an unintended consequence of the women's liberation movement?"

Some of us with feminist parents were told "You can be anything." Somehow we heard, "You have to be everything." The unintended consequences of the women's liberation movement aren't just informal and possibly illegal college admissions policies, but the oppressive paradigm of the perfect girl.

The perfect girl is everywhere. She is your niece, your daughter, your friend's genius kid. She is the girl who makes the valedictorian speech at your son's graduation and the type-A class president in the skimpy black dress that he brings to the prom. The perfect girl is thin and hungry, not for food, but for honors, awards, scholarships, recognition. The Princeton Review book is the perfect girl's bible. Her appointment book, even at 14, is filled morning to night with scheduled activities. She speaks three languages. She has five varsity letters. She never stops to breathe. She is voted most likely to succeed. She knows she will because she devotes every last iota of her energy, and then some, into achieving.

I know, because I was one. In 1998, when I applied to college, I struggled through the night to cut my list of accomplishments down to the tiny space provided on my college applications. How do you abbreviate captain, editor, president? Should I emphasize the child abuse prevention work or the magazine publications more? Though two years earlier my mother had typed every last comma onto my brother's college applications (what an anachronistic clacking that now seems), I refused to let her even look at my finished packages. I was unhealthily driven and fiercely independent.

Courtney E. Martin is a writer living in Brooklyn. Her book, Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, will be published by Simon & Schuster's Free Press in March 2007.

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