Parental pride, parental anxiety: on ever-earlier adolescence and the ever-present double standard

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As I’ve written before, each semester in my women’s history course we spend some time looking at Joan Brumberg’s wonderful Body Project. Brumberg talks about the four to five year drop in the onset of puberty between the late nineteenth century and the present. The best medical evidence we have from 1900 put the average age of menarche at 16; today, it is just over 11. And of course, with earlier menarche comes earlier development of other secondary sex characteristics. The same is true with boys, though males lack the single defining demarcation line of the onset of menstruation to mark an entry into adolescence.

It’s a women’s studies class, so we spend much more time focusing on the impact of earlier puberty on girls than on boys. We refute some of the common myths (like the long-standing notion that the Virgin Mary was fourteen, and thus menarche must have happened for her before she was to be wed). We talk about the role of changing diet, particularly meat consumption, in driving adolescent growth. I quote from PCRM’s summary of a Harvard study:

Some studies suggest that the growth of vegetarian children is more gradual than that of non-vegetarians—in other words, vegetarian children grow a bit more slowly at first, but they catch up later on. Final heights and weights for vegetarian children are comparable to those of meat-eating children. Interestingly, breast-fed babies also grow more slowly than bottle-fed babies. Somewhat less rapid growth during the early years is thought to decrease disease risk later in life.

On the other hand, diets rich in animal protein, found in meat, eggs, and dairy products, appear to reduce the age of puberty, as shown in a 2000 study from the Harvard School of Public Health, which found that girls who consumed higher levels of animal protein compared to vegetable protein between 3 and 8 years of age went through menarche earlier. Nature may well have designed the human body to grow up more gradually, to reach puberty later, and to last longer than most people raised on omnivorous diets experience.

Bold mine. The full study is here. I never hide the fact that I’m a vegan, and so I’m quite clear about my bias: if future parents want to make sure that their children “don’t grow up too fast”, raising them with a minimum meat intake (or as vegans) is the best way to go. Take Harvard’s word for it — there’s a lot to be said for delaying physical puberty by 24-36 months, to give the mind time to keep pace with the body developmentally. MTV can’t make your daughter menstruate earlier than you did; McDonalds can.

But please believe that I don’t just use the palpable anxiety my students feel about the “vanishing of physical childhood” to push my vegan agenda. Yeah, I do that – but there’s more as well. We also spend a great deal of time exploring the historical, psychological, and cultural implications of a much earlier adolescence. Those students who are comfortable doing so are invited to open up dialogue with older female relatives (this is not required); many in my classes, filled as they are with first-generation Americans, have grandmothers who are a foot shorter than they are — and who report “starting” substantially later.

In journal assignments, many of my students write about their own worries about their younger sisters or daughters. (I have many single parents, mostly moms, in my courses). A great many talk about rethinking the diets that they will offer their future children. But interestingly, none of them express any anxiety about early puberty in boys. When the subject comes up — which it has — in my men and masculinity courses, I never hear a student say “Gosh, I want to make sure I raise my son vegetarian so he can stay in a boy’s body longer.” In my women’s history courses, I constantly hear “I want to do everything I can to delay my daughter’s development”.

We project our cultural anxieties about sex on to girls’ bodies, not boys’. The lamentable and indefensible double standard that leads many parents to guard jealously their daughter’s virginity while expressing incestuous pride at their son’s sexual exploits is at play in how many parents respond to their children’s development. Imagine a typical modern parent, if there is such a thing, saying “My little girl is growing up” as a beloved daughter shows signs of physical puberty. What tone do you imagine in the mother’s — or father’s — voice? My bet is wistfulness and worry more than pride. But when little Jimmy comes running in, looking not so little anymore, and Mom or Dad says “My, look how big you’re getting!”, it’s pretty darned likely that there is nary a hint of anxiety in the air!

It is a rare parent indeed who will approach the family physician saying “My Jimmy is the tallest and strongest boy in the fifth grade. Don’t you think he’s growing up too fast?” But ask any pediatrician, and he or she will tell you of legions of parents who come in, worrying that their eleven year-old Jenny is already developing breasts and hips. (One of my pediatrician friends regularly gets asks if there’s a “shot” that can delay the onset of puberty. He’s only asked that by the parents of girls. The parents of boys ask him for a referral to an endocrinologist, so that they can get growth hormones for their undersized laddies.)

Kids aren’t dumb. Children, even (perhaps especially) adolescent children, are particularly attuned to nuances of approval, disapproval, and fear. Girls get the message that their growth is scaring their parents; worse, many fathers famously reduce their physical affection towards their daughters as the girls begin to hit puberty. Though one hears anecdotally about mothers eagerly awaiting their daughter’s menarche so that they can “bond as women”, those stories seem fairly rare. Boys suffer too — but the boys who have the hardest time are those who are the last to begin to grow. Too often, the most worried parents on the block are the parents of the girl who “developed first” and the parents of the smallest boy in his class. These are two very different sets of anxieties, and kids pick up on them very easily. The message is clear: boys are “supposed” to be strong and powerful (and in some sense, physically sexual); girls are “supposed” to be “little” as long as possible.

Walk on to the campus of any American middle or junior-high school, and look at the seventh-graders. If you’re over thirty (or fifty), your first thought (especially if you’re not often around adolescents) is how big and how developed the kids appear compared to what you remember about your peers at that age. Puberty still happens along a spectrum, and at any given age, some kids will always be farther along than others. But the age at which many kids start traveling down that spectrum is much earlier than it was a century — or even just twenty-five years –ago. Some of that is due to better overall health, much of it due to increased meat consumption — but regardless, it is a significant shift. And because we live in a culture that objectifies adolescent girls at the same time that it denies them sexual agency, and because we live in a culture with absurd and unattainable standards of what “real men” are supposed to be, we respond radically differently to the onset of puberty in our sons and our daughters.

Leaving aside veganism as a panacea for all ills (though I am often inclined to think that it is), what we need is some more honest conversation about our fears and our hopes for our young people. We need to make sure that we are involving teens (and yes, older pre-teens) in that discussion, and that we are actively listening to their anxieties and hopes rather than merely projecting our own on to them. And we need to see that our sons can be vulnerable at any size, and our girls can find the first glimmers of power and agency even in junior high school. In other words, we need to recognize boys and girls as complete human beings, adults in formation, with potential that ought not be shaped or limited by the sex of their rapidly changing bodies.

54 thoughts on “Parental pride, parental anxiety: on ever-earlier adolescence and the ever-present double standard”

  1. So I am the one parent who does go to the pediatrician worrying about my son’s height and weight, but we have a minority situation – he is autistic, so at 4 1/2 yrs old looks like a 6-yr-old but speaks and understands at the level of a 2-yr-old. Now I wonder how my fear about his physical growth would have been manifest had he not been autistic.

  2. Hugo,

    Actually, social factors do affect the age of menarche. Specifically, girl children in a household where the father is absent tend to enter menarche at an earlier age than ones who grow up in a stable family situation. (There is some theoretical basis in behavioral ecology for this, if you’re interested in R vs. K selection theory.)

    Whether MTV type sexual overstimulation also leads to earlier puberty is an interesting question. As far as I know there’s no evidence, but I wouldn’t dismiss it out of hand. The interplay between the psychological and the physiological is more complex and subtle than most of us used to think.

    It would appear that the breakdown of the American family has not been good for children, either emotionally or physically.

  3. If it’s this study, Hector, it affected boys equally.

    And the onset of earlier menarche was 11 months earlier, which is far less than the 24-36 months associated with diet-related causes.

    The theory you note remains controversial, much more so than the nutritional explanation. See here.

  4. “Specifically, girl children in a household where the father is absent tend to enter menarche at an earlier age than ones who grow up in a stable family situation.”

    There is absolutely nothing unstable about a household simply because the father is absent.

    Also, I personally was raised by both parents. I starting menstruation at the ripe old age of just over 11. I was fed a diet heavy on meat. I wouldn’t touch a vegetable when I was a kid.

  5. It’s worth bearing in mind that while menarche marks the beginning of fertility, it does not mark the beginning of sexual feelings.
    I had developed enough to need a bra by eleven (although there was a strong expectation that girls in secondary school would wear bras – I’m pretty sure all the girls were wearing them, at least on days when we had PE) and I started bleeding when I was twelve or so, but I didn’t have my first crush for at least another year, more likely two, and I didn’t connect ‘that man is attractive and I want to look at and think about him’ to sex until my late teens.
    And it didn’t and doesn’t bother me that my body was capable of sex when I wasn’t ready for it. My body is capable of a great many things that I do not require it to do.

    On to another point: physical maturity cannot be equated with adulthood. People grow up at different rates. I personally was ‘grown-up’ enough to be ready for university by my midteens. My little brother isn’t quite there, but he has another year before he goes to uni anyway. My housemate is still not as adult as I was at fourteen and she’s been at uni for two years already. She didn’t reach menarche particularly late any more than I reached it particularly early. Earlier physical develpment does not mean kids are growing up earlier.

  6. Exactly, Froth. The longer we delay menarche, the more likely physical maturity and sexual feelings will be congruent. And though kids are not “growing up” earlier in a psychological sense, they are in a physical sense — and as a consequence, are much more likely to be sexualized by adults and by their peers. (Brumberg makes this point beautifully, and Courtney Martin does as well.)

  7. I’m very uncomfortable with the idea of anyone, including my parents, trying to arrange my life to affect how fast I developed. Trying to hasten puberty and trying to delay it both strike me as a denial of bodily autonomy. If I asked “Why did you raise me veggie?” and was told, “Well, in part it was so that you wouldn’t reach pubery too early”, I’d feel violated and objectified. Let my body do what it does, don’t interfere with my growth to fit your idea of how a proper little girl ought to be.
    “The longer we delay menarche,” you say. So a girl is like a pet, who needs to be controlled and altered to fit your convenience or your comfort.

  8. In my immediate family the men were very late to puberty. I think my dad somehow evaded the bullying, but my brother was routinely mocked for infractions such as “not having pubes,” among other, meaner things, while he was in his first couple years of high school. So yeah, I get why parents freak out about having the “smallest” boy. Then again, if burgeoning masculinity could have been expressed more positively instead of with mocking and hurting those who hadn’t yet reached puberty, maybe it wouldn’t be such a big deal if someone was a late bloomer.

  9. “a 2000 study from the Harvard School of Public Health, which found that girls who consumed higher levels of animal protein compared to vegetable protein between 3 and 8 years of age went through menarche earlier.”

    I wonder if that study controls for the amount of growth hormones given to the animals. My mother grew up on a farm, with a high animal protein diet, and started her period at sixteen. She said that was a common age (15-17) to start at the time (1950s). The only two things I think of that is different from now is that she and her friends were more physically active than most girls today, and that growth hormones are given to animals.

    “Boys suffer too — but the boys who have the hardest time are those who are the last to begin to grow.”

    I had that problem growing up. I was young for my grade and small for my age. I was 4 when I started kindergarten and 16 when I started 12th grade. I was always the smallest or next to the smallest in my classes. I was less than 70 pounds in 7th grade, and was 5′ in 9th grade. I grew until I was 21, ending up at 6’2″ and 175#.

    My wife was full grown (5’6″) by 7th grade and had started her period by 11. She also grew up on the farm and she had a very active youth. She said most of friends started their periods at or before 14. Our sons take after my wife in being fast growers. My oldest is in 9th grade and is already 6’1′.

    “So I am the one parent who does go to the pediatrician worrying about my son’s height and weight, but we have a minority situation – he is autistic, so at 4 1/2 yrs old looks like a 6-yr-old but speaks and understands at the level of a 2-yr-old.”

    My middle son is autistic, and he significantly taller and larger than his age peers. The only research I have found about growth and autism is the link between fast growth of the brain in the first year and autism. His head grew very fast his first year. It took five years for his body to get caught up to his head.

  11. But please believe that I don’t just use the palpable anxiety my students feel about the “vanishing of physical childhood” to push my vegan agenda. Yeah, I do that</blockquote

    Single-handedly, Hugo, you’ve managed to convince me that I will have nothing to do with and will never support PETA, the ALF, or any other animal-rights organization you profess to admire. You’ve made it plain that all the other principles you hold are disposable – your only deeply-held belief is in the protection of animals, and things like ‘anti-sexism’ or ‘pacifism’ are feel-good platitudes.

    And a lack of credibility means that when you are being honest and forthright, nobody will be listening. Are you more interested in seeing yourself as the Righteous Minority, or in persuading people? I don’t really expect you to answer that, because you have this fantastic ability to swan right past anything you don’t want to hear.

    Now, for people who are interested in what the study actually says rather than Hugo’s third-hand interpretation, the abstract can be found here. It was a study of 67 Causasian girls, collected from data from the 1930s and 1940s, and predicted likely age of menarche. It was not, as Hugo or the PCRM would spin it, an examination of what a healthy, modern vegetarian diet vs. a meat-based diet would have on a girl’s age of puberty.

    So a girl is like a pet, who needs to be controlled and altered to fit your convenience or your comfort.

    Actually, Froth, Hugo regards pets as having much more value than little girls. Little girls can grow up to be exploited by doing ‘flirty fishing’ for PETA, and that is right and proper. Pets, on the other hand, are animal companions with the same moral worth as male humans.

  12. “I’m very uncomfortable with the idea of anyone, including my parents, trying to arrange my life to affect how fast I developed. Trying to hasten puberty and trying to delay it both strike me as a denial of bodily autonomy.”

    I’m also very uncomfortable with the idea of trying to interfere in any capacity with a girl’s physical development. There is no valid reason to attempt to keep a girl’s body from developing in the way that it is intended to develop. It is not the job of young girls or their parents to ensure that girls do not develop early so that adults do not sexualize them. It is the job of adults to not sexualize young girls.

    I am personally all in favor of more people going vegan. I’m mostly vegan myself and have been for several years. But this argument, as Froth has already stated, seems to be veering dangerously into interfering with young girl’s bodily autonomy. What we need to do as a society is to stop obsessing over young girl’s bodies and their sexualities instead of trying desperately to control them.

    The idea that we need to interfere in any way with the start of menarche in young girl’s is highly offensive, Hugo. And frankly, I find the suggestion from you that we should attempt to do just that highly disappointing.

  13. Faith, we attempt to do lots of things to safeguard our children’s health. Giving our daughters Gardasil (an excellent idea) as a vaccine against cervical cancer is taking a measure to protect young women’s health. GIven that there is clear evidence that early memarche is linked to diet, and given that early menarche and secondary sex development is often emotionally problematic in pre-teen girls, what’s wrong with feeding our pre-pubescent children a vegetarian diet in order to, among many other things, allow them 24 extra months of physical childhood?

  14. I haven’t deeply absorbed this conversation yet, but Hugo, surely you’re not saying in your last comment there that having your period is akin to having cervical cancer or genital warts? There’s nothing inherently unhealthy about menustration – you don’t need to safeguard girls from it.

    I’m having a hard time finding anything in your post and the comments that suggests that early menarche is REALLY emotionally problematic for pre-teens (I was 12, for the record, and recall feeling like I was in competition with my friends for who would get their first bra and period first, but it wasn’t anything “emotionally problematic”). All I see, and please point me in the right direction if I’m wrong, is worry about the harm coming from adults’ perceptions of young girls. I’m with Faith and Froth here that this is a little skeevy.

    I mean, if you really feel like putting your kids on a vegan diet is beneficial for their health as a whole, then that’s every parents’ preogative to decide that. But singling out girls’ development, and the desire to manipulate it, that’s just weird.

  15. Hugo,

    As I’ve already stated, I started puberty at a very young age. Starting puberty at a very young age did not cause me any harm. Physical development is a problem for girls regardless of their age due to the way other people (i.e. adults and peers who tease them) treat them. The development itself is not harmful. As someone who has struggled most of her life with getting the people in my life to stop trying to keep me as a child, I can tell you quite plainly that trying to delay normal sexual development is most definitely harmful.

    I also started having sex as a young teenager. The sex that I had with other teen boys also didn’t harm me in the slightest. The only sex that I had as a teenager which harmed me was the sex that I had with a 24-year-old man as a teenager. The only way in which I was harmed by having sex with teen boys was, in fact, due to the way other people -treated- me because I was having sex. The sex itself was harmless. I didn’t start having a problem with my sexuality until I was an adult and started having sex with adult men.

  16. “I haven’t deeply absorbed this conversation yet, but Hugo, surely you’re not saying in your last comment there that having your period is akin to having cervical cancer or genital warts? There’s nothing inherently unhealthy about menustration – you don’t need to safeguard girls from it.”

    Thank you, B.

  17. No, of course there’s nothing unhealthy about menstruation. But early development is often problematic psychologically (and, to be fair, so too is late development. Being “average” is what kids tend to crave). The evidence is strong that early menarche is not a consequence of “better” nutrition but a consequence of an increase in meat consumption, particularly hormone-fed meat. For parents to take no interest in the impact of diet on their children’s growth seems odd to me.

    Regardless of when a girl starts to develop, we need strong support systems in place. But all things considered, 14 and 15 year-olds are more likely to be better equipped to handle the societal reaction to their changing bodies than, say, 10 and 11 year-olds.

    If one had a hypothetical five year-old daughter, and one were given the following choice:

    a. You can have a healthy daughter who develops normally, and begins to develop at age 11

    b. You can have a healthy daughter who develops normally, and begins to develop at age 13

    I suspect that many parents would, all else being equal, select option b, because of the better chance of congruence between physical and emotional growth.

    And veganism is one way to increase the odss of “outcome b”.

  18. I still don’t see the harm. From your post and comments, you seem to think that 11 is too young. Half my friends started getting their period at 11, which was one year before me, and I can’t say I have any idea what these psychological problems are that you’re talking about.

    You say, “For parents to take no interest in the impact of diet on their children’s growth seems odd to me.”

    Since when does “children’s growth” = “when girls start their period”? Are there medical doctors saying that girls are physically harmed by having their period at 11 and therefore need a vegan diet to delay it?

    I feel like you’re being very abstract and vague here, and I can’t figure out your motivations. From what you’ve written in the past, you’re not someone who advocates grown women wearing long skirts and high-necked collars to prevent harm to them from the way society gazes at them, so I can’t figure out why you’re doing the equivalent here in a much more invasive way.

    I truly, truly don’t understand your idea that it’s better to be 13 at menarche than 11. Like I said, I was 12. If it’d happened at 11, well, I was already waiting for it and wondering when it would happen. If it’d happened at 13, I would have spent an additional year wondering where it was. That’s really the only psychological effect I can think of. We’d started getting sex ed in 5th grade, when I was 10, so I’d already known about all the things my body was going to go through for 2 years before I got my period.

    I realize I’ve written a lot, and I’m sort of rambling, but it’s mainly because you’ve just really confused me. I see what you’re saying, but I’m not connecting it to anything in real life except yet another desire to control female sexuality.

  19. “GIven that there is clear evidence that early memarche is linked to diet, and given that early menarche and secondary sex development is often emotionally problematic in pre-teen girls, what’s wrong with feeding our pre-pubescent children a vegetarian diet in order to, among many other things, allow them 24 extra months of physical childhood?”

    Since early puberty and growth is often linked to higher social status in boys, and (as you’ve said) parents don’t mind or actively encourage the growth and maturation of their male children, why shouldn’t we fill boys with milk and meat then? Does keeping girls out of a woman’s body, at any cost, help us to deal with all of our issues surrounding the adult female body? (“It’s gross! It has pain! It attracts rapists!”)

    I find your responses in the comments strange, Hugo. I thought in your post, you were remarking on the double standard of parents and society’s views of adolescent maturation and saying “And that’s really screwed up.” But I wonder why, in this instance, you prioritize altering the bodies of adolescents over altering societal creep-spectations.

    For what it’s worth, I went “through” menarche 1 to 2 years later than most of my peers (being skinny)–though still very “early” by those standards, 13-14 was a bit late by the standards of my peers. I did not stop growing. I did not get an “adult” figure until I was 18 or 19, and I continued to curve out into my early 20s. My body, at any point in development, did not make me sexually harassed. Overentitled and undercivilized men did.

    I support giving adolescents space to be adolescent, and decreasing the nasty amount of sexualization our culture places on them. But I also think it’s hard to have conversations about “keeping girls physically young” when the current beauty ideal is basically adolescent–skinny, small hips, no body hair, a babyish face–with the addition of boobs. Don’t worry–they’ll be adults trying to look like teenagers much longer than they’ll be children trying to look like teens!

  21. “If one had a hypothetical five year-old daughter, and one were given the following choice:

    a. You can have a healthy daughter who develops normally, and begins to develop at age 11

    b. You can have a healthy daughter who develops normally, and begins to develop at age 13″

    I have a young daughter. She is not hypothetical. I could care less if she begins to menstruate at 11. Menstruation is -normal-.

    What I see as the ironic thing here is that you complain in your post about the way parents try to delay female development, and now you’re arguing for doing the same thing yourself!

    I think what is going on here is that you are projecting your own fear of female sexual development onto young girls. Girls are not in need of being protected from their own bodies. They are in need of being protected from a society which does not understand how to handle girls and their bodies and sexuality.

    What shall we do next? Shall we start doing what desperate women in Cameroon do to delay sexual development out of fear that they will garner sexual attention from men? Shall we start ironing their breasts?

    Anyone got a nice, flat, hot rock? We’ll take care of those pesky breasts!

  22. Hugo,

    Apparently your blog doesn’t like comments with links. My comments keep getting eaten every time I try to post a link to the breast ironing page on Wikipedia.

  23. Much as I’m aghast to discover, I’m with Faith on this one. The possible benefits of veganism aside, I just found the idea in this post, the deliberate purpose of delaying and controling the onset of puberty in girls, very creepy. Victorian parents supposedly underfed their children for the same purpose, so I’ve read.

  24. Poor Hugo…seems like everyone is picking on him today. That being said, I have to agree with everyone. Eleven is not too young! As someone who started at age 13, I experienced what it was like to be a “late bloomer”. All of my friends were getting theirs, where was mine?!!

    Hugo, have you thought perhaps it’s not just a non-vegan diet that causes early development, but also weight? An overweight or obese girl will develop earlier…do you know of any overweight/obese vegans? Now, before you say meat causes obesity, I do know a lot of non-vegans/vegetarians who have normal BMI.

  25. I’m not getting across well here.

    Folks, the whole thrust of the PCRM/Harvard thesis is that the drop in the average age for menarche is fundamentally at odds with nature — girls getting their periods at 11 is “not the way it ought to be”, and it certainly wasn’t the way it always was. The tinkering with body clocks has come about as a result of massive changes in how we eat, and what we eat, and what we eat ate before it got slaughtered. Returning to a vegan diet is thus not “messing with nature”, it’s a restoration of the natural.

  26. And perhaps we can agree to disagree about the veganism issue, and return to what the real theme of the post was supposed to be about: the radically different ways we — as a culture collectively — respond to the changing bodies of our sons and daughters.

  27. Hugo, our HEIGHT is not the “way it ought to be” if you’re using the assumption that eating meat is messing with our bodies in bad ways. I don’t see you decrying tall kids or suggesting parents really need to try to keep their kids short, or shorter for longer.

    You still haven’t answered, where is the harm? Really. Having our periods at 11 is DIFFERENT than it was before, yes, you’ve demonstrated that. But that’s not enough to get me on board here. You keep talking about the “problematic psychological” effect, but I haven’t seen you go beyond simply making this claim to demonstrate it. As I keep saying, I’ve BEEN one of these girls you are talking about, my friends were these girls, and I cannot relate to your claim of problematic psychological effects at all.

    If it’s really just a matter of “restoration of the natural”, you wouldn’t be so focused only on young girls and their puberty. Puberty IS NATURAL. It’s not bad. It’s not harmful. Just because the age that it’s occurring these days is DIFFERENT does not convince me that we need to DO something about it.

    If we’re talking about 5-year-olds whose bodies physically can’t handle going through these changes and they’re not mentally old enough yet to handle taking care of the personal hygiene demands that puberty brings, then sure, you’ve got more of a point there. But I, and all of my friends, were more than ready and capable to handle our bodies’ changes when we were 11 and 12.

    If society isn’t ready to handle it and responds by sexualizing girls, how in the world is it appropriate to respond by doing something TO the girls? As I said before, you don’t advocate doing that to grown women, so why do it here?

  28. And perhaps we can agree to disagree about the veganism issue, and return to what the real theme of the post was supposed to be about: the radically different ways we — as a culture collectively — respond to the changing bodies of our sons and daughters.

    I don’t think we ever left it. I don’t see your dissenters arguing against the veganism, but against how you are, in your words “respond[ing] to the changing bodies of our…daughters.”

  29. “the whole thrust of the PCRM/Harvard thesis is that the drop in the average age for menarche is fundamentally at odds with nature”

    What is their definition of “nature”? Do they mean living in a hunter-gatherer society, such as the Bushmen (San, !Kung, etc.) of southern Africa? Does “nature” mean living in an agricultural society (~8000BC – 1750AD) or in an industrial society (1750-1950)?

    This is a serious question, no irony or sarcasm implied.

  30. My comments today have been hasty, B; my original post made clearer my feelings: if parents want to delay the onset of puberty for the sake of allowing their children a little bit more time “to be kids”, then veganism is one way to do that.

    But as I said in my conclusion, what really needs to happen, irrespective of diet, is conversation. And this is the real point of the piece:

    …we need to see that our sons can be vulnerable at any size, and our girls can find the first glimmers of power and agency even in junior high school. In other words, we need to recognize boys and girls as complete human beings, adults in formation, with potential that ought not be shaped or limited by the sex of their rapidly changing bodies.

    Regardless of when puberty begins, our daughters can have power and agency. That needs to be our focus as much as our diets.

  31. “And perhaps we can agree to disagree about the veganism issue, and return to what the real theme of the post was supposed to be about: the radically different ways we — as a culture collectively — respond to the changing bodies of our sons and daughters.”

    Like B already said, I don’t see where we ever left the theme of the post. If you want to advocate veganism, have at it. I do the same thing myself. But don’t do it in the name of “protecting” girls from freaking puberty.

    “if parents want to delay the onset of puberty for the sake of allowing their children a little bit more time “to be kids”, then veganism is one way to do that.”

    But aside from our societies fear of girl’s developing breasts, menstruation, and (*gasp*) having sex, WHY should any parent attempt to delay puberty?

  32. I think, Faith, that a great many parents would like to spare their children, for as long as possible, the premature sexualization that kids so often encounter when they transition into adolescence — sexualization, usually but not always, at the hands of older men. While our first job (as any reader of my blog knows, I’m passionate about this) is working to change how men see young women (see my sidebar on the topic), it’s not absurd to wish that a child might have an extra couple of years to prepare himself or herself for the onset of a great deal of complex adult attention. To me, this is in no way shape or form similar to asking girls to “cover up”. The body is not the problem — society’s sexualization of adolescence is. But that doesn’t mean a parent can’t wish to delay their child’s encounter with that sexualization for as long as possible. Does that make sense, or are we talking past each other?

  33. I think that parents can do many things to delay that encounter, such as buying age-appropriate clothes, not letting them color their hair, championing role models who aren’t Hannah Montana, selecting books for them to read that aren’t The Clique and Gossip Girl, etc.

    Trying to reach that goal by physically manipulating their daughters’ bodies is on this whole other level. Doing so in order to satisfy a parent’s wish to protect their daughters is just skeevy. It’s not the wish for delayed youth that’s bad – but they should really, really be appropriate in how they go about it.

  34. Hugo, you freely admit that your concern for girls’ development is an excuse to push veganism. Suddenly pretending that we needn’t talk about veganism anymore is hasty backtracking because you realize your position is nonsense. (As is your interpretation of the Harvard study, which is not only bizarre but completely different from what the study actually says.)

    I’ll take B.’s point a step farther: this isn’t just skeevy, it’s what over at Pandagon we’d call panty-sniffing. The solution to sexualization of our daughters is not to try and manipulate their bodies so that they might achieve menarche later. (Nutrition and genetics, by the way, play a role in girls’ development; do you also recommend we starve our daughters, or that men make sure to select wives who were ‘late bloomers’?)

    Oh, and since I am an actual parent of daughters, I would truly appreciate your not blathering idiotically about what parents clearly want. You can pretend that I don’t exist if it makes your protective bubble of ego remain intact, but if you’re trying to convince parents to give up meat, you’re doing just the opposite.

  35. Mythago, I have a track record of fifteen years of teaching gender studies and many, many years of youth work with teens of both sexes. I’ve been a vegan for less than half that time. If you read my posts about menarche in the past, you’ll see that I write about adolescence from a wide variety of positions without pushing a vegan agenda.

    I’m not sure how else to say it, because what you seem to be hearing me say and I what I think I am saying are worlds apart. Look at the title of the darned post: this was about parental fears and the double-standard; it was written to criticize the over-hyped anxiety we have about adolescent girls. That’s the point of the post — the stuff about veganism is a tangent, albeit a controversial one, but a tangent regardless.

    The primary reason to be vegan is out of concern for animal welfare, not the impact of meat upon human bodies. From that perspective, any argument in favor of a vegan diet that de-centers animal concerns is a flawed one. That said, feeding children of either sex a vegan diet is one strategy for avoiding the growth hormones in food that may contribute to premature adolescent development. That’s not “panty-sniffing”, which seems to come close to a charge of prurient interest in the very young, which is a serious accusation to throw around.

    My entire writing, teaching, and volunteering career — not to mention the modest popularity of this blog — is contingent upon my credibility as a safe adult mentor for young people. If the way in which I write leads folks to surmise that I have some sort of bizarre pedophilic interest in the bodies of the very young, then I’m failing miserably at being the kind of winsome advocate I have worked so hard to be.

    And Mythago, your commenting here has gotten increasingly critical — fundamentally, you don’t seem to like me or my world view one bit. I’m not asking for a cookie, but a relentless diet of brickbats unleavened by even a passing sense that you and I share the same worldview leaves me wondering why you continue to take part in these discussions. You seem to find my views on food, feminism, and my Jewish heritage to be distasteful at best and jaw-droppingly asinine at worst. I’m not trying to drive you away, but I admit, I’m a bit perplexed as to why you stay.

  36. The first time I was sexually harrased and knew it to be sexual harrasment (there may have been catcalls I’ve forgotten), I was eleven. While I was wearing a bra, I didn’t really need it, and I didn’t have womanly hips and I hadn’t reached menarche.
    But a boy my age still felt it necessary to follow me home and shove pornography in my face.

    Girls are going to be sexualised from the moment they get tall enough to look teenage. Not from when they visibly develop – from when they are tall enough. Because our society regards teenagers as fair game, whatever their figures are like. Deliberately delaying puberty, besides being creepy, isn’t going to spare girls from being sexualised.

  37. “Does that make sense, or are we talking past each other?”

    Hugo,

    I understand parents having the fear of their daughter being sexualized by older men. There’s a very real need to have that fear. But two things here:

    A) A girl does not have to reach puberty to attract sexual attention from men. Girls, unfortunately, quite often begin receiving sexual attention from men long before they even reach puberty. Some don’t even get to make it out of diapers before they end up the object of a man’s sexual attention.

    2) The answer here is not to try to expect females to change, or to try to alter their diet in some capacity to “protect” them from developing. The answer is to actually expect men to actually stop sexualizing young girls and work towards that reality. We must stop putting the onus of responsibility for not being sexually victimized on females and finally put it square on the shoulders of those who create a society in which discussions like this end up occurring. You know, the men. Every time we expect females to take responsibility instead of men (Anyone else starting to be reminded of all the things women are told to do to avoid being raped? Don’t wear that short skirt! Don’t go out alone at night! Don’t have a vagina!) the men who are created this hell on earth gain a few more points and ensure that we will continue to live in a society in which sexual harassment and violence against women reigns supreme.

  38. We must stop putting the onus of responsibility for not being sexually victimized on females and finally put it square on the shoulders of those who create a society in which discussions like this end up occurring.

    Amen. Complete agreement. See my post here: http://hugoschwyzer.net/2006/07/13/a-good-bishop-gets-it-dead-wrong-more-on-womens-clothing-male-desire-and-gods-gift-of-self-control/

    And most of my “modesty” archive:http://hugoschwyzer.net/category/modesty/

  39. Yes, Hugo, we all know what you’ve said before. We know what the title of your post is and what most of the content of the post is. But you can’t sit there and decry the difference between how adolescent boys and girls are treated and then say, “Oh, but IF YOU WANT to delay your girls’ puberty, try veganism!”

    All I can think is that you saw a place to shill for your newest favorite topic and either didn’t see or didn’t care about the conflict of interest and the harm you suggested. Animals trumped girls.

  40. I think, B, a better way for me to have put it originally would have been to say:

    “Meat consumption, particularly hormone-infused meat consumption, causes girls and boys to develop unnaturally early according to many reputable physicians. Therefore, one solution among many is to feed children a vegan/vegetarian diet, allowing for a more natural transition into puberty.”

    If I had said that in the first place, we might have been better off. Blog in haste, repent in leisure, and all that!

  41. “Meat consumption, particularly hormone-infused meat consumption, causes girls and boys to develop unnaturally early according to many reputable physicians.”

    I’m still not convinced the development is “unnatural”. I’m also not convinced that girls are developing at a rate that much faster than they have historically. For starters, I question how anyone could really know the average age of menarche 100 years ago given the shame that surrounding menstruation and girls feeling the need to hide their menstruation due to that shame. How could they have possibly truly known that average age of menarche was 16 given the secrecy that used to surround menarche? Could be that it is that significantly different, but I’m not buying it. From what I know about the history of teens giving birth, I’m guessing that the average of menarche has not dropped anywhere near as drastically as some people are making out.

    I’m most certainly not convinced that this drop in the average age of menarche is harmful if it indeed is a fact.

  42. Faith, check out Brumberg’s book, and her extraordinarily detailed footnotes. Gynecology did exist a century ago, and wasn’t an entirely primitive discipline — the resarch on the declining age is excellent and varied, and a long list of refereed medical articles is provided in the footnotes of the Body Project.

  43. I do not have The Body Project at hand. But from what I remember of that and other books, the 19th/early 20th societal discomfort over early menarche was, in part, focused on “Why are our upper-class girls reaching puberty earlier than poor girls? Perhaps they are overnourished and underexercised!” Now at that time there were no artificially-added food hormones, less artificial light, etc., so that the main variable seemed to be one of diet.

    Can we say, though, that girls who ate the diet of the 18th/19th century poor and working classes ate the perfect diet and were perfectly healthy and grew exactly as they should? We know that the 18th century Frenchmen who stormed the Bastille were about the size of a modern 14 year old American girl–but people usually thought that the sans-culottes were undernourished, not that we were feeding our girls too much!

    Especially for people who don’t see/do veganism as a moral choice to limit animal suffering, this post has so many echoes of cultural food anxiety for women: “Butter, meat, cheese–they are bad foods. They go right to your hips! Stay small. Stay skinny. Stay in a girl’s body.”

  44. Just adding a note about my own personal experience. I am East Indian and was raised on a diet that was predominantly vegetarian. Meat constituted about 10% of my diet. I had barely turned 12 when I started menstruating. I was a very scrawny kid and a poor eater (everyone told me so) until I started menstruating. Don’t know if the two are linked in any way. I must add that I was raised by both parents. There are always exceptions to every study and rule.

  45. “fundamentally at odds with nature”?

    I hate to break it to you, sport, but veganism is fundamentally at odds with nature. Rip out your intestines and your dentition sometime and hand ‘em over to a biologist, and say “what kind of diet does the critter these came out of require”? S/he’ll tell you, “omnivore”.

    Lots of things are fundamentally at odds with nature. Eyeglasses. Cancer drugs. Living in artificial houses instead of caves. Cooking. “Fundamentally at odds with nature” is shorthand for “not living like a fool”.

    I think the other commenters are on point here. You’ve got some squick issue about teenage girls or something. Worrying about when strangers’ children hit menarche is freaky, bro. For the record, I have a five year old girl, and like Faith and others, I could care less when she hits puberty; I just want her to be healthy, happy, well-cared for, and given space for her physical, sexual, and emotional development at her own pace. I feed her meat when she wants meat and vegetables when she wants vegetables.

    If you’re concerned about early sexualization of girls, then start writing Wal-Mart and pressuring them to get their Junior Whore toy lines off the shelves.

  47. “Gynecology did exist a century ago, and wasn’t an entirely primitive discipline ”

    No, of course it wasn’t. However a few questions come to mind:

    1) How many females had access to these gynecological services 100 years ago? I’m guessing not a tremendous number.

    2) How could they have verified the age of menarche through anything other than personal testimony? Seems to me that given the fear and shame of menstruation and early sexual activity amongst females would have led to a significant number of girls lying about when they began to menstruate.

  49. Froth. The longer we delay menarche, the more likely physical maturity and sexual feelings will be congruent.

    Menarche. Isn’t. Physical. Maturity.

    Pretending along with you that it is, though, is there some particular reason you think girls ought to be made to associate lustful feelings with menstruation, of all things? Because personally, and I know I’m just a girl, I appreciated having them develop just a bit out of sync. (Out of sync because I started thinking about sex a few months before menarche, as is perfectly normal, but never mind that.)

    Secondly, do you have ANY evidence that girls who start menstruating at 14 or 15 have sexual feelings that are more “congruent” with their physical development than girls who start earlier? Why do you think it doesn’t take the older girls a couple months or years to settle into their bodies, just like the rest of us?

  50. your commenting here has gotten increasingly critical

    That’s because your posting has gotten increasingly dishonest. I’m sorry, but there’s no way for me to gently sugar-coat the fact that the only issue that is truly real to you is animal rights. You’ve repeatedly shown that your other claimed principles – feminism, pacifism – are quickly set aside in the interests of promoting animal rights. The reason I’m so snotty about that is that your ego apparently refuses to permit you to concede that’s what you’re doing. And yes, I’m beginning to wonder why I’m bothering to listen to somebody whose attitude about the exploitation of women, for example, is “I can deplore the exploitation of women’s bodies except when PETA does it, but I have feminist cred so you can’t call me on it”?

    As for the actual subject of the post, I don’t understand why what I said was confusing, so I’ll try to lay it out succinctly.

    1) Unlike you, I am a parent. Unlike you, I am also a parent of a teenage daughter and a daughter who is about to be a teenager. So when you talk about what parents clearly want or ought to think, that chaps my hide – particularly in an election season where every vile, reactionary assjack is insisting that we support their candidate/ballot issue/opinion because OMFG TEH CHILDREN!!!11!!!

    2) You admit right up in your post that you deliberately exploit your students’ anxiety about girls’ sexual development to push your vegan agenda. That is evil. Period. “But we talk about other stuff!” does not change the fact that you are encouraging and approving that anxiety because it furthers another of your political goals.

    3) I’m going to cut you some slack on this one and assume it’s just liberal-arts cluelessness plus wishful thinking, but you are citing ‘scientific evidence’ that just isn’t there. The study cited by PCRM doesn’t say what you want it to say. (It’s also rather questionable whether it has evidentiary value – again, read the abstract.) There is no credible scientific consensus that consuming animal protein in any form leads to “unnaturally” premature sexual development in teenage girls.

    4) And again, what you’re doing actually hurts your cause. Think of all those anti-drug programs that tell kids one puff of weed will MEAN THEIR DOOM, or that having sex ever will cause their genitals to turn purple and fall off. Then the kids find out the grown-ups are lying, and they don’t listen to things that might be important, like “Heroin will kill you” or “Condoms prevent STDs.”

    So when you fudge on what ‘science’ says, or approve of T&A or violence, what makes you think people will give any credibility to your views on Proposition 2, or the health of a vegan diet for children?

  51. Mythago, I’ve made it very clear I am not a PETA supporter. I differentiate what PETA does from other forms of “T&A” because PETA uses volunteers — which I think is a crucial distinction. That doesn’t mean I approve of everything they do.

    I do trust the science as reported by PCRM; they are a “physicians committee”, and I defer to their analysis. I admit they may, like most advocacy groups, be willing to interpret the evidence in a specific light to advance their cause.

    I admit, too, that I’m committed to both a vegan agenda and safety and justice for young people. I think the anxiety we have is fundamentally misplaced — but if, if, if, parents want to persist in “doing something” about their anxiety, adopting a vegan diet might be one strategy for delaying menarche.

    When and if we are blessed with a daughter, we will raise her the same way we raise a son — on a vegan diet where possible. We will accept puberty when it arrives, whenever it arrives, and love and affirm our children just as they are. I wish all parents felt the same. But it’s not contradictory, really it’s not, to argue that some of the anxiety paerents feel is misplaced while simultaneously suggesting that one of many ways to deal with what is admittedly a misplaced worry is to adopt a vegan diet. The evidence that I read suggests vegetarianism in girls can delay the onset of menarche without doing any noticeable harm; evidence also suggests that high consumption of meat is unhealthy for most humans (regardless of sex).

  52. It may not be logically contradictory, but it doesn’t make sense. “Your worries are unfounded, and here is a way to act on your worries,” isn’t good advice. If parents shouldn’t worry about how long it will take for their kids to become adolescents, then they don’t need advice on how to change that.
    Has it occured to you that the human body is designed to cope with a huge range of diets and climates and exercise levels, and that it copes with them in part by adjusting its growth rate, and that therefore, both menarche at eleven (when food is abundant) and menarche at eighteen (when food is scarce) are ‘natural’?

    The evidence that I read suggests vegetarianism in girls can delay the onset of menarche without doing any noticeable harm

    Menarche doesn’t do any noticeable harm, so why should it be delayed? It won’t protect girls from anything to start later than their peers, becuse adults aren’t going to ask if they’ve got their period yet before they treat them as sexual beings. Unless you’re advocating that girls should wear colour-coded hats, so men know if they’re fair game to hit on?

  54. I admit they may, like most advocacy groups, be willing to interpret the evidence in a specific light to advance their cause.

    They are, and have, as they half-admit in some of their press releases. I used to have quite a higher opinion of PCRM than I do now – unlike you, I don’t believe that nobility of purpose justifies using “Trust me, I’m a doctor” to mislead others. If you have actual evidence that consumption of animal protein leads to ‘early’ menarche, put up or shut up. The study PCRM cites says no such thing.

    “Contradictory” isn’t the point, Hugo. What you’re doing is vile. If a study suggested that meat consumption in adolescence was correlated with homosexuality in adulthood, would you “gently suggest” to your students that they consider a vegan diet for their kids in order to make sure they don’t turn out to be queers?

    Somehow I suspect I know the answer.