Stepford, the sequel

Today's most-emailed article in the New York Times:

For Girls, It's Be Yourself, and Be Perfect, Too

First, a correction issued from the paper:

A front-page article on Sunday about the experiences of high-achieving high school girls in Newton, Mass., misstated a verb property of Latin, which one of the girls in the article studies. It is the subjunctive mood; there is no subjunctive "tense."

Ok, I couldn't tell you that, and I took five years of Latin in high school plus two semesters in college.

Now on to the real article:

Esther and Colby are two of the amazing girls at Newton North High School here in this affluent suburb just outside Boston. “Amazing girls” translation: Girls by the dozen who are high achieving, ambitious and confident (if not immune to the usual adolescent insecurities and meltdowns). Girls who do everything: Varsity sports. Student government. Theater. Community service. Girls who have grown up learning they can do anything a boy can do, which is anything they want to do. . . .

To spend several months in a pressure cooker like Newton North is to see . . . these girls struggle to navigate the conflicting messages they have been absorbing, if not from their parents then from the culture, since elementary school. The first message: Bring home A’s. Do everything. Get into a top college — which doesn’t have to be in the Ivy League, or one of the other elites like Williams, Tufts or Bowdoin, but should be a “name” school.

The second message: Be yourself. Have fun. Don’t work too hard.

And, for all their accomplishments and ambitions, the amazing girls, as their teachers and classmates call them, are not immune to the third message: While it is now cool to be smart, it is not enough to be smart.

You still have to be pretty, thin and, as one of Esther’s classmates, Kat Jiang, a go-to stage manager for student theater who has a perfect 2400 score on her SATs, wrote in an e-mail message, “It’s out of style to admit it, but it is more important to be hot than smart.”

“Effortlessly hot,” Kat added.

If you are free to be everything, you are also expected to be everything.

So there's the universal problem of feeling like you don't measure up no matter how well you do. And then there's the problem of hyper-competitive societies that are so intent on churning out smart, beautiful, athletic, charitable robots that it doesn't matter if they believe in or care about anything they do, as long as it looks good on a college application.

Oh, and then on the other side of the coin are all the less-advantaged kids who don't have the benefit of SAT prep or the luxury of schools that can afford the AP classes and the extracurriculars.

But here's what gets me: nearly 50 years after the emergence of second wave feminism and the strides made by women in the workplace and education, girls are still expected to be perfect. Sure, you can be yourself and have fun, but if you want to get anywhere in life, you'd better be flawless. Have we really only gotten this far?

My head hurts.