A few years ago, as we hiked the final miles of our Young Life backpacking trip, I heard one of our high school girls say, "I’ve felt like I could be myself on this trip. I didn’t have to pretend to be anything. I could be real." She added, "When we get off the trail, we’re not going back to the 'real world,' we’re going back to the 'fake world'."

In adolescence, when identity is taking shape and self-confidence is fragile, the pressure to be something you’re not, to live in the "fake world," seems common. For adolescent girls today, the pressure to be provocative, even if you don’t want to, seems unavoidable.

Empowerment or endangerment?

Actress Lindsey Lohan recently said in an interview, "Every girl wants to feel sexy …  It’s a matter of confidence and how you hold yourself. Everyone’s sexy in her own way." Whether or not adolescent girls would claim that Lindsey Lohan speaks for them, no one can escape the fact that a consistent message to young girls today in magazines, movies and fashion is that acting sexy equals female empowerment.

Although there may be transient affirmation that comes with being sexy, adolescent girls also pay a price. According to The American Psychological Association’s recent Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls, the cultural hyper-sexualization trend, rather than empowering adolescent girls, is in reality linked to harmful results. Some we are familiar with: depression, anxiety and eating disorders are still more common in girls than in boys. New studies, however, show this pressure affects even reasoning and problem-solving skills. This was found to be true for Caucasian, African-American, Latina and Asian young women as well. Research shows the same was not true for adolescent boys.

Tuning in to God’s Voice

The pressure to be something you’re not — in this case, to be sexy at a young age — is very real and at times very overwhelming for adolescents. As Young Life staff and volunteers who "go where kids are" we may see and feel the aftereffects of this pressure. In Romans 1:20, the Apostle Paul reminds us that God reveals Himself subtly but distinctly through creation. While creation includes the beauty of the Rocky Mountains we encounter on a backpacking trip, we need to remember that creation includes all created things — even popular culture today. Theologian N.T. Wright has said, in the seemingly irrepressible and noisy din of the world around us, God still speaks. Perhaps not in an actual voice, but in what he calls the "echo of a voice," that rises above all the cultural voices to speak of hope, of things being "put to rights," of restoring order in the disorder and chaos of life.

Perhaps that echo of a voice is capturing the imagination of some who are now offering alternatives to the pressure many adolescent girls feel today. Author Wendy Shalit, in response to the thousands of letters and e-mails she’s received from girls dismayed by the pressure to be a "bad girl," has written in her new book, Girls Gone Mild: Young women reclaim self-respect and find it's not bad to be good., "There’s a dawning awareness that maybe not everyone participating in these behaviors is happy with them, so let’s not assume everyone doing this is empowered."

Web sites such as Modesty Zone "for good girls in hiding everywhere" and Pure Fashion, "a faith-based program that encourages teen girls to live, act and dress in accordance with their dignity as children of God" are other examples of "counter-cultural" movements that offer adolescent girls empowerment that brings dignity, value and worth. And maybe in some way these can serve to remind us too, that God has not abandoned our culture.

Sometimes it may take a backpacking trip into the wilderness that gives us the taste of life lived in the "real world," as God intended it to be. At other times it may take the careful habit of listening for the "echo of a voice" in the normal, everyday "fake world," and then helping our adolescent friends to tune in as well. See, the echo of a voice is meant to draw us closer, the way we might lean in to hear someone who speaks softly, so that we might encounter the Speaker of the voice. As kids lean in; as we as Young Life leaders help them to listen, they can finally begin to hear the comforting and redeeming words of love from their heavenly Father.

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