7 ALASAN MENGAPA PEREMPUAN SUKA MENDAKI GUNUNG (JANGAN DI SIA-SIA KAN!)

Punya teman cewek yang hobi naik gunung? Atau kamu malah salah satu cewek yang suka menaklukkan puncak-puncak tinggi? Betapa beruntungnya dirimu, karena tidak banyak kaum perempuan yang mau bersusah payah mendaki gunung. Bagaimana tidak? Di gunung tidak ada toilet, tidak ada sinyal telepon apalagi internet, jika ingin makan harus masak sendiri, badan dan pakaian kotor penuh debu, seluruh tubuh pegal-pegal, kepanasan di siang hari dan menggigil di malam hari. Kuat banget kan, pendaki cewek itu? Jika kamu punya stigma negatif tentang pendaki cewek, segera singkirkan hal itu dari benakmu. Mungkin kamu berpikiran bahwa pendaki berjenis kelamin cewek itu cenderung tomboy, dekil dan jarang mandi, serta cuek. Stop! 7 alasan berikut akan membuatmu kagum pada pendaki cewek karena mereka spesies langka yang tidak boleh disia-siakan. 1. Kuat dan Tidak Manja Berjalan selama berjam-jam, bahkan 5-7 jam dengan tas ransel atau carrier yang membebani punggung saja pendaki cewek mampu melakukannya. Bekal minum dan makanan hanya seadanya, menunya terbatas pada mie instan dan kopi. Buang hajat di rerumputan dengan berbekal tissue basah. Itu semua harus ditanggung oleh cewek-cewek yang hobi naik gunung. Capek? Tentu. Mengeluh? Itu adalah pantangan. Seorang pendaki berjenis kelamin cewek ditempa untuk menjadi sosok yang kuat dan tidak manja. Mereka berburu dengan waktu, sehingga harus bisa mengalahkan pesimisme yang muncul dalam diri masing-masing. 2. Pejuang Sejati Mendaki gunung yang tingginya ribuan meter di atas permukaan laut bukan persoalan yang mudah. Diperlukan fisik yang kuat dan mental yang mantap bagi seorang cewek yang ingin melakukan pendakian. Sudah kodrat jika cowok dan cewek memiliki kekuatan yang berbeda, cewek biasanya lebih lemah dari cowok. Tapi saat naik gunung, cewek harus bisa mengimbangi para pendaki cowok agar tidak ketinggalan di tengah jalan. Lihat, kan? Seorang pendaki cewek memiliki semangat berjuang yang besar. 3. Ramah dan Supel Saat melakukan pendakian, tentu di perjalanan banyak bertemu dengan pendaki-pendaki lain. Entah itu pendaki cowok atau cewek. Bagi kamu yang sering naik gunung, tentu hafal dengan kebiasaan menyapa pendaki lain. Bahkan mereka bisa menjadi teman perjalananmu selama mendaki gunung. Pendaki cewek juga sering menyapa sesama teman pendaki lain, bahkan walaupun mereka tidak saling mengenal. Dari sekedar basa-basi, “Mari, Mas/Mbak.” sampai menanyakan asal atau memberi semangat. Bahkan tidak jarang, berawal dari saling berbagi makanan atau foto bersama bisa membentuk sebuah persahabatan. 4. Bukan Orang yang Eksklusif Tidur hanya beralas matras dan sleeping bag di tengah alam terbuka saja mau. Makan seadanya, bahkan kadang makanan yang disajikan tidak higienis karena terkena debu saja tidak mengeluh. Capek dan pegal-pegal, tetap berjalan bersama. Pendaki cewek tidak suka menuntut macam-macam. Jangan cemas jika kamu adalah cowok yang enggak kaya, pendaki cewek bukan orang yang matrealistis. Mereka hanya menginginkan pasangannya mau menerima apa adanya dirinya, seperti halnya mereka menerima apa adanya pasangannya. 5. Sederhana dan Apa Adanya Siapa bilang pendaki cewek itu tomboy, sehingga mereka cenderung cuek? Tentu saja tidak! Para pendaki cewek hanya sedikit lebih istimewa daripada cewek-cewek kebanyakan. Pendaki cewek tidak terlalu mempermasalahkan seperti apa mereka di hadapan orang lain. Mereka tidak suka terlihat cantik dengan make up tebal atau perawatan di salon-salon terkenal. Untuk apa? Toh, make up akan luntur saat terkena panasnya matahari di atas gunung. Begitu pun muka akan terlihat coreng moreng karena debu di sepanjang trek pendakian. 6. Romantis Abis Cewek itu gampang tersentuh perasaannya. Tapi, tidak banyak cewek yang mau bersusah payah menunjukkan sisi romantismenya. Kebanyakan malah menuntut cowoknya senantiasa romantis, sedangkan dia sendiri enggan jika harus bersikap romantis. Alasannya: cowok memberi, cewek menerima. Beda halnya dengan cewek yang suka mendaki gunung, dia tidak akan ragu menggandeng tangan pasangannya sambil menikmati matahari terbit di puncak gunung. 7. Cantiknya Tersembunyi Setiap orang tahu, edelweis adalah bunga abadi yang cantik. Tapi orang jarang memperhatikan dandelion yang tak kalah indah, tersembunyi di rerumputan. Seperti halnya para cewek yang suka mendaki gunung, mereka bagaikan dandelion yang keindahannya kalah oleh edelweis yang terlihat di permukaan. Oleh karena itu, hanya orang-orang yang jeli yang bisa melihat kecantikan cewek-cewek titisan Srikandi yang berbeda dari yang lain ini.

WHY KIDS TODAY GROWING UP TOO FAST?

Marketers call them "tweens": kids between eight and 12, midway between childhood and adolescence. But tweens are becoming more like teens, leaning more and more toward teen styles, teen attitudes and teen behavior at its most troubling. "The 12- to 14-year-olds of yesterday are the 10- to 12-'s of today," says Bruce Friend, a vice president of the kids' cable channel Nickelodeon. The Nickelodeon-Yankelovicht Youth Monitor found that by the time they are 12, children describe themselves as "flirtatious, sexy, trendy, athletic, cool." Among the products targeted at this age group is the Sweet Georgia Brown line from AM Cosmetics. It includes body paints and scented body oils with names like Vanilla Vibe and Follow Me Boy. Soon, thanks to the Cincinnati design firm Libby Peszyk Kattiman, your little darling will be able to slip into some tween-sized bikini panties. The tweening of childhood is more than just a matter of fashion. Tweens are demonstrating many of the deviant behaviors we usually associate with adolescence. "Ninth and 10th grade used to be the starting point for a lot of what we call risk behaviors," says Henry Trevor, who heads a middle school in Brooklyn, N.Y. "Fifteen years ago they moved into the eighth grade. Now it's seventh grade." The data supporting this trend are sketchy, since most studies of risk behavior begin with 15-year-olds. But the clearest evidence is found in crime statistics. Although children under 15 still represent a minority of juvenile arrests, their numbers have grown disproportionately in the past 20 years. According to a report by the office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, "offenders under age 15 represent the leading edge of the juvenile crime problem, and their numbers are growing." The crimes committed by younger teens and preteens are growing in severity, too: "Person offenses, which once constituted 16 percent of the total court cases for this age group now constitute 25 percent." Tweens are also becoming more sexually active. Between 1988 and 1995, the proportion of girls saying they had sexual intercourse before 15 rose to 19% from 11%. (Boys remained stable at 21%.) "We're beginning to see a few pregnant sixth-graders, "says Christy Hogan, a recently retired middle-school counselor in Louisville, Ky. Equally striking, though less easily tabulated, is the increasing prevalence of sexual contact short of intercourse. Michael Thompson, co-author of the forthcoming "Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys," says he hears from seventh- and eighth- graders a lot of talk about oral sex, which they, like a certain prominent role model, don't think of as sex. "For them, it's just fooling around," Mr. Thompson says. Drugs and alcohol are also seeping into tween culture. The past decade has seen more than a doubling of the proportion of eighth-graders who have smoked marijuana (10% today) and of those who no longer see it as dangerous. "The stigma isn't there the way it was 10 years ago," says Dan Kindlon, Mr. Thompson's co-author. "Then, it was the fringe group smoking pot.... Now the fringe group is using LSD. " Other troubling trends: Although the numbers remain small, suicide among tweens more than doubled between 1979 and 1995. Therapists say they are seeing a growth in eating disorders — anorexia and obsessive dieting—even among girls in late elementary school, doubtless an outgrowth of a premature fashion-consciousness. What change in our social ecology has led to the emergence of tweens? In my conversations with educators and child psychologists who work primarily with middle-class kids nationwide, two major and fairly predictable themes emerged: absentee parents and a sexualized and glitzy media-driven marketplace. What has been less commonly recognized is the way these two influences combine to augment the authority of the peer group. With their parents working long hours away from home, many youngsters are leaving for school from an empty house after eating breakfast alone, then picking up fast food or frozen meals for dinner. Almost without exception, the principals and teachers I spoke with describe a pervasive loneliness among tweens. "The most common complaint I hear," says Ms. Hogan, "is, 'My mom doesn't care what I do. She's never home. She doesn't even know what I do.' " The loss of family life invariably expands the power of the peer group. By late elementary school, according to "Peer Power: Culture and Identity," a recent study by Patricia Adler with Peter Adler, boys understand that their popularity depends on "toughness, troublemaking, domination, coolness, and interpersonal bragging and sparring skills." Girls derive status from "success at grooming, clothes, and other appearance-related variables; . . . [their] romantic success as measured through popularity and going with boys; affluence and its correlates of material possessions and leisure pursuits." Both parental absence and the powerful peer group are intricately connected to the rise of a burgeoning tween market. Tweens began to catch the eye of marketers around the mid-1980s, when research found that more and more children this age were shopping for their own clothes, shoes, accessories, drugstore items—even for the family groceries. Today's tween ads reflect this sensibility: Kids are on their own, goes the premise; flatter them as hip and aware almost-teens rather than out-of-it little kids—as independent, sophisticated consumers with their own language, music and fashion. Anyone who remembers high school will recall many of these dynamics. But it is important to recognize that the combination of isolation from adults, peer cruelty and fantasies of sophistication, though always a danger to the alienated teenager, is especially taxing to the fragile ego of the preadolescent. With less life experience and less self-awareness, preadolescents have fewer internal resources to fall back on. "These kids have two years less time to become a firm person," says Helen Colvin, a middle-school science teacher from Harrisburg, Pa. "That's two years less time to discover what they are, what they believe, to experiment with identity. Instead, they want to be like their friends." Tweens, far from being simply a marketing niche group, are the vanguard of a new, decultured generation, isolated from family and neighborhood, shrugged at by parents, dominated by peers, and delivered into the hands of a sexualized and status- and fad-crazed marketplace.