Packaging Girlhood

Today Sharon was quoted in USA Today in an article, entitled, "Do thin models warp girls' body image?"

So? Of course they do!  Here's an excerpt from the longer article:

Girls today, even very young ones, are being bombarded with the message that they need to be super-skinny to be sexy, says psychologist Sharon Lamb, co-author of Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters From Marketers' Schemes.

It used to be that women would only occasionally see rail-thin models, such as Twiggy, the '60s fashion icon. "But now they see them every day. It's the norm," Lamb says, from ads, catalogs and magazines to popular TV shows such as America's Next Top Model and Project Runway. "They are seeing skinny models over and over again."

On top of that, gaunt images of celebrities such as Nicole Richie and Kate Bosworth are plastered on magazine covers, she says.

What worries Lamb most is that these images are filtering down to girls as young as 9 and 10. Some really sexy clothes are available in children's size 6X, says Lamb, a psychology professor at Saint Michael's College in Colchester, Vt. "Girls are being taught very young that thin and sexy is the way they want to be when they grow up, so they'd better start working on that now," she says.

Lamb believes it's fine for girls to want to feel sexy and pretty when they are teenagers, but that shouldn't be their primary focus. "If they are spending all their time choosing the right wardrobe, trying to dance like an MTV backup girl and applying lip gloss, it robs them of other options."

Some girls don't want to participate in sports because they're afraid they'll bulk up. Some won't try to play an instrument such as a trombone because it doesn't fit their image of what a "girly girl" should do, she says.

ok. it's not exactly poetry but I think I got the message across that super sexy models are much more pervasive in girls' worlds today and that, as a body ideal, the image reaches down to even younger girls.  I also told the journalist that viewing these images has been associated in dozens of studies with girls' lowered self esteem, poor body image, eating disorders, and depression.  Colleagues Sarah Murnen, Janet Hyde, and Monique Ward have all done meta-analyses or literature reviews compiling these studies and showing the results! 

Girls and Design -- How about Engineering?

In Packaging GIrlhood we talk about how girls are encouraged to design fashion and arrange flowers.  Their art and visual skills are pushed in the direction of decoration rather than problem-solving.  Why? One reason is the stereotyping of what are appropriate activities for girls.  Another is the incessant banter about how girls aren't good at math (in our chapters on books we show how girls over and over again are depicted as bad at math or hating math.)  We know in psychology that "stereotype threat", bringing up negative stereotypes before performance, can affect girls' performance in a setting. What about hearing these stereotypes over and over again?  Meredith Knight wrote to us about her work with girls around professions in the STEM fileds (STEM-science technology engineering math). She collected over 1,000 drawings from girls and boys grades 1-12, and aasking them both to draw and write about what they think an engineer would do at work. When she talks to kids she asks them about the gender stereotypes that go along with the misconceptions they have about what engineers actually do, and then ask them why they think more women don’t go into engineering!  In addition to the "girls hate math" stereotype, and the "girls decorate rather than create" stereotype, I think that our narrow definitions of what's pretty or beautiful limit girls in terms of what they create.  There certainly is beauty in a well designed dashboard but from a very early age, girls are taught that what's pretty is something pink, glittery, and utterly useless (an accessory.) When girls are encouraged to "save the world" it's through personal helping service work, and not through the design or creation of a drug, a machine that assists people in a new way, or a way to transform pollutants into nutrients for the soil.   Okay. Enough of this rant. I'm hoping Meredith might join in.  She runs programs for girls that you can read about on www.stemteams.com. (Got that great photo from UCSC paper on a girls engineering summer program they run; the girl's name is Sienna Forest.) 

Barbies

Now, Lyn and I write a lot about the Bratz dolls because they have a slightly different message than Barbie. Barbie did her own kind of damage. While Bratz dolls sell a lifestyle associated with sexy teen pop star fashion and have been criticized for dressing like little ProstituteZ, and hanging around hot tubZ with bratz Boyz, drinking little alcoholic-like drinkZ, Barbie, we think, contributed to the problems associated with internalizing an idealized impossible body image.  Recently some researchers in Bath, UK released a press release on their study showing that girls torture and maim Barbies.  Mind you, a press release before the study was accepted for publication and reviewed by peers. Nevertheless, it's no surprise to me (Sharon) who has a whole chapter on sexual play involving Barbies in the now out of print, Secret Lives of Girls, that girls do all sorts of things with their Barbies.  While we feminists might want to interpret the findings as girls' resisting the idealized body image, the study shows that it's at the point where girls feel they're "too grown up" to play with Barbie that they start to torture her. The idea is that they maim and torture her because they want to put doll play behind them and that growing up means moving beyong "little girl" things, and (Lyn and Sharon add) DISSING little girl things, identifying with boy culture. That's not to say that girls don't "naturally" act aggressive.  But I wonder if we should overinterpret their torturing Barbie as a way to say, "Screw you Barbie and your impossibly perfect body!" I don't think so.  For a wonderful artist's take on what I assume to be Barbie, since her collection is called, "The Barbs", see. www.dcolotti.com.  She takes torturing Barbie to a whole new level.  You may particularly like Queen-Sized Barb. 

More Sensational Coverage of Girls' Meanness

We wondered why Primetime Live was doing yet another Mean Girls study!  We've often thought that that whole phenomenon of labeling a girl and calling her a name was a reflection of the very behavior these researchers are trying to get rid of!  Lyn in Girlfighting has shown how the culture sets girls up for these kinds of behaviors.  Sharon in Secret Lives of GIrls has shown that relational aggression is common in most girls and that the sensational reaction to it comes from our ideas that girls should be more innocent than boys or that aggression is particularly bad in girls. 

In the link below you can read about a Brigham Young U. research study showing pre-school girls get bossy and aggress against other kids.  Oh dear, how surprising!  I mean, given that teen girls use these strategies, why shouldn't we expect less socialized, younger, less developmentally mature kids to use them?  The study said that these bossy girls are controversial and they mean that not all kids like them -- implying a stereotype that all girls should want to be and should be liked by everyone.  I think that bossy girls get rewarded -- because they are more likely to get what they want.  It may not be "nice", but it's one avenue towards power that girls sick of the tyranny of "nice and kind" (Brown & Gilligan) have!

http://marriageandfamilies.byu.edu/issues/2006/Winter/20061.News0306.pdf#search=%22Clyde%20Robinson%20research%20girls%22

Black Girl Magazine

Oh dear. We had www.blackgirlmagazine.com on our web site for Packaging Girlhood. Then a reader wrote to us and said when she went to the site she found out it was a porn site. A cruel joke? she asked. No.  It seems that the high school senior who created this 'zine let her rights to that name lapse in July (long after we got the web site up and running), and some guy bought the rights to the name and started publishing porn on it.  How awful.  The link to the story on this that I found is http://www.wsbtv.com/news/9484418/detail.html.    It's really incredibly sad that a girl can't go on the web and search for something about herself without coming upon porn. We discovered this when we were looking for cheerleader chat rooms -- first you have to wade through site upon site of cheerleader porn.  All things girl turns into all things sexual.  But the answer can't be those inadequate screening tools or kids won't have access to the real sex ed they need or fun, ironic sites that use sexual language.

Padded bras for 6 year olds?

This could be a rumor, but a colleague sent me an email stating that Targets in Australia are now selling padded bras for 6-year-olds, and that the company who makes them is the Bratz doll company.  I will check up on this but if you have any more information about this, please comment!!!  Okay (15 minutes later). Here's the URL to read about this  and yes they are Bratz related.  http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,20380241-1243,00.html

Bratz parents BUY her Little Tykes

(Lyn AND Sharon here.) MGA, whose Bratz dolls gave Barbie a run for her money is going to buy the preschool toy business Little Tikes Co. from Atlanta-based consumer products giant Newell Rubbermaid Inc. Little Tikes competes with Mattel's Fisher-Price line of pre-school toys and once put out the red and yellow Cozy Coupe. Brace yourself for a new line of Little Tykes Cozy Coupes...the generic red and yellow replaced by two separate cars, one for boys and one for girls.  The girls will have names like sizzlin' slinky (slutty?) sassy roadster with accessories like... little purses, compacts in the glove compartment...and maps to the latest dance club...Thanks to reader David for alerting us in his letter below!!!

First, I wanted to thank you for writing such an insightful book.  My wife and I both enjoyed reading it and feel better prepared for what our 7 year old daughter is likely to be exposed to at school, with friends, through media.  I wouldn't normally bother to write to an author, except that during the last week as I was reading the book, I happened to be glancing through the Wall Street Journal.  I noticed that MGA Entertainment had bought Little Tikes, a factoid that would have generated zero interest 2 weeks ago.  But because of your book, I saw it as the parent company of Bratz buying a toy company that extends its reach down to toddlers, which creates a different level of awareness as to what might be coming out of Little Tikes in the future. David.

Girls, Sports, and Selling Sex

Sharon here, Just received this from my friend Tomi-Ann Roberts at Colorado College. "This morning I was walking to class and noticed that the women's field hockey team here at my college is trying to "attract" (I use that word consciously in this case) more fans to come out and watch their games. Their posters read: "We bend over for 90 minutes in 11 different positions." 

Now I ask, why is it that girls (women in this case) have to attract people to their games by selling the sexual aspect of it as if girls can't do sports for sports sake and still have people interested in their skills, their game.  I know it's a joke and kind of funny too like all those bumper stickers about how people of different professions "do it", e.g. scuba divers do it under water.  Still, sports are so good for girls that it's really a tragedy when they have to be sold to the public as sexy and that we are encouraged to sexualize girls who do sports. 

Our New Blog

Well, Lyn and I were thinking that it would be good to have a space on our web site where people who read our book might respond with new examples of the way marketers or the media continue to stereotype girls.  So, perhaps we can send people to this blog.  Neither of us have ever blogged before so it's all new. But we're up for it.  I'll end now because this is our first post and I want to see how it all looks.