The Watchful Eye Newsletter
Mid-November, 2010
Mary Bailey, Editor
the watchfuleye@rcn.com
Teen Magazines Send GirlsWrong Message
By Sheila Gibbons
Abridged from Women’s ENews
Girls blasted with “advice”
If the screaming pink and orange cover lines on mass-circulation teen magazines don’t get you, the mixed messages inside will. Has there ever before been a flood of such contradictory, confusing, high-pressure “advice” directed at teen girls that serves their interest less?
The yin and yang of being simultaneously irresistible and virginal fill page after page. Teens (and pre-teens) are being whipsawed by the mixed messages. Tips on how to look hot and sneak lip-locks with a beau at the school locker are interspersed with warnings to keep sexual matters from getting out of hand.
“Hallway make-out sessions: dos and don’ts” (YM) co-exist with heartbreaking confessionals such as “Gossip ruined my life” (Seventeen), in which a night of necking made lurid headlines the next day at school. These articles ran in August and September [2003] back-to-school issues.
Teen magazines are loaded with ads and editorials – and the two are difficult to distinguish – urging girls to acquire the latest “hot” haircut (Seventeen) and “hot” looks (Elle Girl), reinforced by commands to “flirt your way to a date” (Teen). It seems to me that turning up one’s personal heat this much puts a girl on the path to commentaries such as “One night of partying ruined my reputation” (Cosmo Girl), in which a college student recalls waking up naked and wondering if she’s had sex. Campus gossip said she had.
The magazines envision teen-age girls’ lives as endless popularity contests (“301 ways to be the coolest girl in class” in Teen, and “432 ways to go back to school a new person” in YM, in which the assumption is that the reader invariably has defects that need to be fixed. School is the main stage for efforts to attain popularity and snag a boyfriend (you can’t have one without the other, it seems) but mostly school is merely that – an environment for socializing. These magazines have little to say to girls about the value of academic achievement, civic engagement or intellectual challenges. It’s fair to say that the brain is not the “hot” organ at the center of teen magazine content.
Bodies: the new priority
It wasn’t always thus. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, author of “The Body Product: An Intimate History of American Girls,” says: “The body has become the central personal project of American girls. This priority makes girls today vastly different from their Victorian counterparts. Although girls in the past and present display many common characteristics – such as self-consciousness, sensitivity to peers and an interest in establishing an independent identity – before the 20th century, girls simply did not organize their thinking about themselves around their bodies. Today, many young girls worry about the contours of their bodies – especially shape, size and muscle tone – because they believe the body is the ultimate expression of the self.”
You need look no further than the mass-circulation teen titles (and their adult sisters) for confirmation of this. And the consequences of being a teenage reader of magazines may not always be happy ones. “Magazines, not television, seems to have the strongest relationship to eating disorders,” says Rose M. Kundanis, author of “Children, Teens, Families and Mass Media: The Millennial Generation.”
“Researchers explain that because television encourages the consumption of high-fat foods, it minimizes the effect on eating disorders. Magazines, on the other hand, offer more instruction on dieting and therefore seem to be more significantly correlated to eating disorders,” she says. The impact has reached ever-younger girls: Teen magazine this fall [2003] reported, without comment, that 35 percent of girls 6 to 12 years old have been on at least one diet, and that 50-to-70 percent of normal-weight girls consider themselves overweight.
Beauty before health
Information on maintaining healthy skin, hair, and nails abounds amid a scarcity of information about other health issues in teen magazines. Sexual health in particular receives short shrift. A 2002 study by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. of teens’ and women’s magazines published between 1986 and 1996 found that “readers are increasingly likely to have learned that they need to be more concerned about sex per se – for example, ways to ‘make his thighs go up in flames’ rather than sexual health.” (“Sexual Teens, Sexual Media: Investigating Media’s Influence on Adolescent Sexuality”)
“Teens’ magazines,” the study concluded, “have increased the amount of space focused on non-health sex issues, even more, percentage-wise, than have women’s magazines.” During the same period, “space for sexual health-focused content has grown only slightly.” This is a disturbing finding, considering the teen magazines’ reams of instruction on how to get dates and develop romantic relationships, activities bound to lead to sexual experimentation.
Hollywood celebrities are presented as role models against which readers can calibrate their own behavior: “Love Quiz: Are you a serial dater like Britney or uber-committed like Reese?” (Seventeen); “The celeb style you want most: Reese Witherspoon, Cameron Dias, Salma Hayek and Heather Graham” (Elle Girl); “Celeb high school secrets” (Teen).
With rare exceptions, women who’ve distinguished themselves outside of the entertainment world are not presented as women to emulate (or look like) anywhere near the frequency of actors and singers.
Real reasons to worry
Should we worry about these pink-and-orange, boy-obsessed, lip-glossed, giggly treatments of teen life or accept them as a rite of passage for teen girls? Meenakshi Gigi Durham of the University of Iowa in Iowa City, who has conducted extensive research on teen media use among middle-school girls, thinks we should. “All the girls I have talked to have expressed some dissatisfaction with their bodies and many of them have resorted to extreme measures such as starvation.” Durham also thinks the magazines are missing the chance to help girls develop a healthy attitude toward sex. “What’s presented as sexy is the bare midriff, the busty blonde. It’s such a fiction. Anyone of any body size and race can experience her sexuality and enjoy it, but these magazines don’t offer this message.”
Adults can converse with girls and help mediate the destructive messages of these publications. But wouldn’t it be great if these magazines – given their abundant resources – were actually showing a sense of editorial responsibility toward their readers? (www.womensenews.org, 10-29-03, reprinted with permission)
Sheila Gibbons is editor of Media Report to Women and author of “Exploring Mass Media for A Changing World.”
Going Viral
By Jill Niebrugge-Brantley
One of the questions frequently asked about the Sexualization of Youth Task Force is “are things any really different now than they have always been?” Behind this question is the sense, understandable, that the attempt to call attention to the Sexualization of Youth as a social problem is really playing King Canute to a centuries old tide—a tide, which while perhaps lamentable, is one that adults today lived through and so will children today.
The question whether we are dealing with anything “new” received a forceful suggestion of an answer this summer with two events—the release of the film The Social Network which told the background story of Facebook, and the tragic case of Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers University freshman who committed suicide after his roommate webcammed him having sex with a male partner. The Clementi case prompted a series of stories on young people bullied in various ways because of sexuality issues. What these two events, of course, have in common is that they both call attention to the extraordinary role that technology now plays in socialization and in social interaction.
The growth of technology points to this specific answer about whether there is anything “new”: what may be new is the degree to which children and youth are themselves not only the victims but also the perpetrators of sexualization. To pursue this hypothesis, let us consider what would have happened in the old days if someone wished for whatever reason to start a rumor or verbally bully someone else around issues of sexuality. “A,” the perpetrator, might have told “B,” a mutual friend, about “Z’s” alleged sexual deviance (whether being “gay” or a “slut,” for instance) and “B” might have told “C,” “D” and “E” at the lunch table and it could have spread from there. “Z,” discovering all this, might have cried, “the whole school now thinks . . . .” Or, “A” might have written graffiti in one of the bathrooms where a number of people might have seen it until someone washed it down.
Now what is going on here is what Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann described in a little classic of the mid-1960s as “the social construction of reality,” which they saw as a constantly occurring chain of action in three stages: externalization (“A” expresses something hurtful about “Z”), objectivation (“A”’s comment passes from being an externalization of “A” into an “object” in the world that others react to, the comment now somewhat divorced from the source), and internalization (“B,” “C,” “D,” “E,” and of course “Z,” make the comment part of their understanding of the world). Now in this last step, internalization doesn’t mean they necessarily believe it, but that they now cope with the reality that it has been said -- and that it seemingly cannot be “wished away” (Berger and Luckmann’s definition of reality).
But, in the old days several things limited the damage. First, because the comment must be more or less carried by hand (or word of mouth), “A’s” authorship, the original externalization, is a little clearer; the comment is a little less an object. Second, because it is being relayed by word of mouth, “A” can claim to “Z” that “that is not what I said” -- and whether the denial is true or not, “Denial is a mighty river” and it may carry both to safer shores. And third, “the whole school” is not the whole world, even if in one’s worst moments it feels like it.
But in the present day, we see a working out of the principle that a change in scale can lead to a change in kind. Ordinary individuals in everyday life can now tap into a “mass audience”—their externalizations now have the potential to become objects that “go viral.” One reason that reaching a mass audience has this “viral” effect is, as Georg Simmel wrote in the early 20th century, a mass communication must be to “the lowest common denominator,” that is, what is finally retained or “internalized” by everyone, by the mass, will be the simplest point of the message; nuances are lost.
A second critical point about contemporary electronic media communication is that the ability of a third party—here “A”—is not just to write graffiti or send a note, it is to send pictures, pictures in real time. And this creates an object which alters two other capacities Simmel considers critical to social interaction: tact and discretion. Tact is the norm whereby individuals limit self-disclosure and, thus, hide peculiarities. Discretion is the norm whereby group members refrain from asking for more disclosure than the individual willfully chooses to give.
And all this can happen instantaneously before we have a chance to stop and think or follow that age-old precept “count to ten”; all we have to do is hit “send” and the world really can go viral. So, yes, there is something new here and we need to address it.
Fashion’s Improper Fit
Robin Givran, TheWashington Post fashion maven, is a woman of mystery. One day her comments seem right out of a designer’s ad copy, and the next they could have come from the pages of The Watchful Eye. Recently she covered the story of a high school girl who wanted to wear a tux to the prom, but was banned from attending by school authorities. The girl was a lesbian, but Givran’s description of her situation is something all women and girls can recognize:
“Men’s apparel owns the language of power and authority. The clothes are in service to the man. They are tailored to him – designed to make him look good and feel comfortable. Men’s suits are stitched to be easily altered. Pants are sold unhemmed. The clothes are not finished until the gentleman says they are. Menswear aims to make men feel like they are the masters of their destiny.
“Womenswear all too often is constructed to make women feel manipulated, shamed or unworthy. Comfort? Often it’s an afterthought. Something as simple as a pair of pants, hemmed to a particular length, that do not fit, whisper to a woman: You are the wrong size for this perfect pair of trousers. You have failed. Women, in a fit of insecurity and self-flagellation, all too often believe they have to alter themselves – fix themselves – to fit the clothes.”
Instead, Givran concludes, “the wise and humane course of action is to declare the fashion rules wrong – rather than the person who has reason to break them.” As they used to say, Right on, Sister.
How Moral Revolutions Happen
They aren’t frequent, but moral revolutions do occur. In his recently published book, “The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen,” Princeton philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah thinks he knows how it works. As described by Paul Berman in Slate, Appiah analyzes four moral causes: three that were embraced by enormous numbers of people in a relatively short period of time resulting in permanent social improvement -- slavery, foot-binding, and dueling – and a fourth, honor killing, a cause still in progress. Since opposition to the sexualization of youth is basically a moral cause, Appiah’s insights are worth our consideration.
The first cause, slavery, was initially opposed in the 18th century by Quakers in Britain and the U.S. In England, where a huge portion of the economy rested upon importing cotton for the domestic textile industry, the cause seemed hopeless. But workers and tradesmen began opposing slave labor by appealing to “the honor of workingmen,”and by the 1830s and 40s crowds of indignant citizens signed petitions opposing slavery. Parliament took heed and in 1833 abolished the practice throughout most of the Empire – “one of the hugest, speediest, most peaceful consequential moral revolutions to occur,” Berman said.
In China, foot-binding had been the custom for a thousand years. Little girls’ feet were broken and bound until, in womanhood, their feet might be “the size of a man’s thumb.” The resultant foot was called “the golden lotus,” which some men considered erotic. But in 1900 a small group started campaigning against the practice on the grounds that it looked bad in the eyes of the world. “And then, poof! it was gone.”
Likewise, Appiah argues, the gentlemanly art of dueling with pistols was felled in Britain within a quarter-century – finished off by a single well-aimed argument -- a new definition of gentleman as one “who never inflicts pain.”
Of the four, the struggle against the “honor killing” of women in Pakistan and elsewhere is a current and unresolved practice. But, Appiah believes the small group of people who argue that violence against defenseless women is not honorable will play a central role in that region.
Slavery, foot-binding, and dueling were undone by adapting the concept of honor to revolutionary new uses, Appiah says. In each case, the reforms were initiated by a small number of crusaders. They did not appeal to rational behavior, or morality, or law, or religion, but to an updated notion of honor – the honor of the workingman, the gentleman, the national honor of China. (Slate, 09-19-10)
In reviewing Appiah’s book, Berman argues that there were other factors that could explain the success of the three revolutions. But without getting into that debate, we can consider whether appealing to honor might be a more effective way to combat the sexualization of youth than applying shame – especially when dealing with the advertising, fashion, and entertainment industries. Shame, we have observed, doesn’t work all that well on the prideful.
Editor’s Mailbox
Dear “TWE”:
Newsletter received, and I’m so glad you’ve broadened the focus to the Sexualization of Youth. I’ve been thinking about the appearance of young women and its mutations. I sometimes buy old LIFE magazines and universally young females are shiny-haired, with little makeup, white blouses and plaid skirts, wholesome. What wouldn’t we give to have them look like that now. Then I remember those were the years when girls went to college to get their M.R.S. degrees, when women were being thrown out of factory jobs for returning GIs, when the government propagandized women as homemakers only, resulting in the Baby Boom. Then the feminist movement, with my daughter in farmer’s overalls and painters pants and long straggly hair. Which evolved into young women claiming their own sexuality and sexual independence and dressing to express that. Which has swung 360 degrees from the 40s and 50s look to the tarty, sexual object look of today. My conviction is that America is in a stage of high decadence, a dark ages; no wonder it’s reflected in the sexualization of youth.
Margot McCullough Peters
Wisconsin
Sightings
A “most curious rebellion.” We’ve all been exposed to the profile of the traditional Japanese man: Devoted to his company, works 70-hour weeks, boozes rowdily after work with his co-workers, and spends little time with his family. But now, in a climate of economic uncertainty, young Japanese men ages 20 to 34 are breaking the mold, to the consternation of their fathers. Unlike their fathers, this generation of “mild, frugal, sweet-mannered men” are less willing to sacrifice for the company and don’t drink “to the max” (said one, “It’s not cool to be throwing up on the street after you’ve been drinking”). In fact, according to government statistics, Japanese men in their twenties consume less than half the alcohol the same age group did in 1980. But more significant from The Watchful Eye’s perspective, these young men in Japan are also less likely to pursue sex the way their fathers did. In a 2009 survey, almost half of the 20-to-34-year-olds identified with those who, euphemistically speaking, “do not prioritize physical relationships.” (Washington Post, 10-25-10) It is astonishing that such a deeply ingrained macho tradition can be so severely altered in a very short period of time. Scientists, please investigate!
Sex, addiction, and the brain. “There is evidence that the same basic neurochemical pathway is involved in all addictions – drugs, sex, gambling, or even jogging. All lead to a dopamine spike in the brain, which stimulates reward circuits, leading to a sensation of pleasure,” says psychologist and jogging consultant Gloria Balague of the University of Illinois at Chicago. (Newsweek, “Health Matters,” 11-08-10) Those two sentences pretty much describe the potential danger awaiting boys who regularly log onto online pornography. The worry: They’ll be the first generation addicted to sex before they even grow up.
Glee, the sexist. The TV high school musical comedy disappoints. Glee cast members who recently posed in the men’s magazine GQ are operating “against Glee’s whole ethos of inclusion,” writes UK’s Guardian: “The pictures are amazingly sexist. Monleith, who plays Finn, is wearing
approximately 10 times more clothing than both the women, who are draped over him like fancy accessories. … It’s perhaps not surprising to find these kinds of images in a men’s mag, but the pictures are baffling when considered alongside the ethos of the show. Women as decorative props for male consumption? Really, Glee? Really? The idea of inclusion is at the heart of Glee. I love the show for the central message that you don’t have to be a jock or a cheerleader to be OK; you can be gay, disabled, fat, or an obsessive-compulsive guidance counselor and still find acceptance, friendship and love. … The cast members in this shoot are the three most conventionally attractive actors in the show. It’s almost impossible to imagine how the rest of the cast of Glee could have featured in this shoot. … So we have cheerleader Quinn, but not key cast members Kurt and Mercedes. And this from a show that rejected the idea of the hot-chick cheerleader as the pinnacle of social acceptance and cool. … Apparently, attractiveness still depends on being thin and pretty, falling out of your bra and sucking on a lollipop (yes, really) to please straight male readers. … Which is pretty damn depressing.” (guardian.co.uk, 10-22-10)
Ad nauseum. KFC, the chicken people, paid female college students at Spalding University $500 each to pass out fliers while wearing fitted sweatpants with “Double Down” in big letters across their fannies. The plan is to promote KFC’s fat-laden Double Down sandwich to 18 to 25 year-old males, the chain’s key customers. Commented NOW President Terry O’Neill, “It’s so obnoxious to once again be using women’s bodies to sell fundamentally unhealthy products.” KFC plans to add additional colleges and pick up more female students via a Facebook promotion. (usatoday.com, 09-23-10)
Cosmopolitan, the magazine with a “sexy, chic, snag-a-man attitude,” is “a cultural force to be reckoned with,” says Lacey Dunham in reviewing “Bad Girls Go Everywhere” by Jennifer Scanlon. “By embracing capitalistic conceptions of womanhood (she might as well have created the term ‘pink purchasing power’) while also standing for equal pay, the right to choose, and women’s sexual equality, [founder Helen Gurley] Brown – and by extension thousands of ‘Cosmo Girls’ – resembles today’s feminist women more
than their Betty Friedan/Gloria Steinem predecessors.” (Politics & Prose, 11-11-10) It’s hard to consider Cosmo’s sexually-posed, formulaic females as models of equality, especially in a culture where girls are obsessing over “hotness” at the expense of studies and athletics and boys are enjoying the freedom of not needing to care how they look.
Child prostitutes rescued. In a three-day operation, an FBI task force rescued 69 children from truck stops, casinos, and online web sites in 40 cities. It arrested 885 people altogether, including 99 suspected pimps. All of the children were between 12 and 17 years of age, 23 of whom were located in the Seattle-Tacoma area. Others were found in California, Michigan, Illinois, and Florida. Since its inception in 2003, the task force has rescued more than 1,200 children and seen 625 pimps, madams and their associates convicted of exploiting children through prostitution. (The Wash. Times, 11-08-10) We see a connection between today’s sexualization of youth and child prostitution. While not the only cause, of course, the mainstream media is blurring the line between children and adults as sexual beings. Now accustomed to this on a regular basis, we fear that people who would otherwise be outraged by child prostitution are being lulled into resigned acceptance.
This newsletter does not necessarily reflect the views of the National Organization for Women