You know how self-help gurus, Oprah, and basically any teen magazine will advise you to, in moments of insecurity and lags of confidence, look at yourself in the mirror and reaffirm all the things you love about yourself?
Well, my roommate passed a YouTube video to me of a little toddler doing just that while standing on her bathroom sink. Check it out:
What first was a sweet, adorable video gave me an idea. The next day, standing in front of our medicine cabinet mirror waiting for the shower to warm up, I took a breath and started listing off all the things I like, a la little Jessica: “I like my friends! I like my family! I like my eyes! I like my legs! I like my sense of humor! I like San Francisco! I like my dog! I like my apartment! I like my hair!”
I laughed at how goofy I was being, but amazed at how GOOD I felt. Later, I confessed the ritual to the friend who initially showed me the video, and she broke into laughter, admitting she did the exact same thing just hours earlier!
So, go. Do it. Look at yourself in the mirror and, like Jessica, list off everything you like, even if it is simply “my haircuts” and “my pajamas.” It’s always nice to remember the little things, after all.
The media pays a lot of attention to violence in kids’ video games. But when we’re looking at messages in games, I’m also concerned about the troubling signals in games designed for tween girls. In an article in WIRED magazine, Tracey John asks whether games that encourage girls to be pretty and liked above all else could be just as damaging as games like Grand Theft Auto.
What is Carrie the Caregiver teaching our daughters?
John mainly deals with console games, but I also looked at a variety of PC games and noticed similar lessons and messages. Mostly I tried time-management games where the player takes on the role of a young woman running a business, including Carrie the Caregiver, Pet Show Craze, Sally’s Salon, and Fix-It-Up: Kate’s Adventure.
1. Girls should be encouraged to pursue caregiving occupations.
Perhaps the most cringe-worthy of this type of game is Carrie the Caregiver. The first game in this series sees the ever-perky Carrie working in a nursery where she exhibits an unnatural level of enthusiasm all day as she feeds, burps, and changes babies. Check out the trailer:
Even the games where the main character runs a business involve small service-industry businesses like Sally’s Salon or the bakeries in Cake Mania, which reinforce the perception that all women are natural caretakers.
2.Ambitious older women are your enemies.
The older woman enemy in Pet Show Craze
The back-stories for the games usually include an older, angry, cold, and ambitious woman who’s trying to put you out of business.
Most of these games have twin goals of earning money and boosting your reputation (usually represented by hearts), indicating that likeability is just as or more important than money. If you don’t worry about what other people think of you, these games suggest, you might end up like the frigid, older woman you’ve been fighting.
Do you know of any boys’ games that encourage the player to spend time collecting hearts to make people like him?
3. Your customers will reinforce race and gender stereotypes, and beauty is key.
All the male characters in Pet Show Craze gain hearts if you seat them next to the supermodel, even the little boy
Pet Show Craze has some of the best examples of this: each type of character owns one type of animal and your black customers are the only ones who own monkeys. Also, all the male customers gain hearts if you seat them next to the supermodel, but most don’t get a kick out of the sporty girl.
Rewards in these games include unlocking new outfits for your character and new décor for the business.
4. You’d better end up in a (heterosexual) relationship
Many tween girl games include the main character finding love. For example, the entire story of Cake Mania 3 revolves around making sure the main girl character gets back in time for her wedding. Further, Carrie the Caregiver adopts a daughter from Africa and meets her future husband, Will.
Even the more unique Fix-It-Up: Kate’s Adventure, which features a muscular girl with dreadlocks repairing cars, revolves around a back-story in which she falls in love with a guy who helps her fix cars. The amount of attention given to this story and its happy resolution implies her ending up with the guy at the end is just as important as the success of her business.
So are these games as harmless as they seem on the surface? Or are they telling young girls that being beautiful and being liked are the goals, not just in the game, but in life?
What does an ideal girl look like? Is she blonde, with a perfect figure and a Chihuahua in her purse? Or is she the brunette with the looks of Megan Fox? Is her favorite physical activity shopping? Media outlets are busy promoting such stereotypes about girlhood. The logic is simple: when girlhood is mainly about looking good, companies that cater to such a “need” will profit.
For instance, toy companies seem to be selling social identities rather than just toys. Girl toys in the Toys R Us online catalog for 2-year-olds include play houses, oven makers and newborn doll strollers–but boy toys include trains, walker pianos and fire engines. Neurobiologist and author of the book Pink Brain, Blue Brain Lise Eliot argues that the brains of boys and girls are not different at birth. Yet, Toys R Us and the plethora of toy companies would rather defy science and create such gender differences in an attempt to maximize sales. The message they give to our girls is that decorative and homemaking skills must become a priority very early on in life.
It all started in the 1980s when marketing expert James McNeal suggested that targeting products to children at birth would improve customer loyalty. Basically, the idea was that a consumer at birth would be a consumer for life. Companies have faithfully taken his advice. Juliet Schor, author of the book Born to Buy, explains that marketers are eager to target children under age 8 because they cannot spot the commercial intent of advertisements. Instead, kids consider ads information outlets!
To make matters worse, marketers persuade girls by manipulating their developmental patterns. Schor suggests that children learn to behave age-appropriately by observing and emulating adults around them and they are especially drawn to the freedom and style exhibited by teenagers. Thus, by creating a tween market that targets 8- to 12-year-old girls with products that promote them as sexy, popular and overly obsessed with their looks and what guys think of them, companies have maximized sales. A case in point is the retailer Sweet George Brown, which opened a line of body oil for 6 year old girls, called “Follow Me, Boy!” Even more troubling is the use of 10-year-old models for designer bikinis.
Designer Ashley Paige introduces a new line of bikinis for 10 year olds!
Companies use a myriad of techniques to target girls to shop. Susan Linn, author of Consuming Kids, explains that marketers hire child psychologists to measure how much their products make children pester their parents to buy it. Corporations even make their way into slumber parties: organizations such as Girls Intelligence Agency recruits girls as young as 6, and give them “slumber party boxes” containing fashion and glamor product samples for distribution to their friends.Here’s the link to their site and a list of their “faithful” sponsors.
If you thought young girls could be protected in the boundaries of their school environment, think again! Linn points out that corporate sponsors of public schools set up cameras in lunch rooms to understand what 8-year-old kids want, so that these companies can then market new products accordingly! Moreover, outraged teachers are petitioning against the famous school book club Scholastics, whose booklists have more to do with lip gloss, jewelery and key chains than books. Check out this petition link for more information.
Perhaps the most effective of all marketing techniques used by corporations would be the use of celebrities. A Girl Guide poll from 2008 showed that 42 percent of girls mainly looked to celebrities for inspiration. But, female celebrities in the media are mainly worshiped only for their looks, their hairdos, what they wear and who they date.
The message they embody is “your success in life depends on how you look”. They represent an “ideal girlhood” that can only be attained by seeking the right products. Girlhood becomes commodified: it becomes a mold that companies stamp onto girls. It becomes something that can be bought from a store, rather than something requiring inner reflection and the pursuit of individual standards of beauty or success.
I can’t help but notice the similarities in commodified girlhood and cosmetic surgery: marketers tell girls that in order to be successful they should be: cool, sexy and brainless, which is similar to a plastic surgeon who attempts to create the ideal body part by getting rid of the deviations. Anything that strays from these standards is simply unacceptable and needs to be cut out. The end result is a very generic girl, an identity that can be bought. But, isn’t it the “not so ideal” parts of us that make us truly unique?
What are your thoughts about the commodification of girlhood? Should there be a boundary for corporations to adhere to when it comes to maximizing sales at the cost of our children’s mental health? How do your purchases support or oppose the “ideal girl” image? Why not make a lasting resolution and choose to help girls reach their full potential in life, instead of fitting into a commercial mold?
Are you tired of your baby girl’s androgyny? Can’t wait for gender roles to really take a hold on your child and tell her what’s what? Well don’t worry, now you can do more than dress her in pink and hope for the best! With Baby Bangs, the hairpiece for baby girls, you can get a jump start on enforcing beauty norms and make sure your daughter knows from the youngest age that her femininity is tangled up in her hair.
I bet this baby is way happier now that she's got this empowering new hairpiece that differentiates her from the boys in her playgroup. Oh wait...
I really want Baby Bangs to be satirical, like those cat wigs that took the internet by storm a few years ago, and who knows—maybe it is. The web site appears to be down (that, or they can sense my feminist rage from across the internet and have thrown up that “403: forbidden” message just for me), but I’m not letting myself get my hopes up. In a world where a woman’s sexiness is determined at least in part by the length, shine, and silkiness of her hair, I can totally see a product like this finding a dedicated audience.
This is disturbing because it literally turns these baby girls into playthings. It transforms a living, breathing person into a doll to play dress-up with. When you think about it, the foreshadowing is absolutely epic: a girl raised on fake hair seamlessly gives way to a teenager obsessed with her makeup seamlessly gives way to a woman who can’t feel comfortable in her own body because she has never once had the chance to really own it. Her beauty has always been in the hands of somebody else. Even as a baby her natural state needed improvement. Are these really the messages we want to be sending our daughters?
A child is not an accessory, so let’s please stop treating her like she is.
——–
Melissa is About-Face’s newest blog editor. She likes sass, feminism, and tattoos, and gets weirded out by dogs in sweaters.
Do these American Apparel models convey similar messages despite their age difference?
When it comes to children, it can be very difficult to distinguish what is exploitative from what is innocent. If a certain pose signifies sexual provocation amongst adults, must that pose have the same meaning when created by a child? And how does this increasingly blurry territory affect how the judicial system defines child pornography?
This issue came up while I was searching for a scandalous, though not X-rated, photo on the American Apparel web site to include in our Gallery of Offenders. While there, I noticed that the web site had a children’s section, and out of curiosity, I decided to see how their children’s photos compared.
Most of the children’s photos were age-appropriate, cute, racially diverse, and positive overall, but there were a few that caused alarm. If I had seen any of the questionable photos in another context, I wouldn’t have given them a second thought. However, because they were from American Apparel, a company notorious for their pornographic advertising, I deemed them inappropriate.
Some of the children’s photos were disturbingly familiar. Here’s what I mean:
All photos were found on American Apparel's web site and pasted together.
In context, they look pretty bad. Whether the children were posed that way, mimicked the adult models, or were simply caught in a random position that we have given a sexual meaning to–does it really change the fact that these photos are the ones used to advertise clothing?
What complicates the situation is that adult women often mimic the innocence and playfulness of young girls as a way to flirt or behave in a sexual manner.
These American Apparel ads each show models in childish poses.
Basically, women are imitating girls in order to look young and innocent, and girls are in turn imitating women in order to look more adult and sexual.
This issue reaches far greater than fashion advertisements. Pedophilia and the sexual abuse of children are serious problems that are no doubt getting worse, due to the increased sexualization of little girls. But are we unable to separate the harmless from the harmful?
A photo from the parents' alleged collection of child pornography
A few months ago I ran across the San Francisco Chronicle story Are bath-time photos child pornography?, and was shocked to learn that parents faced child-abuse charges for the bathtime photos’ “sexual exploitation” of their daughters.
In more recent news, the U.S. Army charged a soldier serving in Afghanistan with child pornography possession after the soldier’s mother sent him photos of a young relative playing in her swimsuit.
Why does our culture both try to protect children from sexual abuse (sometimes without reason), yet recklessly perpetuate pedophilia by sexualizing childhood? Why can’t we just act our ages and treat and view others in an age-appropriate manner? Or is the concept of “age appropriate” too ambiguous to define?
A friend of mine recently sent me this video in which little Sophie, with the help of her mother, sends out an important message via YouTube. The title seems like a big DUH (“Beauty is Not How Skinny You Are”), but it surely is a message we don’t hear enough. The message extends past dissatisfaction with body weight as Sophie asks the audience “Why are you trying to look like someone else?”:
Why are we trying to look like someone else? Why do companies want us to want to look like someone else?
You might think, “I’m not trying to look like someone else!”, but the truth is that social standards of beauty say that we are only attractive if we have certain physical attributes. These physical attributes tend to come from a select pool of celebrities, too.
Just glancing at the magazine racks as I do my grocery shopping, I can’t escape constant reminders that I, too, can get Michelle Obama’s arms, or Cameron Diaz’s abs, or follow Britney’s quick weight loss plan. How do I copy Kristin Stewart’s outfit, or Beyonce’s hair? My complexion is most like Halle Berry’s, and here is a list of lipstick shades she wears! These magazines say that I, too, can be glamorous, and so can you–we just need to alter our appearances to match Hollywood standards.
As technology advances, we are not limited to simply changing workouts or getting new haircuts! A wide array of reality shows about cosmetic surgery inform us that we have new options!
A contestand from "The Swan" after having plastic surgery. Is this the cost of beauty?
Shows like The Swan (2004-2005), which About-Face protested, and ABC’s Extreme Makeover (2002-2007) portray cosmetic surgery as just another makeover. There is also MTV’s I Want a Famous Face (2004-2005), which documents people who go through surgery and makeovers to look more like the certain celebrities.
As rates of cosmetic surgery rise, more and more people request specific celebrities’ features. The most requested celebrity nose is Jessica Alba’s. Women are asking for collagen injections to get Angelina Jolie’s lips. There are people asking specifically for Scarlett Johansson’s eyes. Would you want to go under the knife to look like your favorite celebrity?
With these shows and ads telling me that looking like my favorite celebrity is as easy as 1, 2, 3, little Sophie’s voice pops back into my head: “Why are you trying to look like someone else?”
Little can remind us more of the beauty of our individuality than a child’s voice reminding us that “You are unique.” Sophie tells the viewer that there will never be another person like them, so why would we want to look like someone else?
“Do you want me to look like somebody else?” she asks. Hearing that from a young girl is almost heartbreaking because we imagine that girls as little as Sophie should be free from the media influences that tell them to change.
If we don’t want Sophie to change and doubt her own uniqueness, why would we want to change ourselves? As Sophie repeats the question “Why do you want to look like someone else?”, I find that I can’t come up with a better answer than “I don’t.”
Do you want to look like someone else? Why or why not?
–Tea
Tea is a college student in Berkeley studying Art and Sociology. While working at a café, she realized there was a lot of negative body talk floating around and wanted to encourage women to rethink the roles their bodies have in their lives. She hopes they would embrace their bodies (and minds!) rather than aspire towards unattainable ideals. What good is a body if you can’t enjoy it? When she’s not blogging for About Face, she writes, runs a photography business, and cuddles up with good books.
For a long time, I have believed in the power of empathizing with a fictional character to transform the way we feel about ourselves. But how does this relationship play out when that character is not human, but cartoon?
Lisa from The Simpsons
In The Simpsons, Lisa Simpson stands out as a character very different to the rest of her family. She is intellectual, self-reflective and idealistic. So it should come as no surprise when she, just like any other real-life female, experiences body image problems.
In the episode “Sleeping With the Enemy”, Lisa is teased at school about her “big butt”, which sends her into a downward spiral of negative body image and unhealthy eating habits. She reads Thin by Third Grade and indulges in retail therapy — only to find a clothing store where a sales assistant planes down the thighs of a mannequin so it conforms to the new skinny standard. She discusses her feelings with Bart, saying, “I know that this obsession with thinness is unhealthy and anti-feminist, but that’s what a fat girl would say!”
Family Guy's Meg Griffin
Lisa is not the only cartoon character to have body image struggles. Family Guy’s Meg Griffin is a socially awkward, self-conscious teenage girl who is generally mistreated by her family, and her appearance is often exploited in the name of humor.
In the episode “Barely Legal”, Meg is depressed about not having a date to her prom, telling the family dog Brian “I’m so fat and gross,” and threatening to kill herself.
Meg's replacement in her family's reality TV show
In other episodes, her brother Chris draws pictures of her with a pig’s body, father Peter farts in her face, she is depicted as a bulldog, and she is replaced by a prettier actress when the family gets their own reality show.
Meg isn’t portrayed as intellectual, like Lisa, and therefore her body image problems are not as complex. While their crises both stem from being made fun of, Lisa has the ability to question it, even as she succumbs to it. On the other hand, Meg is not shown being critical of her own position.
As in real life, neither characters’ struggles are ever fully resolved. At the end of the Simpsons episode, Homer asks Lisa if everything is OK, but she refuses to say that she’s now comfortable with her body. Instead, she acknowledges that, like many women still obsessed by weight, she has a long way to go. The fact that the issue wasn’t neatly resolved meant that it was a little more thought-provoking than a typical cartoon happy ending. In Meg’s case, the jokes just don’t stop coming.
Do you relate to Lisa or Meg? Are cartoon characters an effective means of exploring body image issues?
Dora the Explorer’s new “tween” look has caused quite a stir. The new Dora seems to be telling little girls that looks are, in fact, very important. She is also suggesting that girls should be more interested in styling their hair than in having adventures.
Luckily, the original, adventurous young Dora will live on in her television show. The tween Dora is being marketed as a doll that can hook up to computers to interact with her web site, doralinks.com. The site and doll will officially launch on September 29th, but until then, visitors to the teaser site can watch the Dora links commercial, which you might have seen on television:
The commercial focuses on three main features of tween Dora and doralinks.com: numerous outfit and accessory options, the ability to change Dora’s eye color from brown to blue or green, and the option of making her hair longer.
The commercial mentions that she will now be solving mysteries with her “explorer girls”, but then just goes on to highlight changing Dora’s appearance in order to “disguise” her for investigations. That is a pretty sorry attempt to hold onto any bit of the old Dora’s soul. What’s next, having the option to lighten Dora’s hair and skin? Being able to give her lip injections and breast implants? Maybe they’ll wait for teen Dora for those options.
These marketing points are still standard for girls’ toys, but I really hoped that such a dynamic, groundbreaking character like Dora would not grow up conforming to gender stereotypes and placing so much emphasis on her looks. Cartoon characters and dolls are still role models for girls, and when most play options involve taking care of babies or putting on pretty outfits, we can really see where women and girls still stand in this world.
Judging by my observations of other girls and from my own experiences growing up, girls tend to lose their gusto somewhere between the ages of 6 and 12. Unfortunately, Dora the Explorer is no exception. The Punky Brewsters, Ramona Quimbys, and Eloises of our childhoods are eventually taught that they should be seen and not heard, and that they need to conform to certain standards of beauty and conduct that are appropriate for girls. These standards do not include being bold, rambunctious, or playful.
Why do little girls in this age group lose their spark? Perhaps society is threatened by the power these girls could grow into if allowed to cultivate those characteristics. Meanwhile, boys are encouraged to continue to develop these qualities as they grow older, and they go on to make up the majority of people in power.
I would’ve liked to see the older Dora take on even bigger, more challenging adventures instead of retreating to a stereotypical girly-girl’s world and focusing on her looks. The tween Dora could’ve been an action figure for children, but instead, because of her female gender role, she is assigned the passive role of a doll, focusing on her appearance instead of adventure.
Want to tell Dora’s production companies what you think? Yeah you do. Contact them:
Viacom Inc.
1515 Broadway
New York, New York 10036
(212) 258-6000
or online
Mattel, Inc.
333 Continental Boulevard
El Segundo, CA 90245
(310) 252-2000
Girls like Sarah Totonchi (shown here in 1986) were convinced they were fat at age nine
In his recent article for the Wall Street Journal, Jeffrey Zaslow reports recently contacting women from a 1986 study of fourth graders, in which 75% of the girls revealed that they felt like they weighed too much, and more than half claimed to be on diets.
The girls weren’t alone in their concerns about weight: a fourth-grade boy, when interviewed, said “Fat girls aren’t like regular girls. They aren’t attractive.”
But the societal pressure on girls has increased exponentially during the two decades since the first interview. The original girls from the study had reported drinking diet sodas and watching exercise videos. Now one of them, a middle-school teacher, has to fight with her students to get them to take a few bites of their lunches.
There have been several books in recent years that portray the trend towards increasing body image issues in young girls, which include Mary Piper’s Reviving Ophelia and Joan Jacob Brumberg’s The Body Project. But perhaps the most visceral account comes from Marya Hornbacher, in her autobiographical book, Wasted.
Hornbacher relates several incidents from her childhood: arguing with a friend at age five about who could eat food with the least amount of sugar, panicking after eating two slices of pizza at a party, feeling as though the body in the mirror belonged to someone else. She writes:
“At four I stood, a tiny Eve, choked with mortification at my body, the curve and plane of belly and thigh. At four I realized that I simply would not do. My body, being solid, was too much.” (p. 15)
At age nine, Hornbacher began inducing vomiting, and entered the nightmare world of bulimia and anorexia.
What compels girls as young as nine to embark on dangerous diets and eating disorders? To imagine fourth graders conscientiously sipping diet sodas and watching exercise videos is strange enough, but the situation has moved far beyond that. However, when girls grow up surrounded by media images of alarmingly thin women and food advertisements that link weight with worth, is it really so surprising?
Even one voice of sanity in a girl’s life can make a difference. Don’t be afraid to speak to any young girls that you know, and let them know that their value doesn’t depend on their weight. The Dove website has some great resources, including the True You mentoring guide and some excellent films, especially “Onslaught” and “Amy”.
Help combat the messages young women receive: speak out today!
–Elizabeth
Elizabeth Weaver was trained as an artist, and currently writes for an international women’s organization. She is passionate about helping women to understand their own unique beauty, and hopes to be a good self-image role model to her 3-year-old god-daughter.
The youngsters love Disney’s Hannah Montana, but what kind of message is Miley Cyrus sending them about how to act in real life? Whether she is wearing thigh-high boots or clutching a sheet to her naked torso (as she was in last year’s Vanity Fair), 16-year-old Miley has been shown in very adult poses.
These provocative photos, mixed with the fact that her fame comes from her popularity with the tweens and pre-tweens, results in another attempt to link youth with sexiness. Unfortunately, Miley’s image is falling pray to the pull toward a more “sexy” persona.
Case in point is her photo shoot in the August issue of ELLE magazine
Miley Cyrus in ELLE Magazine, August 2009
Short skirt, legs spread, hair tousled — take this image in while keeping in mind that most of her fan base is still in elementary school. It is true that ELLE is a magazine aimed at adults with more mature content. Why, then, did they choose to feature Miley to attract their adult audience?
Spears on the cover of Rolling Stone in 1999
The answer is in our culture’s fixation with youth being seen as “sexy.” Think back to the Spring 1999 Rolling Stone cover featuring Britney Spears in her underwear talking on the phone and clutching a Teletubby doll. This is a much more blatant attempt to mix youth with sex appeal, but the photo spreads Miley Cyrus has been involved with are much the same.
Novelist Nicholas Sparks is quoted in the ELLE article as saying:
“…she’s growing up, as much as we wish she wouldn’t… I think everybody, when they watch Home Alone, wishes Macaulay Culkin were nine years old, but he’s not. People grow up!”
What Mr. Sparks fails to see here is that while Miley might be growing up, the decisions she and the people around her (i.e. her manager father, Billy Ray Cyrus) make have a direct impact on the young people that watch and sometimes imitate her every move. However popular Macaulay Culkin was, he didn’t send droves of fans running to the stores to imitate his latest outfits.
If these types of images bother you, take action. Don’t underestimate the power you have on the kids around you. Talk to the young people who may or may not be Miley fans about why she might be taking photos like the ones in ELLE. Ask them questions about what they think of Miley’s new photos. Opening this door can help people of all ages see though the hype of marketing campaigns.
If you want to let Miley Cyrus know your feelings on her photo spread in ELLE, you can send her a letter to Miley Cyrus, P.O. Box 1459, Santa Monica, CA 90406.
You can also send feedback to ELLE using the form on their contact page.
You know how self-help gurus, Oprah, and basically any teen magazine will advise you to, in moments of insecurity and lags of confidence, look at yourself in the mirror and reaffirm all the things you love about yourself?
Hornbacher relates several incidents from her childhood: arguing with a friend at age five about who could eat food with the least amount of sugar, panicking after eating two slices of pizza at a party, feeling as though the body in the mirror belonged to someone else. She writes:
