Framing the First Daughters

I just wanted to post a link to my latest column in Flow, which actually does relate directly to girls and media AND to the election, to a certain extent. I'm all about being timely. :-)

Framing the First Daughters: party girls, ugly ducklings, and graceful wives who grew up in the White House

Because babies need their Manolos, too!

Girls studies scholar and all around cool lady, Sharon Mazzarella, pointed out this ridiculous new product to me the other day. Indeed, what every stylish infant needs: Barbie Doll-pink (or zebra print, if you prefer) stiletto heels! They are squishy, which apparently should placate anyone who's worried about their toddler turning her ankle when she decides to take those first few steps, though if you watch the little video that accompanies this news story about it, I think you can see that Baby's First Shoe Injury is still a distinct possibility.

And believe it or not, these were developed by a couple of moms outfitting their own babies with them. I love how the news story's only critical angle is "Some people think any high heeled shoes are inappropriate for babies, but the inventors say they are all in good fun!" That's why they are called  "heelarious" -- get it?  Yes, because it is really funny that we're training our girls to be all-consuming fashionistas (with an affinity for hooker heels) as soon as they leave the womb. 

Sad news: In memory of Jacqueline Kirk, co-founder and co-editor of Girlhood Studies

I just read this tremendously sad news and thought I should share since Jacqueline Kirk (who I unfortunately never met) was an advocate and leader in the field of girls studies research and an activist who actually put herself in harm's way to make the world a better place for girls. She and two aid workers were killed in Afghanistan last month while doing just that. You can see the Girlhood Studies statement about Kirk to learn more about her work and what happened. 

My thoughts go out to her family and colleagues.

'90210': A Study of How the Female Body Changes Over Time

My new column was just posted on FlowTV, and I thought I'd give a little recap because it's about a topic that is near and dear to many grown-up girls who like media and thought that Jason Priestly was a total fox back in 1990. A new "90210" is in town, and it hit me like a ton of bricks how the girl's and women's bodies on this show literally demonstrate Susan Bordo's point that culture imprints the body over time. Indeed, Bordo can be a little theoretically heavy, but if these two photographs do not make the point crystal clear (and please ignore the outdated 90s fashion and just concentrate on what's under these women's clothes for a minute). Notice that the original characters have hips and thighs (poor Andrea Zuckerman must be standing on blocks, but I think that's the only photo enhancement going on here), for example.

More subtle but just as startling is the age adjustment that has always gone on. As I wrote in the column, we thought the original cast looked WAY too old to be in high school -- maybe in the realm of 23 or 24, which actually was true in a couple of their cases. The new cast looks similarly old. You can read the column to see my theories on this, but the fact that even the adults now seem to be averaging out at age 28 in looks is an important difference to note. Anyway, you can read the column on Flow and tell me what you think. I find it tremendously disturbing on so many levels.

And despite all of this critiquing, of course, I'll tune in to the new one in September. I've been addicted to "Gossip Girl" from the first show and own every season of "The OC" on DVD. As a scholar, it's fascinating stuff. As a guilty-pleasure-TV-lover, it would be impossible to ignore it.

Cool New Site Alert: Girls Make Media

I'm on vacation with a slow connection and borrowed computer, so I'll just post this quickly and urge you to check it out yourself:

Girls Make Media, a site devoted to honoring and mobilizing girls' media-making:

http://girlsmakemedia.blogspot.com

This was put together by girls studies scholar and all-around cool woman
Mary Celeste Kearney, who is a professor at the University of Texas. (I discussed
her book in a previous blog post, though you'll have to wade through some first-person stuff
about my own media-making first.)

Fantastic idea, Mary!

New Moon Girls

I just read an article in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune about the New Moon magazine seeking investors so that it can move its operation entirely online, and I'm embarrassed to say that I've never heard of New Moon even though it has 20,000 subscribers and is all about producing media for young girls that doesn't make them feel like they should be ultra-thin, sexy consumers.  Much of the content is reader-produced and they don't accept any advertising, and from what I saw on their Web site, it looks like a fantastic idea.  Check out this sample copy. I love that they have an article on Suffrage as well as a piece that debunks the myth about chewing gum being stuck in your stomach for a seven-year digestive process if you swallow it. It sounds like the proposed online version will include even more user-generated content, and there will be a teen and tween-geared component. 

Are there any subscribers out there? I'd like to hear more about this. I'd also be interested in whether people are going to be up for paying for their subscriptions online (the Strib article says something about a $19.95 annual fee for the Orb28 and New Moon Club content for the older girls). I suspect there's a good research study in here -- just what I've been looking for!

Just Girls by Margaret Finders: Way Ahead of the Curve in Girls Studies

Hello. I'm back, and I'll try to make up for lost time.  First, as promised, a return to showcasing some great research about girls: I want to call your attention to Margaret Finders' 1996 book, Just Girls: Hidden Literacies and Life in Junior High. [I first learned about the book years ago from Cynthia Lewis, a member of my graduate committee who was based in the College of Education at Iowa (and now, fortunately for me, she's at the University of Minnesota), and who has done some excellent girls studies research in her own right.]

The book is an ethnographic look at a group of girls in a junior high and how books play a central role in their social lives as well as their construction of identity. Finders echoes some of the earlier scholarship about girls that discusses how many get caught up in a pattern of perfection and being nice. Although this particular stereotype has been completely overshadowed by the new stereotype of the mean girl, I think it is still so relevant -- maybe even moreso now that popular culture and media no longer represents girls as "troubled" (i.e. Reviving Ophelia), and now that they are reportedly outshining boys in the classroom (you can see an earlier blog about my feelings about this so-called "boys crisis").  Finders really captures the entire junior high/middle school scene so well with her conversations with and observations of girls, and that makes the book truly a pleasure to read. 

Also, one of her main observations is that girls are often dismissed for their reading choices, and that so much of their reading is not the traditional, school-oriented reading but rather, "hidden" literacies, such as note-writing, graffiti, zine reading. She sees this type of reading as very important with regard to gender and identity negotiation even though it is unsanctioned and viewed as unimportant by most adults and school authorities. This argument reminds me of the article that ran in last Sunday's New York Times about whether digital literacy -- chatting with friends, reading and writing fan fiction, and generally, just reading online -- is as important as traditional reading of traditional materials and questions whether traditional reading will be displaced.  While I personally value traditional reading -- books and newspapers being at the top of my list, obviously -- I agree that it's a mistake to dismiss alternative literacies and their importance within adolescent social culture. Frankly, if we want these traditional reading cultures to survive at all, we should be paying much closer attention to how these new forms of literacy can enhance and work with them. (Do you hear me, old-school newspaper executives?!)

In any case, it's more than a decade old now, but I highly recommend Just Girls because its arguments are still poignant and examples are still relevant. 

The Discourse of Moral Panic and Girls in Public

The three of you who occasionally read this blog might be wondering where I've been and what I've been up to, other than slacking off with regard to blog writing. I promise I haven't just been running through the sprinkler and penguin-diving into a Slip-N-Slide in the backyard all July -- not that it doesn't sound nice -- but I have actually been working on some research and writing of my own, including one article that I'm about to present at the annual conference for the Association of Educators in Journalism and Mass Communication in Chicago next week about media representations of girls and young women on MySpace and Facebook that compares and contrasts these representations with coverage from 100 years ago about girls and young women going to dance halls. 

My argument is that the media coverage of these two phenomena employs surprisingly similar language and tactics to stir up public fervor -- or moral panic -- about the notion that girls and young women would place themselves in potentially unsavory and unladylike ways in public space. In the case of dance halls, merely going to the dance hall, dancing and speaking with members of the opposite sex caused an uproar in 1908; in the case of social networking sites, the same moral panic appears to be in place with regard to girls and young women posting "sexy" photos of themselves and potentially, talking with members of the opposite sex. While there might have been some danger in both of these cases (sexual predators, for example), research has shown that the danger is overblown through the media and that the actual statistics about girls being in danger doesn't hold up to reality. However, the moral panic that is created through all of this newspaper coverage (which is done in a variety of ways that I won't go into here) essentially and not-so-subtly seeks to place young women and girls back out of the public eye into the private, and even domestic, realm. 

Anyway, it's fascinating and fairly troubling stuff, and I am excited about the project. Hopefully it can be expanded into a larger piece of work, though admittedly, the idea of writing another book sort of scares me at this point.

FlowTV Column on the Significance of Exile in Guyvile

I had the honor of being asked to serve as a guest columnist for FlowTV, a publication devoted to critical analysis of television and media culture published through the RTF department at the University of Texas (in Austin, one of the greatest cities in the world), and my first column, which is basically, my feelings about the 15th anniversary re-release of Liz Phair's "Exile in Guyville" and accompanying DVD, was just posted. 

Oddly, it wound up being one of the most difficult pieces I've had to write (yes, a 140-page dissertation was somehow easier in a lot of ways), I think because it posed so many conflicting feelings for me. 1) I love the album and have such nostalgia for the time that it was released, and it was such an influence on me as a girl, as a musician, and later, as a scholar, and 2) The way culture has changed in 15 years -- and I will argue that things ARE different now than they were 5, 10, 15 and 20 years ago with regard to women, girls and sexuality -- has complicated my feelings about what Phair did even more, and 2) I'm not much of a fan of anything that she's done in the past 10 years, nor did I find myself feeling better about it while watching the accompanying DVD. Anyway, here's the column (and do read some of the incredibly well articulated responses afterward -- I think a few are better argued than my piece!):

Interpreting Exile in Guyville's Legacy: 15th Anniversary of Liz Phair's Seminal Album Conjures Questions About the Packaging of Sex, Girl Culture and Feminism 

(Thanks so much to Kristen Lambert, my editor at Flow, who very kindly let me go past deadline and my word limit. I'll do better next time, I promise.)

Now that I'm finished with the first column, I vow to get back to the primary mission of this blog -- showcasing relevant research on girls and media. On deck... Review/discussions of The Lolita Effect by Gigi Durham, Just Girls (an oldie but a goodie) by Margaret Finders and Maiden USA by Kathleen Sweeney.

Surprisingly good article on Kit Kitteridge

My apologies for being a little less than attentive to this blog over the past week or so, but I've been butting up against a few major deadlines (the kind that have to do with my getting tenure, and so my job security depends on them -- you know how it goes) and the blog had to pushed down on my list of priorities. However, the New York Times published -- as I'll repeat from my really boring headline above -- a surprisingly good article reflecting on the American Girl phenomenon in general and on the new "Kit Kittredge" film. Unsurprisingly, this is written by A.O. Scott, one of the best critics out there, in my opinion. Here's a link to the whole article and an excerpt is pasted below. Enjoy:

"... Look at one of the dolls, and you see a kind of anti-Barbie, a sturdy, nonsexualized body whose proportions are more or less those of a real girl. (Since 1998 American Girl has been part of Mattel, which is also Barbie’s corporate home.) Her clothes are both practical and authentic, and her activities are a healthy mix of chores, games and career preparations.

While some of the historical adventure books acknowledge that opportunities for girls — especially poor and nonwhite girls — were limited in earlier times, they emphasize optimism, good will and self-reliance as the ever-available antidotes to injustice or deprivation. This is certainly the lesson of “Kit Kittredge,” which does not shy away from showing some of the hard realities of the Depression, including homelessness, unemployment and the scapegoating of the poor.

It celebrates, in the midst of hard times, an appealingly ordinary brand of heroism. Kit is brave, smart, determined and kind, but never off-puttingly full of herself or intimidatingly superior. You would want her for a friend. You could easily imagine yourself in her place.

Which may be at least some of what girls want, and what they get from American Girl. As the son and husband of feminists, I can’t entirely suppress a tremor of unease. Is the brand reflecting tastes, or enforcing norms of behavior? Is it teaching girls to be independent spirits or devoted shoppers?

Probably all of those things, and more. I have spent a lot of time, over the years, with Felicity and some others of her kind, and I still haven’t figured her out. She doesn’t say much, and even though her expression is always fixed in a pleasant smile, she seems to change according to the moods and interests of her playmates. She is an athlete, a musician, a clothes horse, a bookworm, a pet owner, a loner and a confidant. A typical American girl, as far as I can tell."

MTV's 'True' Look at Young Women Online

I have to admit that I generally tend to like MTV's attempts at documentary work in their shows, "True Life" and in the very early episodes of "Made." (And I could write at length about "My Super Sweet 16," "The Hills," and some of their other finer programming, but that's an entirely different post. Or maybe 100 posts.) This recent episode of "True Life," which one of my students alerted me to, particularly piqued my interest:

'I Live Another Life on the Web': Three Girls Explore Life On the Web" 

(below is just the first segment):

• MTV
• Music Videos
• MTV Shows
• Entertainment News

While the storytelling is fairly good, and while I don't think the producers gloss entirely over some serious emotional and psychological issues that each of these girls has (perhaps one more than the others), they completely gloss over a couple of other really important points. 

First, why three girls? In the case of Judy, what about the creepy dudes who offer to pay a girl's rent in exchange for her walking around naked in front of her webcam? Or in the case of Maleri, what about the guy on the other end who just asks for it for free? Does our culture not find that fascinating as well? Why the focus on girls? And why is sexuality such a huge part of this equation? The case of Amy the musician was different, but you do realize from one of her answers that she was asked by a producer about whether she tried to make herself look better in Second Life (her avatar looks about the same, actually). So even if she were trying to remove appearances and sexuality from the equation, MTV just pulls it right back in there. Not that it should surprise us, I suppose. It is MTV, after all. 

 Second, it seems we get to only see the semi-exploited in these cases. OK, you can argue that each of these young women makes a choice to use the Internet and that perhaps they are getting something in return (that is in fact, what each argues -- one for money and a chance to interact with someone without aggravating her social phobia and the other for a chance at falling in love), but the producers at MTV don't really explore the other side. They show Judy taking her antidepressants, but they don't even ask her about whether she thinks her depression and agoraphobia have any relationship to her web site. I'd frankly like to hear what she thinks. (The storytelling in this case is also incomplete. Is it a pornographic website that people have to pay to access? Or does she just take her clothes off for one of the patrons, who wires her rent money right afterward?)  Missing from each of these mini-documentaries is any real critical reflection what this all means, culturally and individually to these young women, which is a shame because MTV had a chance to do some good here.

Berry, Berry Troubling

So, as you can see, the latest toy from my girlhood, Strawberry Shortcake, has gone through the equivalent of Stacy and Clinton's three-way mirror and come out looking a little more like Hillary Duff than Raggedy Ann. At least she doesn't have cleavage, I suppose (I'm not sure whether her hair still smells like strawberries -- or strawberry Crush, which is what it really smelled like -- but I would be very disappointed if it didn't). Her cat has been replaced by a cellphone because of course, we should be teaching our 4-year-old daughters the importance of being in constant contact with the rest of the world at the earliest age possible. Modern, indeed.

There is something ultimately icky about this, in my opinion, though: We're talking about a doll who NO ONE thought of actually emulating when we had her as kids. She was a cute little mini-figure -- a nice alternative to Barbie who could hang out next to my Smurf figurines -- as I suggested, a 1980s rag doll/Raggedy Ann/funny looking little girl who lived in a fantasy world. She played with a friend whose hair smelled like apples and rode around on a giant turtle (oh, Tea-Time Turtle, what will they do with you? Turn you into a purse dog?). 

Marketers apparently have decided that she would be more appealing in the new millennium if she is dressed in clothing that little girls might actually want to wear and talking on a cell phone that little girls might actually want to talk on, too. So really, the fantasy world is gone and we're left with a product that looks and acts like a real little girl. 

Get it now? This isn't about modernization of a nostalgia product. It's about marketing to girls who are younger and younger in order to get them to literally buy into their role as a consumer at the earliest age possible. (By the way, I fully expect agencies to come up with a way to target beauty products at fetuses within the next few years.) 

I know, I know. Some people out there would say that I am going to be the meanest mom alive if I don't get my little girl the new Strawberry Shortcake doll (or Bratz, or Barbie, for that matter), and what other options do we have for dolls anyway? Nothing is realistic, after all. I really do think that we have the power to stand up to this blatant product whoring to children, and I do think that we can turn against images that portray little girls (and dolls) as sexualized, adult, cell-phone-addicted mini-women. Just don't buy (into) it.

 

Girls Strike Back through Project Girl

I just saw an article in my local paper, The Star Tribune, about an art show/film screening being put on tomorrow night by adolescent girls in which their original works convey their feelings about harmful and stereotypical media messages about girls. This seems like a fantastic project in so many ways. Although this is a local group being featured, they are part of a national organization called Project Girl, which was founded a couple of years ago with the goal of empowering girls to critically understand mediated messages geared toward them and to counteract the effect of those messages by producing their own art and programming about them. This again reminds me of M.C. Kearney's book, "Girls Make Media," that I discussed in an earlier post, and I love that this organization places the girls directly in the role of producer rather than consumer or even analyst (though of course, analyzing is an important part of the process). In a lot of cases, the programs are happening in conjunction with YMCAs so girls from many racial and class backgrounds tend to be involved, which is also cool and frankly, very important.

It looks like Lyn Mickel Brown is the keynote speaker for this event. She and Carol Gilligan co-authored one of my favorite scholarly books about girls (and one of the earliest ones that I know of since it came out in 1993), "Meeting at the Crossroads: Women's Psychology and Girls' Development," which was this great ethnographic portrait of girls experiencing adolescence.
I still have to read her more recent "Packaging Girlhood" that she co-wrote with Sharon Lamb (I have to admit that the language used to market this book really turned me off: "A parent Guide to protect girls from marketers and media." I realize this is probably just the publisher's way to market the book to worried parents, and that makes me wonder if parents need a book to protect them from publishers' and the media's overzealous marketing efforts that play on their own fears. I'm not sure if you followed that, but basically, the marketing of this book about marketing bugs me.)

As much as I'd personally be psyched to see Mikel Brown, I wonder if the girls themselves might have been better served by bringing in Diablo Cody or Ani Difranco, given the mission of the project. Just a thought.

(Photo above is from The Star Tribune and shows some of the film producers for this Project Girl event.)

SATC Mania: Are we really all vapid consumers? Is it really just 'crushing sameness'? Can I really not be a feminist who loves blue Manolos??!

I generally like David Carr's column that runs in the New York Times' Business section on Mondays, and at first reading today, this one struck me as quite smart, too. It's basically about how the media business community is finally taking notice that women are particularly strong web community users and that it can translate into dollars for them. 

But it also takes issue with the idea that this demographic has used its strength to literally buy into the idea that their buying power (of shoes, of clothes, of the wonderful lives of four women in New York...) is real power rather than just a means to keep corporate structures (often run by men) and sexist stereotypes (women love to shop) in place. The argument against this is that perhaps, through new media and the revolutionary discourses that could be created through new media, women's web sites might lead their community of followers into doing something new and more revolutionary than Manolo envy.  Even if this is somewhat unrealistic for reasons I'll talk about later, this is a great point. In fact, this column has one of my single most favorite quotations about women and new media production that I've read in a long time from Caterina Fake, one of the founders of Flickr.com. I'll give you the excerpt leading in, too:

...Besides, I realize we are all, like it or not, having a moment with “Sex and the City,” 

no more or less frivolous than the Super Bowl. It’s just odd that while there has been a significant advance in sites by and for women, much of what is being produced replicates, rather than revolutionizes, the template set down by women’s magazines for decades.

“The lack of evolution is disappointing to me,” said Caterina Fake, one of the founders of Flickr.com. “Back in 1996, it was going to be this brave new world where women were finally going to take control of their stories, and to me, it is often more a crushing sameness.”

Even so, she is unsurprised that in an era built on communities of interest, women are on the rise. “It is a rule of Web development that if you want a vital community, it has to start with women. It is just a higher level of discourse and behavior. If a site starts male, it stays male.”

(This is me talking now:) We should acknowledge that try as we might, it is pretty difficult to manufacture and rally around exciting new paradigms that transcend any stereotypical gender norms (to quote a really awful stand-up comedian in "The Nutty Professor" with Eddie

 Murphy: "Women be shopping!" Really, is there a stronger message about femininity than the fact that we love to buy shoes? "SATC" just mirrored and celebrated this. The show and film definitely didn't come up with it.)

But I grapple with this notion that our consumption of popular culture, and our celebration of the fantasyland portrayed in "SATC," is all bad, which is the main thing that I get from this column.  Yes, we could and should do more with the online medium and indeed, if you believe that we can truly and fully escape hundreds of years of cultural ideas about what it means to be female (as a follower of Foucault and Althusser, I have my doubts), then yes, the fact that beyond-snarky Jezebel live-blogged from the "SATC" premier in New York is a little depressing. However, the fact that we can indeed rally and celebrate media and make sense of it on our own and use it to our own ends is something. Actually, it's something important. (The whole phenomenon of "SATC" community is startlingly like Janice Radway's ethnographic research on romance readers and how they used the act of reading in their lives.)

Bringing it back to the younger girls, though (that is what this blog's about, after all): Are the arguments the same? Hannah Montana is probably a far bigger franchise with a far more rabid community  (of consumers) than Carrie Bradshaw when you think about it. Again, girls are not necessarily using online communities or new media to transcend dominant cultural discourses to counter Hannah's own stereotypically girly image, but they are actively making sense of her and using this imagery in various ways, both helpful and possibly harmful (I'd argue that buying and listening to Miley Cyrus' music could be doing harm to anyone's ears who happen to listen, but this is from a person who played in a Def Leppard cover band in junior high, so what do I know?).  Even if it is "crushing sameness," I like to think that it's not totally without merit. Then again, it's difficult to counter that we aren't just grooming today's Miley Cyrus fans to be the"vapid"  "SATC" fans of the future. 

'Girls Make Media' (we really do!)

I've always fancied myself a rocker chick, so to speak. After many years of lip syncing to the Go Go's in my garage with my next-door-neighbor, Kim (she played the tennis racket, I was lead singer and had a Mr. Microphone), I joined my first rock band when I was in 9th grade as the keyboard player. We were a hair band cover band with the unfortunate name of Public Menace (changed to "pubic" on all the posters we made for our show at  our  junior high school) -- "Talk Dirty to Me" by Poison, "Home Sweet Home" by Motley Crue, "Animal" by Def Leppard, and "Jump" by Van Halen were in our repertoire. The Go Go's would never have rocked enough for us even though the bands we covered probably stole some of their make-up and hair secrets.  

In high school and  college, I stuck to jazz and classical, but I was the singer/keyboardist in an 80s/90s cover band after college when I lived in D.C. (Gwen Stefani and Shirley Manson from Garbage were my specialties there), and when I moved to Chicago in 1999, I took up the bass because I knew  it was probably going to be my best chance to really play in a rock band. I was right. I joined three guys in a band we called Brother Lowdown (that's me on the left at our farewell show last summer), and we played from early 2000 until I moved to Minneapolis last fall, starting in small grungy rock clubs (OK, we continued to play a lot of small grungy rock 

clubs up until the very end) and moving up to some fairly legendary places, like Chicago's Metro. We opened for bands that you've possibly heard of, made two EPs and a full-length CD (which we fully recorded and produced on our own), and generally rocked out.

Aside from the lip syncing, however, I always played in bands with guys and no other women (which was circumstance and never choice). And even though I played the bass and wrote songs for Brother Lowdown, people always asked first if I was the lead singer. For whatever reason, that bugged me and still bugs me, but I get it. There are still too few women in bands who are actually playing instruments and actively writing songs that the band will play (our lead singer/guitarist regularly sang songs that I wrote), or at least it would seem that way from the stories we usually read about rock bands. 

But that really isn't the case. Girls throughout history have created various kinds of media and art and music -- long before Sleater Kinney and the riot grrl movement. I didn't necessarily recognize that I was making media myself as a kid (through diaries, songs, stories), but I was. This is one of the greatest points of Mary Celeste Kearney's book "Girls Make Media" -- the simple title really emphasizing the direct action of the process. Furthermore, she says we should not only analyze the texts that mainstream media produce for girls and how they affect girls, but what girls themselves do when left to their own devices. Seeing girls as producers of cultural artifacts tells a much more complete story about identity, gender and feminism. It does a service to the girls and women that they become. (She also talks about how specifically marginalized a lot of DIY artists -- filmmakers in particular -- have been with regard to mainstream acceptance. Again,  why didn't anyone ever ask me if I was the lead guitarist in the band before they asked if I was the singer? And why didn't anyone ask about songwriting? Why is it a big deal when a female musician writes a band's songs?)

So both the rocker chick and professor in me recommends "Girls Make Media" as an excellent read but also a very sophisticated understanding of how cultural theory and critical studies of media explain how gender and power come in to play with girls' creation of media.  (Beware that the theory might be a bit thick for a non-scholar, but Kearney's writing style is still easy to digest.) 

And just as an aside, Kim -- the next-door neighbor rocking the tennis racket -- and I both wound up rioting beyond the garage ourselves. She's now a big-shot competing skateboarder (and kindergarten teacher!). Check her out. (She's in Montana now, but we're still close friends after all these years.)

Girls' Gains Have Not Harmed Boys

Have you heard of the "boy crisis," the notion that boys have suffered because we've paid so much attention to girls' issues in the classroom over the past several years? This argument has always really bugged me because it essentializes both boys and girls in so may ways, and it pits the sexes against one another instead of looks for solutions that work for all children and adolescents. It is an unproductive argument.

Fortunately, the American Association of University Women decided to get to the bottom of the rhetoric about "boys crisis." They did some research, crunched some numbers and found out that even though boys and girls may (or may not -- it's still a debate) learn differently and succeed in different atmospheres, in general, girls and boys who are white and from a middle to upper class background, have approximately the same level of success in the classroom. Boys outscore girls in some areas (notably on both math and verbal parts of the SAT), girls graduate from high school at a higher rate than boys (though the AAUW points out that women on average still earn less than men in the workforce, suggesting the classroom gains are all for naught).

The real issue is that while boys and girls of color and lower income levels have made some gains over the past 30 years to catch up to their Caucasian and middle class to wealthy peers, they are not succeeding in the classroom and graduating at lower levels all around. The AAUW leadership says the lobbyists for the "boys crisis" (notably, Christina Hoff Sommers, who wrote "The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men") are distracting the country from this much larger problem. The New York Times article is fairly short and admittedly, a little one-sided on the side of the AAUW; you might want to check out the full report yourself. Beware: It's 124 pages and takes a minute to download.

Putting on my college professor hat for a second here, I'd say the research seems credible and is based on massive amounts of data over a long period of time (all kinds of standardized test scores from 1971 to 2007, high school grade point averages from 1990 to 2007, graduation rates from 1969 to 2007, bachelors degrees conferred from 1971 to 2006 -- all broken down by gender, race and class as well as various math and verbal proficiency scores). The authors are a credentialed cultural anthropologist, an education policy person and public policy person who focuses on women's economic status and oversees research for AAUW.

One thing the report does not offer: Any concrete solutions. Perhaps this keeps the data politically-neutral in the eyes of the AAUW, though I'm pretty sure a lot of people would argue that it is not possible for anyone to be objective, and that an advocacy organization like the AAUW should be acting as a powerful advocate to make policy recommendations.

I do wonder what we can do improve the educational system for all students nation-wide. (I'm actually getting involved in a project at a lower-income school in Minneapolis to provide a curriculum that is centered largely around digital media production and literacy, and I think it will be an interesting approach. I'll write more about it as the project unfolds this summer.) So much of this depends on government and funding, and I often feel like such a passive, un-empowered person in that process. It's difficult to see gains even when you are working hard on an individual level to push for reform and help individual students.

On a personal level, I also wonder what I'll do with my own (still non-existent) kids when the time comes. Would I send them to the most diverse school possible so that they have a classroom that actually mirrors the world around them? Do I send them to the nearby private school that has very little diversity, costs a ton and regularly has graduates going to the Ivy League? Should I seek out a school that does some single-sex classroom teaching? I have lots of well-adjusted successful friends who went to single-sex Catholic schools growing up. Maybe I should think about that...

I find myself having a very hard time writing concluding statements for any of these blog entries, to be frank with you. I'd love to make some rallying calls to action -- but exactly who would we rally against? (Please don't answer The Man.) Maybe I need to listen to more conservative radio and take a few pointers from their rhetorical techniques, huh?

For now, carry on, soldiers. Do not go gentle into that good night. Good night and good luck.

Megan Meier and MySpace

You would have to have been living under a rock over the past two days (or at least ignoring all the shouting on CNN -- when did that start? Didn't they used to be the calm, semi-objective news casters?) to have missed all the coverage of the indictment in the Megan Meier suicide case, but just in case you've managed to avoid it (perhaps by paying attention to news of a massive deadline earthquake in China, a massive deadline cyclone in Myanmar and a war happening in Iraq), here is a link to the latest story on the topic:

Mom Indicted in MySpace Hoax

Really, there are so many fascinating and troubling facets to this story that it is hard to know where to begin a rational discussion. Jacqueline Vickery of the University of Texas-Austin presented a paper at the International Online Journalism Symposium in April about how persons on message boards have responded to the story when it first hit last fall, and she related the various sides of the consequences of anonymity online (for everyone involved, really -- from the original case of masked identity to how audiences of the story, many of whom also responded anonymously, made sense of the story).

Here's a link to the page where you can download Vickery's paper as a PDF:

"The Megan Meier MySpace Suicide: A case study exploring the social aspects of convergent media, citizen journalism, and online anonymity and credibility" by Jacqueline Vickery

I'm personally interested in looking at how the media has covered the story with regard to gender and power and in perpetuating this concept of the "mean girl." I've studied this before with regard to the Glenbrook North hazing incident a few years ago, and just to be brief, I found the mass media (meaning print, TV, Internet -- the whole lot) liked to glom on to the cultural rise of the "mean girl." In a short period of time in 2001 and 2002, many articles and books were published discussing how girls were conniving, back-biting, and generally, mean (see the first post of this blog for the NY Times Magazine story by Margaret Talbot that kicked it off). This stereotype of tween and teen girls was generally accepted by people from all walks of life (often you heard after this, "Well, girls ARE mean! Remember when you were 13?" as if all girls have a mean gene that just kicks in and allows them to be passive-aggressive and bitchy at a certain age). I argue that it has also been used to explain and in many cases, dismiss certain behavior. What the Glenbrook North high school girls did in their hazing case, however, was not mean. It was incredibly violent. While the girls were maligned by the media and portrayed as snobby (see the photos of one of them carrying her Louis Vuittan purse to court), they were not so much taken to task for their specific, violent behavior, but they were lumped together in this cultural story about girls being mean. And the media held them up as a perfect example.

This is playing out again now in the case of the videotaped and YouTube-posted beating of a cheerleader by other girls (and two guys -- again see the story I posted on the first day of this blog). And I see shades of it in the Megan Meier case. This time the mean girl is Lori Drew (and by extension, her daughter and her daughter's girlfriend), the mother who sent anonymous messages as Josh, apparently hoping to commit some kind of weird revenge on Megan for a falling out she'd had with her daughter. Before the indictment, the second-day stories like this one were fairly common:

A Hoax Turned Fatal Draws Anger but No Charges

The quotes from the sources here say Drew's behavior was "rude" and "immature" and that she was "messing with" Megan. Later on, Drew reportedly said that she felt less guilty since the girl had tried to commit suicide previously. Certainly, now that the indictment has come through (and as Vickery's paper reported, intense outcry about the case has reverberated through the blogosphere and elsewhere), Drew has become the ultimate mean girl: Lady MacBeth. Before she can brought to trial, we've already categorized her (and her co-conspirators, which it has been suggested, are teen girls).

Conversely, Megan is painted as a weak, helpless victim (which may be true, though the media reports certainly aren't objective in describing her as such). She was "teased about her weight" and switched to a new school and lost the weight. She'd been on antidepressants and had attempted suicide before, according to most stories. She had ADD, according to others. She was sensitive and seemingly very gullible, sweet, and vulnerable. That these descriptions are included in the news stories -- especially in contrast with the descriptions of Lori Drew and what she did -- is significant. Simply describing the victim and the perpetrator in these very gendered, subjective ways -- choosing to tell their stories with these words or quoting only people who use these words -- frames the story in a way that takes away from the truly complicated nature of all of it. It makes it so simple for a reader to see the inherent drama in this narrative. It also reinforces the mean girl bully and the girl-as-helpless victim mentality in every way. And we see it played out both overtly and subtly in every news story we read or hear about this case.

I won't weigh on whether she should or shouldn't be charged. Obviously, this is an incredibly sad, tragic case, and the authorities-that-be did indict ultimately indict Drew so there must be strong legal reason to believe there's a case here. I just would like people to pay close attention to how the case is reinforcing gender stereotypes in a way that is in fact, harmful to girls and women, and that makes it impossible to get to the truth of the matter without falling back on the stereotypes.

And sadly -- as evidenced in Glenbrook North, the YouTube cheerleader beating, and now, Megan Meier -- I'm sure this cycle of framing stories will continue to the detriment of us all.

Entering the Girl Wide Web

I'm just going to begin the first several entries of this blog with some book recommendations. The first is a book titled Girl Wide Web: Girls, the Internet and the Negotiation of Identity (edited by Sharon Mazzarella, who is a girls studies scholar and professor at Clemson University), which was released on Peter Lang Publishing in 2005. Granted, it feels a little self-serving to start off by promoting a book in which I've written a chapter (of course, this is from a person who started a blog, so I clearly must have a self-promotion gene), but this really is a fantastic book, and it isn't so filled with academic jargon that I wouldn't recommend it to a parent.

The book explores a pretty wide range of topics regarding girls and new media (as the title suggests), from how girls use the gURL.com site (which is owned by iVillage) to discuss sexuality, to online fan communities of Chad Michael Murray (the blonde guy from "One Tree Hill"), to understanding the "Constant Contact Generation" and how the Internet can in fact, bring daughters closer to their families.

See? It's not all bad news.

In fact, the book is interesting in that it looks at how girls use the Internet in constructive ways to articulate identity and negotiate gender norms. However, another theme running through most of the chapters is how girls do this while still existing in a world that let's face it, is full of sexist stereotypes that are frankly impossible to avoid. (For example, in the gURL.com chapter, the authors note that even though it's good that the girls feel empowered to discuss issues of sexuality that they might be embarrassed to broach in real life, they also tend to use the language that you would hear in pornography and think very little about their own sexual pleasure.)

As you'll see, this "good news, bad news" theme runs through a lot of the research I'll be talking about in the blog. One of the goals of getting this work out there in the public eye should be to get rid of that "bad news" -- from stereotypical portrayals of girls as victims or vixens (borrowing from a Girl Wide Web chapter title) or uber-bullies, to sexist treatment of girls, to girls constructing and identifying themselves in harmful ways. I really do believe that getting the type of research that is found in Girl Wide Web out to the public can help reach this seemingly lofty goal.

Why start a blog about girls and media?

It seems that every time I open a newspaper, I read a story about adolescent girls. The New York Times seems to have an entire beat devoted to the goings on of (mostly Caucasian, mostly middle to upper class) girls and how they are using (or being used by?) media. Lest you think I exaggerate, here are only a few of the more notable ones, including a cover piece on today's Sunday Magazine:

Hurt Girls: The Uneven Playing Field by Michael Sokolove

The Growing Wave of Teenage Self Injury by Jane Brody (the examples are primarily girls despite the headline)

Revealing Photo Threatens a Major Franchise by Brooks Barnes

Eight Teenagers Charged in Internet Beating Have Their Day in Court by Damien Cave (the story -- from the lead on -- does not even mention the two boys who were in court and also charged)

A Girl's Life, With Highlights by Camille Sweeney

And those are just from the past month. And I'm sure I've missed a few.

Here are a couple of older takes on girls by the Old Grey Lady:

Girls Just Want to Be Mean by Margaret Talbot

Friends, Friends With Benefits and the Benefits of the Local Mall by Benoit Denizet-Lewis

Looking at the Times' coverage of adolescent girls, we should indeed be worried. Here, we have a troubled lot of bullying, sex-crazed, obsessive (even in sports), mean girls who sometimes cut themselves.

My own research on the topic of girls and how the media represents their use of new media (from Facebook to AIM) has demonstrated a similar result that borders on moral panic. Other scholars have demonstrated the same.

It occurs to me, however, that even though there is so much incredible scholarship -- based on actual in-depth research and not just quotes from "official" sources (as a journalism professor and former journalist, I feel comfortable saying that much of the news that we read about girls is based on testimony from "experts" and quotes that are often fairly easy to get) -- that people have never heard anything about. In many ways, this is our fault as researchers. Our jobs at universities require us to publish in scholarly journals that generally are not read by non-academics and frankly, cost quite a bit. We don't get a lot of credit in our schools for distributing our research to parents, journalists, and generally concerned citizens who might really benefit from it or at least enjoy a different perspective.

That's why I'm starting this blog. I hope to focus on all the fantastic girls studies research (yes, it's a scholarly field!) that is out there and try to bring you some of the main points. Granted, I'm doing this while still trying to publish some of my own research in scholarly journals and teach classes, so please forgive me if I'm not the most prolific blogger. By starting it after my classes were finished for the schoolyear, I'm optimistically hoping I will have time to post relatively often up front.

I look forward to sharing with you and hearing from you.