Girls and Media

Cyberaggression and Gender (Part II)

2010-10-26T11:41:00.005-05:00

I've been asked how gender plays into this topic of cyberbullying in a few interviews now, and oddly enough, I've surprised myself at how little I've even considered it since the issue is so universal. It's also a complicated issue for me because I feel like even connecting cyberbullying (or other aspects of cyberaggression and cyberharassment -- which you can read about in the previous post about the panel with Sen. Amy Klobuchar last week) to gender can perpetuate some unfair and even harmful gender stereotypes.

So, first we should look at the facts. Amanda Lenhart has done an amazing job of collecting and disseminating some very interesting, telling research about young people and their use of interactive media for many years for The Pew Internet and American Life project; Amanda and I are former classmates (a year or so apart) from Georgetown University's Communication, Culture and Technology program -- she's incredibly smart and savvy -- and I think Pew Research is among the best out there, so I see this data as excellent and reliable (and you can check it out in its entirety here). Over a third of adolescents in this country have reported that they have been harassed online -- and this can include bullying, having material forwarded or posted without permission, and a number of other harassing behaviors that has to do with one or more students exerting power in a negative way over other students. According to this same, data more girls than boys report having been harassed in some way online. No data was available that broke down sexual orientation, but the patterns and anecdotal definitely show that LGBT kids (or those who are perceived to be LGBT) also are highly victimized online.

This is not terribly surprising if you consider that a lot of the online harassment is actually sexual harassment, which is largely male to female, according to both statistics and anecdotal evidence.

However, I start getting annoyed when there is an assumption that girls are bullied more because "girls are mean" and "girls are conniving" and "girls are backbiting" because "that's just how girls are with each other." My own research has shown that indeed, girls can be violent and they can partake in bullying, but to fall back on these tropes as if they're common knowledge both simplifies and trivializes a very serious problem. It shrugs it off, absolving violent or harmful behavior in some ways by chalking it up to a gender stereotype.

And boys bully boys, too. This often gets lost in the argument in cyberbullying, for some reason, even though it looks really obvious typed on the page here. Americans can get so caught up in the mainstream media's over-hyping of girl fighting -- particularly when it's "caught on tape" and uploaded to YouTube so TV stations can air footage repeatedly -- that it just stokes the fire of the mean girl stereotype. I suppose it's sensational footage -- sensational storytelling -- because of both the abhorrent nature of the story ("girls are supposed to be nice and well-bred" -- an old-school stereotype but it still holds more true than people think) and the icky sexualization part of it ("girl on girl action" -- like porn). At least that's my take on why these stories always seem to get covered instead of the stories about boys who upload their fights and bullying incidents to YouTube.

That's my take. My personal solution is pretty simple. We need to pay more attention to teaching young people media literacy and new media literacy pretty early on. Explain that when you post something on Facebook meant to harm somebody else that the effect is immediate and incredibly broad, and it can easily encourage kind of a "piling on" effect (consider the "Like" button). We should teach them to stop this kind of behavior. You can even report it to Facebook and the bully will be threatened with losing their account for life -- which really is a pretty serious punishment. More importantly, I'd love to see more discussions about good ol' fashioned civility. We live in loud angry times, and the computer screen makes it so easy to just get online and be as loud and angry as you want in writing without thinking much about the people who you affect on the other side of the computer screen. I actually have a few sentences in every one of my college syllabi about civility and discuss what it means to share within a civil classroom or online forum, and I think that this small acknowledgment -- this setting of ground rules -- goes a long way.

Cyberaggression Panel with Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Part I)

2010-10-26T11:39:00.004-05:00

OK, part of this post is going to be a re-hash from my other blog about New Media and Youth, and part of it is going to address what gender has to do with cyberbullying and "cyberaggression" in general. Here's Part I, which is a reprint:

I had the distinct honor of being asked to serve as a panelist for an event sponsored and moderated by Minnesota's own Senator Amy Klobuchar (editorial note: I've always been a fan, and now that I've met her in person, I'm an even bigger fan) last week at Augsburg College. The local media covered it fairly nicely, and it was an amazing opportunity for me to meet some people who have a true passion for battling cyberaggression (which covers a lot, by the way -- online spying and surveillance, cyberbullying, cyberharassment, misrepresentation online, etc.). In addition to the Senator, the panel included Nikki Jackson Colaco, Public Policy Manager of Facebook;
Detective Brian Hill, computer forensics investigator with the Anoka County Sheriff’s Office;and Lynn Miland, of Northfield, the parent of a child who was bullied and now a parent advocate with the National Center for Bullying Prevention, which is affiliated with Minnesota-based PACER Center, a national center that champions children with disabilities. (Lynn's story about her daughter was particularly touching and troubling, and I was really happy she was able to do the panel and tell her story.)

The experience was mostly good. Mostly. Maybe I'm being hypersensitive as a journalism professor (specifically one who just taught a lesson in good, ethical headline-writing in class this morning), but The Star-Tribune literally seized upon one fragment of one of my sentences about defriending and blocking falling under the category of cyberbullying -- I assume because they found it to be ridiculous, and I agree it sounds ridiculous without the context of the rest of the remarks. The headline and story ran like this:

'Defriending' latest form of adolescent cyberbullying

Anyway, obviously, there's more to it. :-)

Here are a few of the other stories about the panel:

Q&A With Parents and Experts About Cyberbullying from Fox9-Twin Cities

Cyberbullying Highlighted at Augsburg Event from KARE11

and

Klobuchar, panel address changing face of harassment online from The Minnesota Daily

And if you're interested, here are my basic remarks. I went a little bit off the cuff and edited out a few things that had already been said before it was my turn to talk, but this is the gist.

Notes for Cyberbully Panel with Sen. Klobuchar

In a national survey conducted with about 3000 teens over a three-year time period, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 93 percent of adolescents age 12-17 surveyed go online, and 63 percent of those go online at least once daily – most of them from home, though a large number are also able to access the internet from their mobile phone, and at school or a library.

32 percent of adolescents report that they have been the victim of online harassment – from having an embarrassing photo posted of them on a social networking site without their consent, forwarding an email or text or instant message without their consent, or had a rumor spread about them online. In my own research, young teens reported instances of just being shut out completely by their peers – from being de-friended on a massive scale on Facebook to being deleted from a friend list on Instant Messaging, which is almost as devastating for many of them.

So, over a third of our adolescents have reported behavior like this, which is a huge number, but let’s face it. Even 1 percent is too high a number of kids reporting being victimized by bullies online. Although we hear about some very extreme instances of cyber-aggression from the mass media, it must be noted that less extreme instances happen all the time to all kinds of different kids and young adults, and we need to pay attention.

You sometimes hear people say, “People have been bullied since the beginning of time,” and that’s true. However, this type of bullying is different from the type of bullying that takes place on the schoolyard because when you go home at the end of the day and retreat to your room – a zone that is supposedly safe – the bullying continues. There is little escape.

Social networking sites make it even more difficult for victims because they make it so easy for the bullies to instantly post something mean or embarrassing about them to hundreds and potentially thousands of peers. The impact is immediate because the “attack” can be accomplished at the click of a mouse. There is little defense against this type of practice. Unlike when your parent teaches you to fight for yourself on the playground, if you stick up for yourself online, you risk even more ridicule and aggression.

Research shows that people often say things online that they would not have said in person, and the computer screen can have a de-humanizing, de-sensitizing effect on behavior. This is one factor that drives adolescents who might otherwise not engage in bullying or harassment.
I think we all have to agree, too, that to share a bully’s post or comment on it truly makes you complicit in the bullying process. A lot of people don’t think about it that way, but social networks allow for a real piling on effect that even previous types of cyberaggression did not.

What can be done? First of all, discussions like this one go a long way in educating the public about the problem and moving us beyond the sensational media stories to actually thinking about what we can do about the problem. We need to acknowledge as a culture, that cyberbullying is prevalent and a serious issue that has to be addressed.

There is a true lack of new media literacy among a lot of adults that makes this a tough issue to tackle because they literally have no understanding of how online technology works in the first place. That’s a real problem. More adults, especially parents and teachers but also people with no connections to young people, need to become educated on how this works – open a Facebook account yourself and use it. Get acquainted with the technology so you understand how it works and what can be done using it, and then you’ll better understand the issues and what’s at stake here (legally, culturally, and so on).

The other really important part of the equation is that parents and educators need to agree that we should be teaching our kids civility – both online and offline – at a very young age. We need to teach them the consequences of online bullying – tell them stories about real-life instances of cyber-aggression and how it truly affected a person’s life.

Discussion of cyberbullies on TPT "Almanac" last night, KSTP appearance

2010-10-16T15:29:00.004-05:00

I apologize for the lack of real blog posts, but as you can see, I've been busy doing media appearances. I thought we did have an interesting discussion about social media and cyberbullying last night on the "Media Panel" segment of "Almanac," which airs on TPT, the Twin Cities PBS affiliate. Thought I'd share.

Here's a link (click on "Media Panel" when you get there):

"Almanac" -- October 15, 2010

I was also interviewed for the KSTP evening news by Collen Mahony the other night on the topic of law enforcement officials using social networks and mobile communication technologies to do research on crimes about minors. (It was part of one of the saddest stories I've ever heard, to be honest.) Here's that segment:

"Murder-Suicide Suspected in Deaths of Lakeland Teens"

Cyberbullying in the Age of Social Media: My Take

2010-10-12T22:23:00.000-05:00

In case you were wondering about my take on cyberbullying, which has been in the news a lot lately (and probably should have been in the news long ago), here it is, in media-packaged form from the very good people at University of Minnesota News Services:

Cyberbullying has many facets, U of M expert says

The start of the new school year this fall has brought with it a national focus on and concern with cyberbullying. What is this form of bullying and how can it be addressed? A University of Minnesota expert who can comment on the current cyberbullying crisis is:

Shayla Thiel-Stern, assistant professor, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, College of Liberal Arts

Thiel-Stern says the issue of cyberbullying is far too complicated to blame on only one factor. “There is not just one root to this problem,” she says. “However, we can have a productive conversation about cyberbullying if we acknowledge the many facets of the issue.”

To see a video of Thiel-Stern discussing the topic of cyberbullying and what can be done to curtail it, visit http://mediamill.cla.umn.edu/mediamill/display/83724.

She says cyberbullying differs from traditional notions of bullying. “Some people note that bullying has always been around and that the current crisis is overblown,” Thiel-Stern says. “Children, teenagers and, yes, even adults, bully and have been bullied throughout human history, but it used to be that these instances were confined to a small space in ones life. You could usually escape a bully by going home at the end of the day, for example. The Internet makes this impossible.”

In addition, social media further complicates cyberbullying. “It is now so easy to ‘share’ media with the world that can negatively affect another person – whether it’s a complaint about another individual written as a Facebook status update, an out-of-context online conversation that someone has cut and paste or an embarrassing photo or video sent out to everyone on a friend list,” she says.

“Sadly, the victim has little recourse in this process. Once something about them is posted, it's out there. It is difficult for him or her to remove or refute the post before it continues to be shared.”

Thiel-Stern’s research interests focus on the intersections of new media, youth and gender as well as critical and cultural aspects of online journalism. Her first book, “Instant Identity: Adolescent Girls and the World of Instant Messaging,” was published by Peter Lang Publishing in March 2007.

To interview Thiel-Stern, contact Jeff Falk, University News Service, jfalk@umn.edu or (612) 626-1720.

Oh no! I forgot to post this feature on Rachel Simmons!

2010-09-02T12:49:00.002-05:00

For whatever reason, I thought I posted and commented on this last month after it ran. Oops! Apparently my brain is on summer vacation mode. Better late than never, right? If you haven't heard of Rachel Simmons, you have probably heard of her book, "Odd Girl Out," which was one of the better takes on girls and bullying in a time period where a lot was published on the phenomenon of the "mean girl." I'm really anxious to read her upcoming book on girls' seemingly inherent (and contradictory?) need to be nice and good (this phenomenon is well-documented in the Brown and Gilligan's "classic," Meeting at the Crossroads: Women's Psychology and Girls Development, and in Finders' Just Girls, but it will be nice to have an updated take because obviously, the culture of "nice" is still alive and well and complicated as ever among tween and teen girls).

The New York Times a few weeks ago ran this great feature on Simmons' Girls Leadership Institute, which is kind of like a summer camp to help girls become more self-confident and insightful about all the garbage that surrounds them. What a totally cool idea, and how awesome that Simmons has used her resources to come up with this. Good stuff. Makes me feel a little bad about myself for just doing research on and writing about girls (oh no! I need to go to the summer camp! ;-)):

Girls, Uninterrupted by Jan Hoffman

Three cheers for Simmons and the great girls profiled in this piece.

Miley, We Hardly Knew Ye (a.k.a. Who'da Thunk Girls Had Any Critical Bones in Their Bodies?)

2010-07-11T20:27:00.003-05:00

As I pointed out a couple of years ago in one of my earliest blog posts, The New York Times has a particular fixation with stories about tween and teen girls, particularly their media preferences, and you can see this by the fact that I have yet another Times piece to point out.* Today's is a front-page Sunday Styles story about Miley Cyrus, known to many as Hannah Montana, a 17-year-old pop singer/actress who apparently is no longer worshiped by many of her once loyal tween and younger female fans because of her recent bouts of sexiness and strippery-ness (lap dancing, pole dancing, etc., etc.). The gist of the piece is she's sold fewer records in the young girl demographic and while several of the girls interviewed for the piece are put off by the new Miley, their moms are kind of like, "Giver her a break. She's almost 18." I loved the tone of the piece in general -- and again, actually interviewing her fans and former fans -- partly because of the journalist's assumption that the girls would not be so shocked or critical of this change in their idol. I was trying to remember my teen idols from fourth and fifth grade and thinking about whether this was indeed a new phenomenon, and immediately, Michael Jackson came to mind (I was also into Prince and Madonna, who were pretty much the opposite of a corporate image of wholesomeness). As soon as he started getting creepily weird -- which I think happened sometime during the reign of "Thriller" -- the posters came off my wall. Bottom line: Girls actually are critical consumers when given the education and opportunity. Don't sell them short.

And here's the story. I'd be interested if your take was the same as mine:

Fans of Miley Cyrus Question Her New Path

*I imagine that many of the Times' section editors and reporters probably have teen and tween girls as daughters or nieces and find their tastes and insights as fascinating as I do. That, or maybe they think their readers are primarily alarmed parents of teen and tween girls and this is a demographic consideration. Could be both.

Cyberbullying Piece in the New York Times

2010-07-08T14:53:00.000-05:00

The New York Times ran quite a good piece on cyberbullying a few weeks ago now that I've been intended to re-post here; since it ran on a Monday, you might have missed it, but it was one of those front page into a double-page spread types of stories, so it was lengthy:

How Should Schools Handle Cyberbullying

One particular strength of the reporting, in my opinion, was the fact that they interviewed a number of students for the article. It's so rare that you get actual kids' voices in pieces like this one. In fact, my only issue with the article -- which I have to admit is something that I look for and so it probably bothers me more than the average person -- is the way bullying is conflated with sexual harassment, which is problematic. While calling sexual harassment of young girls bullying might get the problem the attention it deserves because culturally, it's more acceptable, it ignores what sexual harassment really is and doesn't address that further education is needed at a very early age in order to combat it.

'Your Hair is Probably Ugly' and Other Lessons Learned from 'Seventeen'

2010-06-22T14:16:00.005-05:00

Thanks, Jen Keavy, for alerting me to this. I feel like public radio is the soundtrack to most of my days so I'm surprised I missed it, but this is a fun critical piece from "All Things Considered" on what happened when a female teenaged blogger (with no blog entries that I could find other than her Seventeen project, but that's OK -- I certainly can't be one to criticize, given that I've let a full year lapse between my own blog entries) decided to literally take all the advice Seventeen magazine could dole out for her for 30 days:

Living by Seventeen Magazine's Rules

However, I strongly urge you to check out Jamie Keiles' take on her own research in blog form right here: http://www.theseventeenmagazineproject.com/

(The photo on the left is courtesy of Jamie Keiles and stolen brazenly from her website.)

Her actual project is kind of a work of genius (hey, she's going to the U. of Chicago in the fall, which also says a little something about her intellect) -- much more than the NPR segment could convey. You can tell she's from the Jezebel generation in both her writing and visual style, and even though that isn't always a good thing in my book, I admit to getting pretty sucked into Keiles' project. Even in a completely non-academic egghead kind of way.

Orenstein asks: 'Do Gyrating Girls Becoming Sexting Young Women?'

2010-06-14T16:04:00.001-05:00

(Photo by Rania Matar, NY Times)

Actually, her New York Times Sunday Magazine online blurb editor asks that question, if you want to get picky, but I wanted to call some attention to Peggy Orenstein's piece titled "Girls Play Sexy" in the most recent magazine because while I am generally a very, very big fan of Orenstein's research and writing, this particular piece bugged me for some reason, and I'm still trying to put my finger on it. (Maybe it's just the blurb. I hate these cause-effect simplifications.)

First of all, while she's right to point out the issue of inevitable moral panic that follows every instance of a young women or girl acting in a sexy way (that youtube video of little girls dancing to "Single Ladies" is her main example, but she also includes the Miley-Cyrus-public-lap-dance example, and I'm afraid that Miley is now more like a young woman, and a very wealthy, seemingly together one at that), I think we do still have reason to be troubled by this trend. It's counterproductive to just shrug off the moral outrage because that doesn't really get to the problem at hand, in my opinion, it lets the media off the hook. (In full disclosure, I'm working on a book about news media-generated gendered moral panics about adolescent girls in "public recreational space" over the past 100 years, so I do know where she's coming from with this.)

So I guess it is the causal suggestion that is bugging me more. I personally find it hard to believe that anyone could make any real causal connection between a little girl dressing up in a halter top and gyrating Beyonce-style and a tween sending a naked photo of herself to her boyfriend, and I'm bothered this question is even raised, but the psychology professor interviewed is not saying that. He says (in a paraphrased quote) that this display and promotion of SEXINESS has nothing to do with healthy sexuality. Right on. I can't imagine anybody would argue that it would. But where are they getting the ideas in the first place? From the mass media's prevalent representations of girls and young women -- from the dolls she talks about earlier to everything else -- that fits very specifically into a patriarchal understanding of what it means to be feminine, and even more specifically, a feminine sexual being. This means that girls and women are objects of desire, to be watched and admired and possessed, and it's nothing new, but in this era where you can post and share anything from YouTube via Twitter, Facebook, or yes, even antiquated ol' email with as many people as you like, these patriarchal understandings are easily shared on a massive level, instantaneously.

Now, I'd bet that everyone sending the link of the girls dancing to Orenstein was sending it because they assumed she would be an appalled feminist scholar (that's usually the case when my friends send me anything related to girls and the Internet), and I think they were mostly right, though I like that she treats the issue with thoughtfulness and relates that it's more complicated than we might think. However, you cannot guarantee that's going to be the audience's reading of the video (classic encoding and decoding here -- thanks, Stuart Hall). Just as the mantra, "Well, girls ARE mean" seems to have become a totally acceptable statement in our culture, I worry that "Well, girls ARE sexy" or "Girls want to be sexy" will become a totally acceptable statement as well before long. OK, maybe not acceptable, but accepted. Post-structuralist theorist Louis Althusser would characterize this as a classic example of interpellation. The girls have seen plenty of examples of sexiness being enacted throughout their experiences with media and their lived daily (primarily mediated) experiences with peers, society accepts that this happens, the mass and interactive media provide a never-ending feedback loop, and poof. Through interpellation, it's so. Before long, sexuality and sexiness are in fact, mistakenly conflated, as the article suggests they might be.

Furthermore, why do we have to lump all things related to femininity and the Internet together somehow, as if they are actually related? I'd be more inclined to argue against technopanic than gendered moral panic in that case. You see this tendency repeatedly in mass media reporting. Even if the story is about a young girl who met a sexual predator while using MySpace, the lede often will extrapolate, bringing in "social networking," or "the Internet" -- because it's all the same big evil thing. Of course, we should be talking about teenage girls and sexting with mobile devices in the same breath that we use to discuss how a young girl's parent or dance instructor uploaded a video of them dancing in a non-little-girl-ish way to YouTube that was subsequently spread all over the Internet.

Indeed, space constraints never allow reporters or columnists to tell the most complete, most complicated stories (at least as complete and complicated as we long-winded academics wnat to see), and I suppose that is why blogs like this one exist.

Twitter and Girls Studies Scholars

2010-06-02T21:55:00.002-05:00

After several years of being what I think could safely be called a freakishly prolific Facebook user, I decided to just quit cold turkey and deactivated my account in April. I admit that I was appalled at all the time I was spending online reading about other people's lives and all the energy I was putting in to writing clever status updates, but I was also more than a little freaked out after hearing a lecture from an FBI agent who specialized in "forensics in digital worlds." Even with your privacy settings jacked, your photos and information on Facebook are still pretty far from private, according to her. In any case, I've been joking that I have been using Twitter as kind of a methadone to Facebook -- a nice step-down, if you will. I'm on it far less and reading tweets takes a lot less energy.

I tend to follow a lot of journalists -- primarily those working in interactive media -- and scholars who study interactive media. I know most of them personally. Online journalism is both a former professional career for me and a research and teaching interest for me. Probably 80 percent of the tweets that I read in a given day have to do with what is happening in the online media industry as it's seen by these scholars and professionals. It's fun, and I feel fairly informed about the issues and scholarship in this arena as a result, but I do feel like we're all just talking at each other to a certain extent and repeating one another to a large extent (though often adding our own snarky commentary to the repeating).

In reading through so many of these tweets, I got to thinking: I wonder if there is a different "feel" within the Twittersphere when you're following scholars and professionals working with girls and media. It's generally a group of feminists, who are interested in equality and frank discussion, and I imagine that all of our Twitter contributions would make my own experience using Twitter a fairly different one.

So, I realized, why not start following a few girls' studies scholars on Twitter?

I searched for all the usual suspects' names -- there are dozens of professors who I thought of off the top of my head -- and I came up with nothing. Nothing! So disappointing!

First, please let me know who I'm missing. Are you on Twitter, updating the world on the latest in girls and media in 140 characters or less? Drop a line, OK? (Or follow me: @chezla).

Second, I have decided that I really need to be more committed to advancing our scholarship to whomever will read it -- on Twitter, in blogs, in journals, and hopefully, in an upcoming book.

I guess that's it. It might translate into more traditional blog posts, or it might not. Blogging is so 2004, isn't it? (At least I think that is what the new media journalists and scholars I follow on Twitter would tell you.) Stay tuned.

It's been WAY too long

2010-02-09T17:11:00.004-06:00

I hope that by writing this post I am signaling a return to publishing this blog on Girls and Media. It doesn't always work out that way, but I like to hope that if I'm making some kind of public "announcement" (to all three of my faithful readers! ;-)) that I actually will stick to it. So much work in the realm of girls and media has been done over the past year, and yet, there's so much disturbing fodder to write about. And speaking to that thought, here's a new headline from this morning that you can ponder:

Miley Cyrus' little sister the new face of kiddie 'lingerie' line

More on that later. Actually, I'm booked to appear on Twin Cities Live tomorrow to talk about that topic as it relates to parenting.

And I feel slightly -- but only slightly -- more equipped to speak of parenting because six months ago, I became a parent myself. I had a wonderful baby girl ... who will never be allowed to own a Bratz doll, wear inflatable high heels for babies, or watch and admire "The Girls Next Door." And for goodness' sake, NO LINGERIE. This isn't so much about being a feminist girls studies scholar as being a parent. There you go.

Looking forward to more discussions about girls and media in the coming months.

An important (and troubling) story about girls in today's paper

2009-01-14T13:48:00.005-06:00

I am please that my first post of 2009 is to alert you to this piece the New York Times ran today -- finally, a great story about girls that I hope inspires academics and activists alike.

Afghan Girls, Scarred by Acid, Defy Terror and Return to School

Happy new year, all. I will try to be better about posting more regularly in the coming year (though I should note, it wasn't one of my resolutions, which for me in the past have generally been made only for breaking within 30 days).

Framing the First Daughters

2008-10-03T12:54:00.003-05:00

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!

2008-09-21T15:55:00.005-05:00

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

2008-09-10T08:59:00.003-05:00

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

2008-08-26T19:18:00.007-05:00

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

2008-08-19T18:08:00.002-05:00

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

2008-08-04T12:44:00.003-05:00

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

2008-08-01T10:23:00.002-05:00

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

2008-07-31T22:16:00.001-05:00

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

2008-07-12T12:25:00.004-05:00

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

2008-06-28T12:06:00.003-05:00

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

2008-06-17T10:51:00.005-05:00

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):

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

2008-06-11T10:59:00.003-05:00

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

2008-06-05T09:40:00.003-05:00

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??!

2008-06-02T11:28:00.005-05:00

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!)

2008-05-28T11:47:00.001-05:00

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

2008-05-21T11:56:00.000-05:00

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

2008-05-16T09:55:00.000-05:00

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

2008-05-14T18:56:00.000-05:00

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?

2008-05-11T18:19:00.000-05:00

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.