The Media Education Foundation is one of my favorite organizations: they produce and distribute “documentary films and other educational resources to inspire critical reflection on the social, political, and cultural impact of American mass media.”
Generation M, a documentary about misogyny in media and culture, touches a lot of my film’s themes.
Check out the film’s trailer on the official Generation M page at MEF. Highly highly recommended.
Yesterday, the blog Jezebel discussed a recent segment that ran on ABC’s Good Morning America:
Good Morning America recreated the 1940s experiment in which 63% of African-American children given identical white and black dolls said they’d rather play with the white doll and 44% identified more with the white doll.
The original Jezebel post and the GMA video can be found here.
That made me remember a video that I had watched over a year ago, directed by a young African American girl, who ran the very same experiment and also filmed lots of interviews of fellow African American girls, discussing self image, body image, and discrimination. It was far, far more powerful and emotional than the GMA video. I highly recommmend watching it:
Girls today are salon vets before they enter elementary school. Forget having mom trim your bangs, fourth graders are in the market for lush $50 haircuts; by the time they hit high school, $150 highlights are standard. Five-year-olds have spa days and pedicure parties. And instead of shaving their legs the old-fashioned way—with a 99-cent drugstore razor—teens get laser hair removal, the most common cosmetic procedure of that age group. If these trends continue, by the time your tween hits the Botox years, she’ll have spent thousands on the beauty treatments once reserved for the “Beverly Hills, 90210″ set, not junior highs in Madison, Wis.
Reared on reality TV and celebrity makeovers, girls as young as Marleigh are using beauty products earlier, spending more and still feeling worse about themselves. Four years ago, a survey by the NPD Group showed that, on average, women began using beauty products at 17. Today, the average is 13—and that’s got to be an overstatement. According to market-research firm Experian, 43 percent of 6- to 9-year-olds are already using lipstick or lip gloss; 38 percent use hairstyling products; and 12 percent use other cosmetics. And the level of interest is making the girls of “Toddlers & Tiaras” look ordinary. “My daughter is 8, and she’s like, so into this stuff it’s unbelievable,” says Anna Solomon, a Brooklyn social worker. “From the clothes to the hair to the nails, school is like No. 10 on the list of priorities.“
(Emphasis mine.)
The article continues,
Why are this generation’s standards different? To start, this is a group that’s grown up on pop culture that screams, again and again, that everything, everything, is a candidate for upgrading. These girls are maturing in an age when older women are taking ever more extreme measures, from Botox to liposuction, to stay sexually competitive. They’ve watched bodies transformed on “Extreme Makeover”; faces taken apart and pieced back together on “I Want a Famous Face.” They compare themselves to the overly airbrushed models in celebrity and women’s magazines, and learn about makeup from the girls of “Toddlers & Tiaras,” or the show’s WEtv competitor, “Little Miss Perfect.”
Read the full article here – and check out the interactive chart about women’s beauty spending, from childhood into their 60s. Disturbing stuff.
This kind of sexualization of ‘tween girls – defined as those between the ages of 8 and 12 – in pop culture and advertising is a growing problem fueled by marketers’ efforts to create cradle-to-grave consumers, a University of Iowa journalism professor argues in her new book.
“A lot of very sexual products are being marketed to very young kids,” said Gigi Durham, author of The Lolita Effect. “I’m criticizing the unhealthy and damaging representations of girls’ sexuality, and how the media present girls’ sexuality in a way that’s tied to their profit motives. The body ideals presented in the media are virtually impossible to attain, but girls don’t always realize that, and they’ll buy an awful lot of products to try to achieve those bodies. There’s endless consumerism built around that.”
Welcome to the new face of teen magazines. Indigo, a magazine started by a group of women in Victoria last year and headed by Barwon Heads mother Leanne Koster, emphasises real girls and their achievements, not celebrities and fashion.
The most recent issue included images of everyday girls and their stories, interviews with successful young women, pieces about the environment as well as creative activity ideas.
The philosophy behind the magazine? “When girls flick through the pages of the mag, they can see themselves,” editor Freya Holland says.
The launch of Indigo came in a year when teen mags stopped simply being hot property in schools and became the subject of intense public scrutiny.
The federal Minister for Youth, Kate Ellis, spoke out about the devastating effects of poor body image, linking the problem to the types of media girls and young women consume. Ellis announced a National Media and Industry Code of Conduct on Body Image, which demands labelling of airbrushed images in women’s magazines and the diversification of models’ size and shape.
The Media Education Foundation is one of my favorite organizations: they produce and distribute “documentary films and other educational resources to inspire critical reflection on the social, political, and cultural impact of American mass media.”
