Teenage Girls, the Media and Self-Image
The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
-Virginia Woolf
Youth is beauty, money is beauty, hell, beauty is beauty sometimes. It's the luck of the draw, it's the natural law; it's a joke, it's a crime.
-Ani Difranco
The teen magazines began appearing in the fifth grade. They seemed to show up overnight, out of nowhere. At lunch or between classes, groups of girls would cluster around the desk of the mature eleven-year-old who brought in the latest issue of Seventeen. Page by page, they explored the intricacies of how to unlock the secrets of boys, makeup tips to accentuate a girl's natural beauty, and quizzes to help one find her celebrity dream date. In the span of a few weeks, every girl had a subscription to her very own teen magazine; teachers were forced to establish rules limiting the times and places that such magazines could be read.
When the magazines first showed up on the scene, I was as curious as any other girl-what did these barometers of pop culture decree concerning this month's new trends? For just twenty dollars a year, we could be told how to dress and act. It was as if we were suddenly given an invitation to join the mysterious world of our older peers, full of the excitement and glamour of teenage experiences. Originally, the content of these magazines had no direct bearing on our lives; I spent my free time playing dolls or G.I. Joe with my little brother. The boys still believed we were infected with a rare strain of cooties; they had a way to go before maturing into the young men the magazines displayed, the objects of affection who would one day take us to the movies in convertibles or st...
... middle of paper ...
...: NYU P, 1996.
Early, Gerald. "Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant." Encounters: Essays for Exploration and Inquiry. Ed. Pat C. Hoy II and Robert DiYanni. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2000. 224-38.
Geller, Jaclyn. "The Celebrity Bride as Cultural Icon."Encounters: Essays for Exploration and Inquiry. Ed. Pat C. Hoy II and Robert DiYanni. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2000. 277-281.
Griffiths, Vivienne. Adolescent Girls and Their Friends: A Feminist Ethnography. Aldershot: Avebury, 1995.
LeCroy, Craig Winston and Janice Daley. Empowering Adolescent Girls: Examining the Present and Building Skills for the Future with the Go Grrrls Program. New York: Norton, 2001.
Mann, Judy. The Difference: Growing Up Female in America. New York: Warner, 1994.
Miss America Organization, The. The Miss America Organization. 27 Oct. 2001. <http://www.missamerica.org>.
In the 1960s, Girls Inc. focused on homemaking skills, with the hopes of turning the girls into exceptional young ladies. Then in the 1970’s, a new executive director came on board and took a critical look at the organization’s mission of educating girls into...
Almost every generation criticizes the current adolescent generation due to the difference of historical perspectives. In response to this, I went out into the world and decided to interview someone of these older generations, Diane Partee Miller. Mrs. Miller is the age of seventy-five and is my maternal grandmother. She grew up in the small town of Evansport, which is located in the Northern part of Ohio. Mrs. Miller was an adolescent and primarily grew up in throughout the prime years of the 1950s. Differences between these generations is evident in classes taken in high school, social acceptance of dress, romantic relationships, and technology.
...have been less destructive if she did, Tom Robinson would not be dead, Helen would not be scared and working all the time, Tom’s kids and friends would not be so sad, Jem, Scout and Atticus would not feel like they lost something important and Bob Ewell might have gone to jail and serve time for torturing his children. Also, Mayella showed that she was terrified when she stopped answering questions and started stuttering because she was afraid she would messed up and ruin everything for her father!!!!!!!!!! If Mayella talked with more confidence, people would not think she was lying, but she stopped answering and started stuttering which was destructive to herself, now people are sure she was lying and that Bob is the real bad guy. Everything was going well for them until then. Mayella’s fear of her father encouraged her to do horrible things and make bad mistakes.
“She represents the type of womanhood America needs, strong, red-blooded, able to shoulder the responsibilities of homemaking and motherhood. It is in her type that the hope of the country rests” (Martin & Watson, 2004, p.3). This was Samuel Gompers sharing his thoughts about the very first “Miss America”, Margaret Gorman. The Miss America Pageant was established in the most fitting of all decades: the 1920s. During a time when women were just starting to experience newfound independence and rights, the Miss America Pageant strengthened the idea that women had more freedom to express themselves. The competition began as a simple tourist attraction, but the fact that the Miss America Pageant survived throughout the decades exemplifies that the competition was so much more.
Pause, reflect, and the reader may see at once the opposing yet relative perceptions made between life, love, marriage and death in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. In this novel, Woolf seems to capture perfectly the very essence of life, while conveying life’s significance as communicated to the reader in light tones of consciousness arranged with the play of visual imagery. That is, each character in the novel plays an intrinsic role in that the individuality of other characters can be seen only through the former’s psyche. Moreover, every aspect of this novel plays a significant role in its creation. For instance; the saturation of the present by the past, the atmospheres conjoining personalities and separating them, and the moments when things come together and fall apart. This paper will explore such aspects of To the Lighthouse while incorporating the notion that the world Woolf creates in this novel is one that combines finite and infinite truth. A created world that recognizes both limitation and isolation and how these themes are interrelated in and throughout the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay. Conceptually, Woolf combines all of the aforementioned realities of life into the presentation of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, a married couple that seem to stand for both accurate and visionary approaches to the reality of life. It is important, then, to consider that To the Lighthouse is not only representational of life, but that it also catches life. It is thus the goal of this paper to readily show why this is so.
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wallpaper." Images of Woman in American Popular Culture. Ed. Angela G. Dorenkamp, et al. Port Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1995. 78-89.
In this paper I will talk about some information that I have obtained from reading Mary Piphers, Reviving Ophelia, Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls and give my view on some of her main points and arguments. I also will discuss why I feel Mary Pipher’s views on the toxic influence of media are accurate, and that it does affect adolescent girls. This paper will also point out the importance of Mary Pipher’s studies on the problems that today’s female teens are facing and why I feel they are important and cannot be ignored.
Woolf’s pathos to begin the story paints a picture in readers minds of what the
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf is a story that centers around the the value of memory to self. The story does this by centering around the characters that Woolf writes about, and their thoughts pertaining to their memories of one another. Woolf’s writing in To the Lighthouse is rich in her characters, Mrs. and Mr. Ramsay, their kids, and their friends’ thoughts and feelings towards everything they are going through, and more importantly, their thoughts and memories of one another. The reader learns about the characters’ through the complex thoughts Woolf’s characters’ have.
To the Lighthouse is a book preoccupied by death, and gender is formulated by the difference in response to its threat. Women pursue immortality through creation of illusion and men through pursuance of facts. The novel questions the distinction between the sexes that became rigidified into pre-WWI gender roles which are exemplified in the institution of marriage. A younger generation fights against the rigidity of gender boundaries, Lily being the chief representative of this rebellion. She must learn to integrate her masculine and feminine qualities into a balanced whole so that she will be a creator of illusion and a pursuer of facts. Lily’s painting is her creative representation of the underlying truth of gendered life and will achieve her immortality.
The first studies relating to gender portrayal in the media developed in the 1950s with the introduction of Second Wave Feminism (Boyle, 2005). Mass media was a main concern for Second Wave feminists due to its oppressive illustrations of women in different genres. The subject of gender misrepresentations is still relevant in contemporary media studies. In 2011, a documentary dealing with the stereotypical r...
On a daily basis we are subjected to a society that continuously uses stratification to divide members of the population into subgroups, such as; ‘gender, race, ethnicity, class, age, disability, sexuality and location, and in which the privileges, disadvantages and exclusions associated with such categories are unevenly distributed.’ Due to this, we are forced to question if gender stereotypes in the media have a negative impact in society.
In modern fiction today, one of the modern themes that can be seen throughout these works is the Das Unheimliche or “The Uncanny” due to the influence of Sigmund Freud during this era and also due to the life style of post war era as well as authors wanting the fiction to be relatable to the real world today. First I would like to provide some historical background for Woolf’s novel “To the Lighthouse.” This background information will be about the time when Virginia Woolf was livi...
An article by Christina N Baker, Images of Women’s Sexuality in Advertisements: A content Analysis of Black And White Oriented Women’s and Men’s Magazine emphasizes on how women’s are portrayed in media such as advertisements and Magazine. The author analyzes how media has a huge impact in our society today; as a result, it has an influence on race and gender role between men and women.
Adolescents is a time of significant life transitions in which young adults learn to cope with changes that are brought about by physical and emotional maturation (Sands and Howard-Hamilton, 1994). During this time girls begin to become more aware of themselves as females, and learn to identify society’s signals to conform appropriately to their gender (Sands and Howard-Hamilton, 1994). The high school girls that are present in this writers program are starting to understand that they can use their bodies to get attention from boys therefore making them value their individual beauty. Some girls have identified that the “boys” that they like do not value them for their brains, but for their beauty and therefore this is where high school becomes a popularity contest, and academically their grades begin to suffer.