Observations in Target: Mass Marketing and Young Females

"Mom, look! That's Rocky and CeCe, from Shake it Up! Can I pleeeeease get one of their clothes?" She stands on tiptoe to reach the higher shelf, and points to a t-shirt with an attached pinstriped vest. "I like that one!" I wonder if she notices that it's almost identical to the one CeCe is wearing in the poster above the rack of clothes.

My post- elementary school years have contained very little Disney Channel, which I consumed vigorously as a child. But after spending a week with a seven-year-old, I was fully informed on how Disney is functioning today. I know every person says this about the shows they watched when they were a kid, but I truly believe that the shows were much better then, especially for girls. Or maybe it's just that I have better media literacy now. After reading in Peggy Orenstein's Cinderella Ate My Daughter (not intended toward my demographic, but I still found it quite interesting) about the marketing system Disney uses, I've been genuinely frightened. There would be the show, and then an interview with the show's co-stars, and then a music video of their song, all within a half an hour. It's no wonder this young girl's eyes was drawn to the ad immediately.

As I stood in the pastel-hued feminine products aisle of Target, I muttered to the girl, like a batty old woman, "You don't know what you're doing! You're buying the clothes that she is wearing! You are not thinking! The advertisers have infiltrated your brain already!" Of course, within a minute, the vest-shirt combination was in her mother's cart.

A few minutes later, two girls and their mother passed by with a cart. One girl, about seven, sat in the cart's bottom, and the other, maybe ten years old, walked next to it. The younger girl was rooting through a small pile of clothes next to her crossed legs in the cart. "Sophia's shirt is an extra-large!" she said loudly, giggling. "Mommy! Why's Sophia's shirt an extra-large?" she asked, smirking at her sister. Sophia sped up walking, blushing. Sophia looked to be at a completely healthy weight, similarly in body type to both her mother and sister. What struck me, though, was how such a young girl already thought that the size "extra-large" was something to mocked, and mentioned, and giggled at. She knew that it was fodder to embarrass her older sister. I gather that looks have been a source of sister feuds for centuries, but I had a feeling the media threw something in here, too.

Disney usually plays it safe in terms of political and social correctness, so I was shocked on another Disney show, Good Luck Charlie, how often weight was mentioned. On the show, featuring a family of four children and their parents, the two sons frequently mock their dad for being overweight. When I saw this, I was completely shocked. Many TV shows have featured overweight fathers, but I've never actually see it be mentioned, as well as mocked, on a show targeted towards young children.

These experiences, although tiny in the scheme of my life, these girls's lives, and, feminism itself, gave me personal proof of the influence of the media on today's young girls. The girl who wanted the Disney shirt proves that Orenstein's claims, as well as those made my many feminist-themed mother bloggers, aren't alarmist. Sophia's little sister, as well as Sophia's own apparent humiliation, proved that the associations with weight begin at a very young age. It makes me so sad that by the age of seven, girls might already think that their appearance ties to their worth as a person. It makes me sad that people think that at all, but now it's happening even younger. This proves that we need to improve the media that children today consume.

This was reblogged on The F-Bomb.

Five Videos I Wish Every Middle School Girl Could See

When I’m trying to share feminism with my friends, dropping Manifesta on their desks or barraging their Facebook walls with links from the Ms. blog are often dead ends. I found that YouTube videos are an awesome way to disseminate this information. When I see the ideas that I subscribe to put out so clearly and grippingly, often with humor, I wish that every girl could see them. Maybe not every girl would agree, and that’s fine, but at least the opinions would be exposed to them in a palatable way. Here are my top five short videos, all with a feminist vibe, that I wish every middle school girl could see.

1. Good Girls Don’t Get Fat I think that this video would make a lot of ideas suddenly click in many young girls’s minds. They may know that they’re valued for more than their looks, but still put a ton of energy into being thinner. This video, to promote Dr. Robyn Silverman’s book of the same title, is very eye-opening.
2. The Girl Effect In a different vein than most of these videos- the issues affecting the middle class, middle school girls of today- this one is about girls around the world and how sexism, far more influential than it is in the US today, rules their lives. It’s incredible to see how much the world could improve
3. Billy Bricks: A Poem (This link is a little tough to get to- click on it, then scroll to the bottom of the page, and click the video there, with the girl’s face with her hands on her cheeks as the screenshot.) The Arts Effect NYC is an awesome theatre group that, with students writing the plays they perform, provides an extremely authentic voice to the preteen girls of today. This video shows that the encounters many girls assume must occur in their daily lives are actually sexual harassment, and not to be tolerated.
4. Why Girls Sometimes Wanna Be Boys By the same theatre company, I found this to be one of the most honest videos I’d ever seen in my life. These girls are brilliant. I think every adult who deals with girls this age- teachers, parents, coaches, everyone- should see this video.
5. Target Women: Story Time Target: Women, a former segment on the former show infoMania, just might be the funniest, feminist-est series I have ever seen. Although (unshockingly) targeted towards adult women, it truly exemplifies how much the media and advertising especially impact girls.

If you have girls this age in your life, please share these videos with them! And if you have any others, please comment!

Interview with Autumn Whitefield-Madrano of The Beheld!

The Beheld is a blog focusing on beauty from many different and thought-provoking lenses, run by Autumn Whitefield-Madrano. I find it particularly interesting as one of the few beauty blogs that explore beauty from a feminist perspective. I had the opportunity to interview Autumn about the many topics she covers on her blog.


What sparked your interest in writing about beauty?

Honestly, I don't know! I was researching a post on the history of makeup and found something in a Wikipedia entry about cosmetics history, and found what I was looking for, and when I looked at the footnote source saw that it was drawn from an article I'd written for my college magazine in 1999! So I've had this interest for a while. I think it's that I was reading lots of great feminist stuff, and was also engaging with beauty on my own terms, and I felt frustrated that there wasn't more examination of how women actually treated beauty beyond just condemning the beauty myth. Bust magazine broke some ground in that area, but they became a little too "yay roller derby and retro lingerie!!!" for my tastes. There's still very much the idea out there in the world that we're either smart OR pretty; that we're either serious women who don't care about our appearance or who do so begrudgingly, or we're big fluffballs who just wanna look purdy. And I know so few women who fit into one of those categories, and gobs of women who don't. I personally don't feel satisfied by the discourse of beauty that's out there--I still find a lot of it one-dimensional.

I guess I just really took to heart that "we write what we know." Anything truly good that I've ever written has come from a place of truth within myself. And the fact is, I think about how I look a lot. I think about how what I assign to my appearance affects how I move through the world; I think about how it shifts how I relate to others, and how they relate to me. I think intensely about a lot of appearance-related choices I make. And I used to belong to a Livejournal community in which I'd just write whatever came to my mind--it was really a journal, not a blog, so I wasn't thinking about how to make it readable to a broader audience. But when I started getting the real itch to put myself out there, I looked through my Livejournal and was surprised to see how many of the entries were tagged "beauty." Around the same time a good friend had been listening to my various thoughts on the matter, and he said, "You should either be thinking about beauty less or writing about it more." I chose the latter!



In regards to your Mirror Fast- what did you most take away from the experience? Would you do it again?


By now you've probably read my grand conclusion--if you haven't, here it is. The upshot is that I had to come to terms with how much I was using the mirror as a barometer of how I was feeling. I'm in recovery from an eating disorder, and one of the biggest issues surrounding eating disorders is a lack of awareness of how one is feeling. Food, or lack of it, or treating it inappropriately, becomes the way one deals with the slightest blip of emotion--it sublimates what you're actually feeling, so you don't really learn how to recognize and handle emotions. I'm still working on dealing with that, but I'm getting better. But when I was "mirror fasting," I realized how frequently I wanted to turn to the mirror to help me determine how I was feeling--like, I'd want to confirm that I was having a good time, or confirm that all was well, or assure myself I didn't need to be sad, which I'd determine by, say, how puffy my eyes looked that day. (Which is all in the head anyway!) And an unexpected outcome of the mirror fast was that for the entire month, I experienced hardly any eating disorder urges. I'd been doing okay at that point--not great, but pretty well, and WAY better than I was before I sought treatment. But for that entire month, it was almost like I'd never had an eating disorder--I ate normally without thinking about it. It was, quite honestly, sort of radical.

I would do it again if there were a situation that called for it. But actually, in some ways I'm still on it. My bathroom mirror is covered, and so is my gentleman friend's. I lift my mirror shroud to apply makeup, but I don't look at it at other times. I do when I'm in an office or another person's bathroom--it's reflex. But I look in the mirror WAY less than I did before. Highly recommended!


When did you begin to define yourself as a feminist? What aspects of feminism do you most identify with?

I don't remember a time when I wasn't a feminist; I was raised in feminism the way one might be raised Catholic. My mother was an active member of NOW when I was growing up, and she volunteered at the local women's resource center. This was in the Dakotas, which was hardly a hotbed of feminist activism, but that meant that people who were a part of the feminist community were tight-knit, so I was steeped in that culture. (I marched in an ERA march in 1980 dressed in all white like a miniature suffragette, and wore a pin that said "Ankle-Biting Feminist," which I still have and think is hysterical.)

But of course that meant there was rebellion. For a while when I was quite young--maybe junior high?--I declared myself basically a "notafeministbut." Even at age 12 I could see that the term brought up some negative connotations. But then I read a piece in Seventeen by Linda Ellerbee about how we shouldn't be embarrassed to use that word, and I figured if it was in Seventeen it must be cool! I haven't looked back since.

They say the personal is political, and certainly for me the whole idea of body talk and appearance has been central to being a feminist--learning to look at media messages critically has been helpful for my self-esteem, which enables me to be a better feminist. And, frankly, talking body stuff is way more interesting to me than politics. (Though, of course, even there I'm making a false division--marital rape, for example, was once considered "personal," but now we see it as political, because we've legislated consequences for it.) That said, I think it's very tempting for feminists who have reaped the benefits of feminists who came before us to ignore that sort of thing, and I really try not to. I'll never know what it's like to not be able to find birth control, or to not be able to get a credit card in my own name, or to be eyed with suspicion if I stay at a hotel by myself, or to know that if I got married my husband could rape me and the law wouldn't care. It's a luxury to be able to have my primary outlet of feminism be more philosophical than political, and I try not to forget that. But my way of supporting political women's causes is to donate money and to speak up on a personal level in conversation. Me writing an essay about reproductive rights would seem hollow compared to people who have had more intense experiences with that.

I also feel strongly about empowering women in developing nations, and support such causes financially, either through microfinance groups like the Grameen Foundation or through groups that support girls' education, like She's the First and the Vietnam Fund for Education, Music & Infrastructure. I spent time in Vietnam a few years ago and saw firsthand how essential it is to support women's work there in practical ways. Helping women in developing nations means helping communities; the two cannot be extricated from one another.


What do you think the role of feminism is in allieviating ridiculous beauty standards?


I think it's a process, and a historic one. Second-wave feminists played a crucial role in this by signaling to women that their role could be a public one that had nothing to do with their appearance, but rather their skills. We wouldn't have the beauty myth in its current form if that hadn't happened. But, of course, we DO have the beauty myth.

I see the role of feminism in alleviating harmful beauty standards as being twofold: 1) The more "real" women there are out there in the world saying to one another, "Hey, this is bullshit," the more alert and aware all of us will be. And while those women don't have to identify as feminists, without feminist discourse those non-feminists might not feel as free to challenge the beauty standard. 2) Feminism can provide an alternate script of what beauty means. I think that it's a human desire to want to beautiful ourselves; the problem is that we've created a rigid template on how we should do that. Feminism can expand that template, provide alternate modes of living and of seeing one another, and I think that's exciting.

Perceptions

I am not easily affected by other people’s opinions. Maybe I was at some point, but I rarely value my worth by how others perceive me. So I don’t understand how I can feel so awfully judged by someone else without her saying a word.

If asked if I were ever explicitly bullied, I would probably say no. But when I sat at this table among eight of my peers, all girls within a year of my age, many of whom I’ve been acquainted with for years, I positively felt like crap. One of the other girls at this table, one of my close friends, visibly hunched over as we sat down.

My friend and I are intellectual. We have truckloads of aspirations and are not afraid to share our opinions or assert ourselves. Neither of us would have a problem speaking in front of a thousand people- as long as I didn’t know these girls were there.

I can’t place what it is. They say that my voice is cute even when I’m talking about rape as a war weapon in Sudan . They fake laugh at what I say regardless of its content, because apparently that should be more of a compliment than actually responding to what I say intellectually. They think that it’s strange that I talk to my friends, the rest of our peers, and teachers exactly the same way, and especially that I talk to guys in the same manner. I can’t do the coy, flirty thing. Maybe I could if I tried, but I haven’t. Maybe one day I will, but it’s not currently my prerogative.

When I speak, even when I’m just sitting there, they look at me. They stare; they never actually make eye contact. If I look back, they just sit even straighter and adjust their clothes.

Around them, I just shrivel up. I feel ugly and fat. I feel like my clothes are wrong. I feel like a loser, and immature. I am always aware, I suppose, that by cultural standards, they are much prettier than I am. I know that, by all logical measures, they are thinner than I am. I know that I dress unusually in comparison. These things, although I am aware of them and do not often fill me with glee, seldom negatively affect my thoughts. Usually I am proud of being a “nerd”, as I value intellectualism. My intelligence is what I am most proud of. But for them, being a nerd is bad, and when they’re around, their perspective begins to infiltrate mine. The immature thing is the most ironic. I’m concerned with global issues and ethics whereas they are typically preoccupied with typical adolescent drama. But for them, due to the fact that I’m all virginal and whatnot, I’m a little kid and younger than them. Somehow, just… lesser than them.

Strangest of all, I feel jealous, so very jealous. I have never been vapid. I will never be so easy to laugh or cry or forget about intense issues and just go to some party. It is not in my character to just get drunk impulsively or, honestly, do anything impulsively. I will never have that kind of fun. It depresses me a bit, because the satisfaction I achieve, although nice, is very different from their immediate gratification.