For the week of 2.6.06 

One of the most notable, and definitely the most lauded, commercials aired during last week's Super Bowl was one advertising Unilever's  Dove Self-Esteem Fund for Women and Girls. Depicting a variety of ordinary females, the ad used the tagline "because every girl deserves to feel beautiful."  The advertisement was notable not merely for its sentiments, but because it was surrounded by dozens of ads exploiting female sexuality and anatomy.

In today's media culture, exploitation of women for sexual purposes is rampant. From rap lyrics, with their constant use of words like "bitch" and "ho" to describe women, to network sitcoms which feature males of all ages ogling and making crude references to women's anatomy, to commercials that use scantily-clad "perfect" models, the image of women as mere sex objects is ubiquitous. Under such circumstances, it is no mystery why so many girls have so low a degree of self-esteem.

Beauty, of course, has always been prized since antiquity, and through the millennia beauty has been idealized as a desirable trait particularly in women. But the rise of mass culture, with magazine illustrations and later film and television, accelerated and exacerbated the tendency. The recognition that mass media's glorification of beauty negatively impacts young women's self-esteem is not new; Norman Rockwell's painting Girl at Mirror,  poignantly portraying a young woman wistfully comparing her own reflection to a photo of a movie magazine starlet, was published in 1954.  But at that time, parents and teachers described the ideal as being to accept others "as they are"; and open displays of sexual behavior and pornography were considered taboo.  Since the mainstream acceptance of Playboy magazine and the "Playboy Philosophy," and the resultant glorification of sexual promiscuity in the 1960s and ‘70s, popular culture – and particularly television – have increasingly portrayed women as objects to be ogled and used for sexual gratification. 

That television and the images it portrays has an impact is undeniable. In the pre-technological culture of the Pacific island of Fiji, weight gain was traditionally considered attractive and desirable, particularly in young women; losing weight was seen as unhealthy. But within three years of the introduction of television in 1995, Fijian girls who watched television were 50 percent more likely to describe themselves as fat than those girls who watched little or no TV.  During the same time, the number of girls at risk for eating disorders more than doubled. (Planned Parenthood website, September 9, 2005)

Nor are such reactions confined to remote locations such as Fiji. The years in which physical and sexual attractiveness was increasingly emphasized in American popular culture saw a cult of mortification of the flesh take root among teenage girls. Eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia swept the teen girl population in the eighties, and progressed to the "cutting" fad of the nineties. Today, girls idolizing pornographic film stars such as Jenna Jameson;  and even calling themselves (or allow themselves to be called) "sluts" has been glamorized and legitimized by TV, movies and popular music to such an extent that teens now bandy about such language freely. (Atlantic Monthly, January 17, 2006; Washington Post, February 5, 2006)

However, some girls and women are rightly offended by such degrading and exploitative treatment and have taken action against it. When the popular clothing chain Abercrombie & Fitch introduced a line of T-shirts for women with messages on the front such as, "Who needs a brain when you have these?", a group of young women in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania called for a "girlcott" of the chain.(Newsday.com, 11/2/05)

QUOTE: "We're telling [girls] to think about the fact that they're being degraded. We're all going to come together in this one effort to fight this message that we're getting from pop culture." -- Emma Blackman-Mathis, sixteen-year-old "girlcott" leader (Newsday.com, 11/2/05)

It is notable that when popular culture does portray women in a non-sexualized fashion which accepts them and encourages them to accept themselves as they are, the response from women is overwhelmingly positive. Seventeen magazine's readership has increased 17% since in 2003, a fact that the magazine's editor in chief Atoosa Rubenstein attributed to its featuring young women of all sizes, not just size-0 models, in photographs. (Mtv.com, October 27, 2005) Other editors of similar publications agree that when magazines include young women of all shapes and sizes, it sends an important message of acceptance to their young readers.

QUOTE: "Models are freaks of nature with genetically perfect bodies. So to me, it's important that girls can look to someone like us and see how to find jeans even though her legs aren't eight miles long." —Teen Vogue editor in chief Amy Astley (Mtv.com, October 27,2005)

Sadly, such enlightened and equal treatment of girls in today's popular culture is far from the norm. Although many Hollywood stars and members of the self-proclaimed creative community boast of their efforts to "liberate" young women from the supposed repression of the past, such "ideals" are in fact a cynical sham, intended only to bolster their program's ratings or sell more products. Such efforts make millions of young girls feel inferior and influence them in making poor choices; but those who profit by such exploitative imagery are indifferent to the suffering they cause.  While those few media sources which do promote a healthy portrayal of girls are to be applauded, only when such a portrayal becomes the mainstream will the "liberation" – and dignity – of American women be assured.

QUOTE: "The dominant culture in this country has abandoned girls in every possible respect. We've made a world for our girls in which the pornography industry has become increasingly mainstream, in which…America's girls [are] experienced beyond their years, lacking any clear message from the adult community about the importance of protecting their modesty, adrift in one of the most explicitly sexualized cultures in the history of the world." – social critic Caitlin Flanagan (Atlantic Monthly, January 17, 2006) 

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The Parents Television Council - www.parentstv.org