Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female With The Mass Media

Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female With The Mass Media (1994)
By Susan Douglas

Synopsis: An exploration of pop culture media representations of women, and the way such representations have led women to feel highly ambivalent about themselves and about feminism. Douglas looks at music, TV shows, film (a little bit), commercials, print ads, and general cultural effluvia connected to women. The tone is very casual and chatty and dated. Her argument is basically that the media has essentially cast women as brainless "bimbos" with microscopic waists who - as heroines - are always deferential to men or - as villains - are 'masculine' and gross and self-absorbed and evil. The media tried to put down women and the feminist changes taking place - a burden which feminism still bares today. She spends a bit of time on the domestic perkiness of sitcom women, though feels that girl groups - especially black girl groups - can be seen as at least somewhat empowering. Bottom line is that women continue to feel conflicted and ambivalent about the images they're presented with, and the best we can do is to teach out kids (and people in general) to be critical consumers of media - to talk back to it, question it, and make fun of it.

Interesting Specifics:

According to Disney, "vanity means a girl is probably evil and deserves to die" (30).

The Mickey Mouse Club was on from 1955-59.

The 1960 Shirells song "Will You Love Me Tomorrow" was the first #1 hit by a girl group.

Maude was great for focusing on a woman who talked back, but she also reinforced stereotypes of the feminist as "a strident, loud, unfeminine, bruiser" (203).

1976 = debut of The Bionic Woman, Wonder Woman, and Charlie's Angels (212).

In reference to pop culture's obsession with the "catfight:" "It may be filled with ambivalence and compromise, tradition and rebellion, but the space between the two cats - the space where we, the girls, are - is what feminism is all about" (244). [Please!!]

"But on of capitalism's great strengths - perhaps its greatest - is its ability to co-opt and domesticate opposition, to transubstantiate criticism into a host of new, marketable products. And so it was with fitness" (260). [This connects with ideas in Cycle of Outrage - that youth culture was eventually "tamed" by media co-option].

Excessive working out, as embodied by a perfect ass, "doesn't reflect hard work or entitlement so much as mindless narcissism, unproductive self-absorption, and the media's ongoing distortion of feminism to further their own misogynistic, profit-maximizing ends" (265).

'The decision to get a face-lift or not is, inescapably, a political decision" (266).

Interacts With:

Golden State, Golden Youth, Cycle of Outrage (really just for its focus on youth - hmm, should compare their angle on the media)
Is a little different because although it talks about ambiguity on the part of the consumer, it doesn't really go so far as to say that consumers carve their own meaning and use what they are given for their own ends. To me, this book is a "fun" book that's more conversational than anything else. Has a very "Hey, remember that show/film/song?!" feel to it. Has the same baby-boomer circle-jerk/self-referentiality thing going on that Jennifer Price's Flight Maps has.