Lyn Mikel Brown

Starr Symposium speaker discusses media effects on girlhood

By: David Cordill

Posted: 3/10/08

Every day, girls are inundated with media portrayals of how they should look, act and think. This influence was the subject of the 2008 Starr Symposium, put on by the UMKC Women's Council and Women's Center.

Writer, professor and community activist, Lyn Mikel Brown, Ed.D., spoke about media's influence on adolescent females on March 6 in Pierson Auditorium.

Brown, co-author of the book "Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketer's Schemes," lectured before a near-capacity crowd and elaborated on the unscrupulous advertising practices aimed at pre-teen and teenage girls.

"Marketing to kids is really big business now, and they are pushing the envelope in every way possible," Brown said. "They're pushing it as far as they can, and they're really depending on us to protest and say 'enough is enough.' Parents have had some success with this, but it is a constant battle. We really have to be vigilant and understand what the issues are."

In a slide show/video presentation, Brown addressed what she called the "commercialization of gender." She discussed how media uses "boy ads" and "girl ads" in marketing particular items. This, she said, is done to limit a child's options in toys, clothes and colors based on gender. Brown referred to her research in the choice of boys' and girls' bicycles as an example.

"The boys' bicycles were named things like Thrust, Champion and Speedster. The girls' bikes were name?Diva, Popular,?Island Breeze," Brown said. "You kind of get a sense of how girls are just packaged, that if they want to go fast, they have to cross over to the boy aisle. … You rarely see boys and girls together, certainly not as friends - it's very rare - in ads."

Brown discussed what she believes is the eroding boundary of childhood and adolescent and sexualization by the advertising media.

Brown distinguished sexualization from healthy sexual development, citing the American Psychological Association's (APA) Task Force interpretation from February of 2007, "Occurring when a person's value comes only from her/his sexual appeal or behavior, to the exclusion of other characteristics, and when a person is sexually objectified, e.g., made into a thing for another's sexual use."

Brown showed a slide show of pre-teen girls' clothing, which included padded bras for 6-year-olds, girl thongs displaying phrases like "eye candy" and "winky, winky," as well as other pre-teen adolescent transitional clothing.

Brown said the APA task force indicated possible links between sexualization and health problems such as depression, low self-esteem and eating disorders. But since these studies only involved pre-teens, or young and adult women, she said she could only speculate about its effect on lower age groups.

"My biggest concern around that is younger children," Brown said. "I really don't even know what all that stuff is connected to their being exposed to. … This early sexualization has happened so fast that there are no studies on it. … We don't know where this is going."

The selling-out of female assertiveness by way of "girl power" in this gender demographic was exemplified by Brown's segments on the power of makeovers. She said makeover reality shows only display a narrow kind of beauty, usually Anglo and white.

In her "Power to Fight" segment, Brown said females are sexualized and marginalized as advertising is directed toward girl-on-girl aggression with women judging and competing against each other.

"I'm very in support of constructive anger and being in touch with our anger," Brown said, "because that's really at the source of social change. When we see something unfair, we need to be in touch with that. But this is not that. This is something very different."

For Lindsay Pericich, an 18-year-old senior at St. Theresa's Academy, the event was an eye-opener.

"I'm a Girl Scout and it really bothers me that the whole image of girls is pink and divas and big boobs and trying to push sex all the time," Pericich said. "The real images of girl power are those things as opposed to girls in leadership positions, doing things in the community, and making a difference in the world. … Girls have such an impact on the world but it's ridiculous that's what it is being pushed out there all the time by the media."

The event was funded by the Family Study Center Endowment. The annual Starr Symposium, which began in 1992, promotes women's issues and family-oriented concerns.

dcordill@unews.com