Modern interest in the female as a subject for study developed in part to response to Freud’s work and how he traced the cause of many male issues to the female. Coupled with the fact that until the middle of the 20th century sociological and psychological studies focused primarily on the male, thus marginalizing the female experience, it’s easy to understand how and why some perceived a need to do some catching up. This need to catch up or to refocus the evaluation lens on the female has resulted in a large body of work. But is everything understood? Has anything been resolved? How are these evaluators doing?
Certainly, this work has helped women achieve individual freedoms, more respect in the home and more opportunities in the workplace. But how does it impact the female adolescent, who is often considered the compass required to navigate the map of understanding the relations between genders, sexes and ages and between individual, groups, and the production and reproduction of culture?
I think it’s a huge burden.
It’s in your face. You can’t escape it. In all forms of the media, efforts are made to “understand” young women, girls, teens… However you term the subject, feminine adolescence is an identified marker for significant change in individuals that has large-scale impact.
Some of this interest comes from adults who need to define and understand adolescence, which in Western culture is a muddy transition between childhood and adulthood. This need for clarity may however make what’s already confusing, even more so. Knowing they are constantly being evaluated, studied and judged makes girls extremely self-conscious.
And what’s a girl anyway? Already faced with the natural need to define themselves, a young female will turn to whatever is available to her to find the answer and there’s no shortage of material. The scope of the media is so expansive now that an almost global peer pressure exists.
To me, the word “girl” evokes thoughts of lightness, playfulness and flirtations – not with boys necessarily but with ideas, interests and yes, wardrobe and hairstyles. My concept is similar to experimentations of an adolescent girl and I am indeed referencing a feeling from that period of my life (although I am careful to cancel out the negative feelings, of which there were many). My definition though, as well as others’ analysis is in retrospect, from the perspective of an assumed fully developed adult and perhaps tainted by a tinge of satisfaction from actually making it through that challenging time. To a twelve-year-old, I would bet “girl” is a developmental stage she is working hard to outgrow. She likely associates it more closely with chronological (and younger) age than do I. Additionally, she knows adulthood is within her reach and is working at pulling herself up to that level. She wants to leave it behind but I embrace it at every opportunity.
Feminine adolescence can be defined by puberty, chronological age, or specific behaviors or identities, all of which sound scientific and may carry the label of “problem” from the perspective of the actual adolescent to which I refer. In response, the adolescent is going to look for answers and explanations that will help her understand and begin to define herself.
One place she may search for answers in film and television. Consider two film options, Girl Interrupted (1999) and Thirteen (2003) and two television shows, Beverly Hills 90210 (1990) and Brat Camp (2005). Each of these centers on characters identifying and overcoming (with varying degrees of success) issues clearly related adolescence. Will living vicariously through these broken characters encourage negative behaviors or will the viewer be so influenced by the characters that she will make positive adaptations in her thinking about herself and in her behaviors so as not to repeat the negative fictional story lines in her own life? What teenager has the maturity to frame their response with the clarity, conviction and strength required of the latter option?
Balancing the influence of images on television and in film, another source exists in the historical study of literature, which might present itself in an English or sociology class. In many literary works, including those of William Shakespeare and Jane Austin, the female characters serve as symbols of society rather than examples of it. Where Shakespeare’s works are male centered, Austin’s are female centered and are generally of greater interest to the adolescent female. Austin’s use of female characters to highlight struggle of conflict as her characters deal with societal changes can be subtly embowering to a modern young woman finding her way in her own society.
While each has value in some way, use of these sources in the formation of one’s identity is flawed in two major ways. First, each perpetuates negative stereotypes by punishing women to varying degrees for attempting to break free of societal norms. Second, as alluded to earlier, an adolescent generally lacks the maturity to process these concepts and to then use them as basis for define one’s authentic self.
While only a quarter century separates me from today’s female adolescent, it’s somewhat difficult to relate to each other as so much has changed in our world during that twenty-five year time span. I didn’t realize how progressive my mother was by abandoning her coffee cloche and tennis lessons to start her own business while her three children were in elementary school. For a mother to work fulltime is commonplace now. I abandoned my dream of being an architect as a result of a fear of not being able to advance from the position of drafts”man.”
I don’t think I understand why it’s still so hard for them to figure it out when they seem to have so many more options than I did and I don’t think they understand the huge impact of Marlo’s Thomas and Friends’ Free to Be you and Me, and of television programs like That Girls and Mary Tyler More that however flawed, helped my generation frame who we were at the time, who we want to be and who we have become.
As women, our reaction to feminist issues, particularly those relating to adolescents, is based on the past. I’ve lived during a period when the female has been closely examined and evaluated. The impact of this interest in my gender is only now, just shy of forty, making sense to me. Feminine, feminism and feminist can mean three different things to one person and in Western society is much more significant than in other cultures. While these words exist in the vocabulary of today’s female adolescent, she likely won’t fully embrace the nuances of each word for many more years, despite how hard she tries to make sense of the overabundance of information present ed to her on a daily basis._____
I did read “The More You Subtract, The More You Add: Cutting Girls Down to Size” by Kilbourne and “Written on the Body” Bitch issue no. 21 and will weave my responses to them into the magazines paper.
References
“A Day Without Feminism” Prologue of Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism and the Future by Jennifer Baumgarder and Amy Richards
Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory, pp. 1-29 and 35-42