The most pervasive and scrupulous of these images, however, are the ones pertaining to sex and romance. Everywhere we look is a carefully designed suggestion of sexiness and the clear message that girls’ primary interest should be getting a boy’s attention through her looks. Open any teen magazine. Watch any commercial aimed at teen girls. She washes her face, wears a tampon, buys school supplies, and wears sneakers all in some sexy manner that reveals the intention of getting boys to notice her. And it starts way earlier than the teen years—just about every Disney princess plot revolves around snagging a man. The Little Mermaid is a perfect example. The main character Ariel doesn’t even speak, and then she gives up her entire identity as a mermaid and singer to get her guy. The meaning has been the same for decades: be available but not too available and, most important, get male attention at all costs. Girls have limited choices in how to respond to these messages. If they want social acceptance, though, the options vanish and there is really only one message left: “be sexy but not sexual.” The message is only made worse by the sheer number of outlets available to deliver it.
Even those images that seem to support independence and strength—ass-kicking girls like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Veronica Mars, or self-contained girls like Bella’s character in the Twilight movies or Elena Gilbert on The Vampire Diaries—often maintain impossible standards of attractiveness. More important, they are almost always caught up in the process of trying to make a boy love them or of keeping a boy’s love. Bella, for instance, is painted as an everygirl. In the Twilight books she is not supposed to be anywhere near as attractive as the actress who plays her in the movies. But even in her ordinariness, a stunningly gorgeous vampire wants her and only her. He has eyes for no one else. Bella begins as a self-contained teenage girl who knows who she is and is not swayed by others’ opinions of her, but soon after Edward falls for her, her entire existence hinges on his love. Stephenie Meyer encourages a fantasy most all girls have: to be as plain as they are but to be adored and chosen by a really hot, really respectful guy.
Elena from The Vampire Diaries is exceedingly attractive, so it makes perfect sense that two hot vampire brothers spend much of their time trying to get with her. Although Elena’s character, like Bella’s, is supposed to be independent, not swayed by boys, the plot shifts soon enough so that her entire life depends on the love she shares with the brothers.
Yes, we’ve had shows like Ugly Betty, starring a more realistic looking female someone who didn’t have that “flattened beauty,” who didn’t spend all the episodes trying desperately to be loved. But the show was so unique in this way that the entire plotline had to involve the fact that she wasn’t our cultural ideal. The show’s name even called this very attractive woman “ugly”! And anyway, while viewers raved for one season, by the second season, they were over it, ratings fell, and the show was canceled. This disappearance is familiar. Darlene Conner from Roseanne and Angela Chase from My So-Called Life, also long gone, were strong, sarcastic characters who really didn’t care what you thought of them—but even then, cool, plain Angela spent pretty much all her on-screen time chasing Jared Leto’s character, who was, let’s face it, super good looking but equally vapid and dumb.
Recently, Lauren Zizes’s character on Glee gives new hope. Puck, the attractive, popular player, falls for her. First, the focus is on her large shape. He tells her he loves her curvy body, but, unimpressed, she says, “I look like what America looks like.” Finally he admits he likes most that she’s more of a badass than he is.
Even if we were to assume that a violent female, an “asskicking” female, equals a strong female, one study found that in films where females participated in violent action, 58 percent of those female characters were portrayed as submissive to the male lead and 42 percent were in romantic relationships with them.{21}
So, even Lauren Zizes is guilty of this. (Her character still defies all expectations of what’s come before, and, hey, she’s on prime time, so I cannot feel disappointed.)
If our media has an obsession with romance and love, then it shows sexiness to girls as the way to get that romance. Generally, when we talk about girls in the media, people express outrage about excessively sexy images, which they argue lead to promiscuity. It’s true that sexual behavior and images of sex in our media have increased rapidly over the decades. Partially, this is simply because of increased tolerance for sexual imagery. Also, the modes of technology—places where we can see those images—have multiplied. But I would argue that our concerns about sexualization are mostly misguided. When given a bare-backed, tousled-hair photo of Miley Cyrus, only adults see a postcoital image. Kids generally don’t pick up on the subtleties of sex in images until they become more sexually experienced. Images alone don’t create promiscuity. The real problem is that girls see those images as their tickets to male attention and romance.
Diane Levin and Jean Kilbourne write in their book Sexy So Soon: “[S]ex in commercial culture has far more to do with trivializing and objectifying sex than with promoting it, more to do with consuming than with connecting. The problem is not that sex as portrayed in the media is sinful, but that it is synthetic and cynical.”{22} In other words, our media shows sex as something artificial, unnatural, maybe even porn influenced. Think about some of today’s female singers, such as Ke$ha, Rihanna, and Beyoncé, who have expressed their sexuality by accentuating cleavage, wearing stripper heels, and pouting at the camera. How does that have anything to do with real sex or intimacy? Girls learn that male attention—and potentially then romance and love—comes from appearing artificially sexy.
And yet these singers, like most of those in the media outlets that exploit sexuality, are not trying to do anything other than appeal to our demands. Girls want direction for attracting men, and this is how to do it: girls need only learn how to appeal to boys’ sexual desire. Girls take notes on how to make themselves desirable, on how to move, dress, pout, and wear makeup. For the purpose of selling things, learning how to court the male desire for real companionship or intimacy isn’t nearly as provocative.
But while the media images encourage sexiness, institutions such as the National Abstinence Education Association, Focus Adolescent Services, and the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy pressure girls to not be sexual at all. In fact, the institutions seem as obsessed with trying to control girls’ sexuality as the media does. Parents and schools often exert this antisexual pressure as well.
In today’s culture, abstinence and virginity connote morality for girls in a way that’s different from that for boys. That is, although we reference honor and strength and basic moral ideals when we teach boys about being good, we mostly reference virginity for girls. As Jessica Valenti notes in The Purity Myth, “While boys are taught that the things that make them men—good men—are universally accepted ethical ideals, women are led to believe that our moral compass lies somewhere between our legs.”{23} Virginity is not just a sexual choice; it’s the most prominent way to frame who you are as a person.