Chapter Nine

 Body Images & Media Myths

             A recent survey of teenaged girls asked what they would do had they three wishes that would grant them anything they desired. A number of youthful fantasies spring to mind – Money? Honor? Fame? None of the above. The number one wish of almost all of these eleven-to-seventeen year olds was to lose weight and (ever practical) to keep it off.[1]

             I suppose this shouldn’t surprise us, given the culture’s general fixation with feminine thinness. But I do think it should trouble us. I spend my working days in the company of nine- and ten-year-old girls, and I’m daily struck by their idealism and wonder, their capacious interests and abundant compassion for life. There’s a lot of conversation in the classes (it’s part of what I’d like them to learn)  and the girls’ is mostly about math puzzles and mysteries, soccer scores, ballet lessons, a great deal about animals (I’m always surprised how many of them want to be veterinarians or marine biologists), and, of course, their friends.  Not much about body types or bad hair (though I’m sure they come up). Their conversations reveal an  infectious delight for life and learning, and listening to them is one of the reasons I enjoy my job so much. I still learn from their deft handling of the emotional climate in the room. No wonder I find it lamentable that their lively wonder is so shrunken down to preoccupation with hip size or facial care or the number of calories in a tuna sandwich. But it’s a fact. Study after study shows that by the time they reach adolescence, girls spend a troubling amount of time, energy and imagination on looks and food – far more than their male counterparts do –  and to such a degree that many of them lose their way in body-image obsessions or eating disorders.[2]

Falling into the Beauty Trap 

            It’s perfectly understandable. Growing up female in a relentlessly male-centered culture will do that to you, especially when your natural desires have been historically subordinated to the longings and fantasies of the pre-eminent gender. In fact, the cultural pressure towards physical “perfection”(read thin) is felt very young by these girls. Eighty percent of our fourth graders have already been on a diet and girls as young as five are now being treated for eating disorders. By adolescence how they look dominates many girls’ thinking. Almost one-third of the high-school girls in the AAUW self-esteem poll, for instance, reported that they worried "very much" about their appearance (compared to just thirteen percent of boys). More disturbing was that almost half of the high-school girls in another large survey reported feeling negatively about their bodies (compared to just 15 percent of the boys).[3] And these girls were three times as likely as the boys to feel badly about themselves, because of the way they viewed their appearance. 

            The largely negative effect of body image on adolescent girls lingers into adulthood. Even our most capable young women carry their adolescent anxieties about their appearance and weight with them to college, where they consume precious amounts of energy and imagination that could go elsewhere. In her landmark book on eating disorders, Unbearable Weight, Professor Susan Bordo writes that for the undergraduate women she teaches, “the hunger for food is the most insistent craving and the preeminent source of their anger and frustration with the body, indeed, of their terror of it.” (Italics hers.)[4] 

            It is a deeply gendered dynamic.  Men simply don’t feel the same pressures about their appearance. In fact, one study found that overweight males were no more dissatisfied with their appearance than women with average body weight.[5] Never, apparently, do most women achieve the more relaxed attitudes towards appearance that characterize most men. One recent study found that the females across the age-span were more concerned about their physical appearance and their body weight than the males,  more distressed with eating behaviors, and had lower appearance self-esteem – chilling evidence of yet another largely unnoticed gender gap, with profoundly  negative consequences for girls.[6] 

            “In our culture, not one part of a woman’s body is left untouched, unaltered. . . From the age of 11 or 12 until she dies, a woman will spend a large part of her time, money, and energy on binding, plucking, painting and deodorizing herself . . . [It is] the core experience of being a woman, a romanticized construct.”                                                                                Andrea Dworkin,[7] 

Appearance as Self 

            It isn’t just that women diet more than men that should cause alarm, or that they drive a billion-dollar dieting and cosmetics industry that doesn’t even exist for males. It is that they are trained from a very young age to believe that their appearance defines to a large extent who they are. There exists a powerful cultural dynamic which insists that, regardless of their intelligence or talent, their interests or their life dreams, females will be measured first by their looks. Research on today’s adolescent girls shows that they are actually socialized to rely heavily on external acceptance to inform their identity.[8] In the predominant media culture, especially movies and television, the pressure for women to look attractive, and, above all  thin, is probably more pervasive and intense than it’s ever been. 

            “It dominates their thinking,” according to Dr. Cindy Stearns, a sociologist in the Women’s Studies Program at Sonoma State University in Northern California. Her specialty is women’s health, and, increasingly, girls’ preoccupation with their appearance. In her course on women’s health, Dr. Stearns has her students write in journals for the first three weeks,  noting their feelings and attitudes about their health and eating behaviors. They use their journal notes as baseline data for term papers at the end of the semester. What initially surprised and then alarmed Dr. Stearns was how persistently the journals revealed a deep dissatisfaction with appearance. 

            “It’s basically all some of them think about,” she added, as we talked in her office on the campus. She explained that girls are trained by the culture and reinforced by the media to be viewed primarily as objects – “something to be seen” – and  are judged essentially by how they look. Boys, in contrast, are judged by what they do and how they perform, she added. “For boys, it’s important to look the right way in order to be accepted; but they can leave it at that. With girls it becomes a matter of who they are.” 

            She explained that girls grow up with the feeling of being under constant surveillance, assessed and valued by what they’re wearing, how they look, and (in the past couple of decades especially) by how thin they are. Pressured constantly to divert energy and imagination into how they look, girls are left at a disadvantage to boys. 

            “Look,” she laughed at one point. “There are things I do to my appearance before I leave the house in the morning to look presentable. We all do. Men too. There have always been standards of presentability and always will be. We all live with that.” But it is when these concerns overwhelm more important considerations, she feels, that they become limiting, if not deeply problematic for many girls. “I have students who won’t come to the front of the class because they are overly self-conscious about their weight,” she said. “Or they won’t go to the beach because they don’t think they look good in a swimsuit. I know girls who won’t have their picture taken because they feel self-conscious about their figure or their face or their hair. That is imprisoning, ” she says emphatically. “That limits and controls girls and ultimately diminishes their essential humanness.” 

            “I want to be judged not just by my appearance. I want to be known as someone who is a strong person, who will try new things, who will make something of herself.”

                                                            Melanie C., 11-year-old GATE student[10]

 The Beauty Imperative 

            I asked Dr. Stearns when these preoccupations begin. “Very young,” she said firmly, “and they originate with their most trusted advocates.” When mothers tie a first pink bow on the female infant’s  head, she added by way of explanation, “it starts. She’s to be looked at. Let’s face it, you can’t really distinguish between a clothed male and female infant – I don’t care how much we like to romanticize about it. But the female infant has got to look cute. Tie on a bow – stick it on if she hasn’t developed hair yet.” Already, the infant-girl’s appearance is an emphatic  marker of who she is. In time, what is unconscious and unspoken becomes internalized as a mandate.[11] 

            “What girls learn,” Dr. Stearns emphasized, “is that to be a girl, they have to care about their appearance –  that caring about it is fundamental to who they are.” A young girl, eager for approval, learns that “it is her job to get people to look at her. Her essential task as a female is to become an object of approval.” 

            “And, she’s got it right,” Dr. Stearns pointed out. “For if girls are not actually working on how they look, then they are violating a cultural imperative for women. What girl would be accepted who said, ‘I don’t care about my looks.’” 

            This is not the way it has to be. Studies show that African American girls and women are generally more satisfied with their bodies, and they generally show fewer concerns about dieting and weight loss.[12] In one recent study, more than half of the African American females believed that a female did not have to be thin to be attractive, whereas an overwhelming majority of white females believe that thinness is prerequisite to attractiveness.[13] There is no natural law dictating that females preoccupy themselves with the way they look. It is a cultural construction, manufactured by history, tradition, male desire, and, increasingly,  financial profit – what  Susan Hoy describes as,

 . . . an institutionalized system of values and practices within which girls and women – and, increasingly, men and boys as well – come to believe that they are nothing (and are frequently treated as nothing) unless they are trim, tight, lineless, bulgeless, and sagless.[14]

Impossible Bodies

             A glance at the models in popular women’s magazines (or in Sports Illustrated, for that matter) makes it clear that today’s ideal of feminine beauty is one of escalating thinness. Just a generation ago the average female model weighed 8 percent less than the average woman did. Today she weighs 23 percent less.[15] What was considered an ideal body in 1960 is now defined in advertisements as “full figure,” requiring special fashion accommodations.[16] The columnist Ellen Goodman calls this fixation with thinness a culture of  “anorexic chic,” and argues that the  “incredible, shrinking models” that portray the ideal of feminine perfection is something no girl (or woman) should reach for. The tall, genetically thin, broad-shouldered prototype, with narrow hips and long legs, is a rare body type, representing only 5 percent of American women. You cannot diet yourself into this anymore than you can make yourself taller. You’ve got to be born with it and no amount of “Jane Fonda” workouts can achieve it. The more “pear-shaped” figure is by far the most common female body-type, but it is unacceptable by the media’s “anorexic” standards. The dress size of the average American women is a 14, a size that dieting advertisements portray as overweight. 

            The ideal feminine body type is becoming almost unreachable. Even the models themselves have to put their health at risk to maintain it. And with computer enhancement, many of the models’ figures you see on magazine covers or in movies don’t  even exist. 

            Adolescent girls have been said to be “worshipping at the shrine of slimness.”[18] Research shows that bound into girls’ image of thinness are unfounded expectations and hopes for acceptance and success, thin females being viewed by adolescent girls as universally popular, desirable, and successful, while overweight females are “expected to have less satisfying personal lives.”[19] Dr. Stearns explained that for many young girls awash in media images, supermodels like Cindy Crawford are their role models. “They know their first names and spend an awful lot of their mental energy trying to imitate them,” she explained. In a typical advertisement,  the models are simply standing around “with weird looks and far-off and distant expressions on their faces, being paid enormous sums of money simply to be looked at. This is not an empowering model for young girls.” But their images have become embedded in girls’ minds by the time they reach college. The dominant theme that emerges from her students’ journals and in class discussions, she said, is that “if they could just lose weight, life would be perfect.”

            The culture of thinness creates enormous anxiety for girls and women, she said, and causes distortions in the images that younger, more vulnerable girls have of themselves. Adolescent girls routinely view themselves as overweight, even when they are not. One study found that 95 percent of the girls in it overestimated their body sizes to be one-fourth larger than they actually were.[21] Because of these impossibly unrealistic standards, girls and women must continually work at improving their appearance. “But they can never fully succeed, and never feel fully satisfied about their appearance,” Dr. Stearns commented. “And even if they do, how can you find satisfaction in becoming a successful object?” 

            Disorders & Distortions

             One out of ten young women suffer from an eating disorder. Disorders typically begin at the onset of puberty and ninety percent of them afflict girls. “Anorexia Nervosa” is a self-starvation eating disorder that includes weight loss in excess of 25 percent of body weight, body-image distortions, a preoccupation with food or excessive exercise, and an intense fear of becoming fat. The incidence of anorexia has been increasing since at least 1970. 90 to 95 percent of “anorectics” are Caucasian adolescent girls who come from the middle and upper-middle social classes, though the incidence of anorexia among minority women is also increasing. Anorectics typically judge themselves to be heavier than they actually are. In fact it is not unusual to hear an emaciated young anorectic complain that she’s still “too fat.” 

            “Bulimia” is characterized by a powerful urge to overeat, combined with purging through self-induced vomiting or laxatives. It also includes a morbid fear of becoming obese. Again it primarily affects adolescent girls and, as with anorexia, it is on the increase. Bulimics have been found to be “more accepting” of cultural standards of attractiveness and thinness, and tend to be “more feminine” than nonbulimics.[23]

 “Normal” Disorders

            As severe as these disorders are for the young women they afflict, perhaps even more troubling is the growing consensus, certainly among feminist scholars, that anorexia and bulimia represent only the extreme version of a more generalized body and food “disorder” which affects all women to some degree. It turns out, for instance, that the distorted body images of the anorectic are actually common. One study of 33,000 women found that three-quarters of them considered themselves “too fat,” even though only one-quarter of them were actually overweight, and almost a third of them were actually underweight.[24] Other studies found that 50 percent of all women are dieting at any given time, even though 98 percent of them regain the weight they lost, and then gain more.[25]

            These findings cause many professionals to view “eating disorders” not as anomalies, but, as Susan Hoy writes, as “only one extreme of a continuum on which all women today find themselves, insofar as they are vulnerable, to one degree or another, to the requirements of the cultural construction of femininity.”[26] 

            I asked Dr. Stearns about this notion, whether she thought eating disorders were a distinct pathology in themselves or an extreme version of behaviors that affect most woman. “You can’t deny the special suffering of the anorectic or the bulimic. These are real disorders. But, no, they are not anomalies.” She explained that if you included food obsessions within the definition of disorders, than most women would qualify as having one. “In one sense, probably, you could say that all women’s eating is disordered simply from the kind of preoccupation they give to food and to their weight.”

Survival Skills

             It is a mistake to view women’s preoccupations with appearance as  simply a consequence of their being overly susceptible to fashion and advertising. A preoccupation with appearance is an appropriate survival skill in a culture that rigidly defines feminine appeal as physical, then irretrievably links it to women’s achievement and success.[28] After all, women don’t undergo expensive (and health-threatening) breast implants because they’ve been taken in, but, as Susan Hoy writes, “because they have correctly discerned that these norms shape the perceptions and desires of potential lovers and employers.”[29] Of course, those potential lovers and employers are mostly men. But men’s complicity in the “beauty trap” remains unexamined, as though male desire and fantasy had nothing to do with pressuring girls and women to look thin and ever-young. It’s what Susan Hoy calls the “unspeakable secret” hidden within the phenomenon of eating disorders and body-image distortions. Rather than implicate it or even give it a name, the culture masks men’s complicity with the myth that “it is women alone who are responsible for their sufferings from the whims and bodily tyrannies of fashion.”[30] In a male-centered culture, this is a far more palatable reading. If women are so unwise as to allow appearance to monopolize their imaginations and behavior, we are more than happy to believe, then they’ve only themselves to blame. 

            It’s just that it isn’t so. 

Avoiding the Beauty Trap 

            “So what do parents do?” I asked Dr. Stearns at the end of our conversation. “Where do they start?”

             “It’s very hard to change these preoccupations. They go so deep.” Then she gave a chuckle: “Even for die-hard  feminists, it’s often the last thing to go.” But starting with the caveat that this is a cultural problem which will not yield to “one-shot treatments,” she offered some sound and practical advice to parents of daughters. I’ve already touched on some of her points in earlier chapters, but they bear repeating in the more specialized context of body image. I’ll summarize her ideas here: 

° Mothers: Ask yourself what your orientation to food is, how much you obsess about food and your looks. The more you can accept your body as it is, the more you can be a role model for your daughter. Talking frequently about your weight or complaining openly about your age only heightens their significance, and your daughter will pick it up.

 °  Fathers:  Make it clear to your daughter that you value her for who she is and not for her looks. Try to examine your own preoccupations with feminine beauty. Can you see beyond women’s physical appearance? Dr. Stearn’s students often report that fathers’ too-frequent comments about their looks “make them feel like a possession. It bothers young women to have all this focus on their looks.”

 ° Encourage daughters in activities that give alternatives to looking in the mirror or going shopping.  Do volunteer work as a family. Do things together that make you part of the community. It is very important for girls to feel connected to the community.

 ° Expose her to the historical contributions of women. Give her teacher a gift from the National Women’s History Project catalog. Hang posters of notable women in her bedroom. Show her the list of “250 Notable Women” beginning on page 172, and go through it with her. 

° Watch out for propagating a food morality. Stearns’ students write that their food intake is routinely monitored by parents, and they resent this. It’s common that everyone in a family feels they have permission to comment on girls’ weight and on how they look. Girls get a lot of feedback at the table from brothers and fathers and others  about what they’re eating.

 ° Talk to your daughter about the power of her body. Say, “Look at what your body can do! It can even bear children if you want.” 

° Talk about body parts openly and use clinically accurate terms. Speak them aloud! Demystify them. 

° Give her permission to express herself honestly. I talked in Chapter Five about encouraging your daughter to express her feelings honestly with you. This becomes even more important as body image concerns begin to weigh upon her. So I’ll say it one more time: encourage a strong, opinionated voice in your daughter. Even when she contradicts you, give her credit for speaking out. 

° Listen to your daughter. As she matures, you want to pay close attention to what she has to say about the world she is growing up in. 

° Examine the culture critically with her. Look at magazines and television ads with a critical eye. (See below for more suggestions on making your daughter a critical TV viewer.)

 ° “How do I look?” When your daughter asks this, it isn’t enough to say that looks don’t matter. There is too much evidence to the contrary. Instead, make your comment specific: “I like the blouse you’re wearing.” 

° Write letters with her to advertisers about sexist portrayals of women. Show them to your daughter. Show her that you are not passively putting up with the beauty cult. 

° Keep talking to her and be patient. Even when she rejects your advice or comments, keep talking with and listening to her. It is one way of giving your daughter some power.

 Girls & Media Myths 

             I took my sixteen-year-old son to see the “Cabaret” last summer. The musical is set within an interesting historical context that I wanted him to see – Berlin in the early thirties, the Nazis on the verge of taking power, the tragic mindlessness of the Cabaret menagerie as evil closed in around them. Chester, the male lead, is an aspiring American novelist; the female lead, Sally Bowles, is a cabaret singer from England. 

            Though I hadn’t gone out that night thinking about gender, I couldn’t avoid the transparent differences in the way the men and women in the musical were portrayed. Chester dreams of writing a great novel (his first has been favorably reviewed). But when Sally dreams, it is to be portrayed in Chester’s novel as being “so seductive that no man can resist me.” I’m no prude, but it would have been hard not to have noticed that almost all the female characters (the Kit Kat dancers) spent the night virtually unclothed, bumping and grinding their way through several provocative dances. Meanwhile, the male characters either drove the action (Chester), led the dancing ensembles as the master of ceremonies, or provided the foils as the Nazi thugs. Sally, meanwhile, manages to strip, get pregnant, tries to talk Chester into working for the Nazis (for the money), and has an abortion. It’s Chester’s child, of course, and he slaps Sally from his higher moral ground when he hears about the abortion. Not a good night for equity.

             One could argue that “Cabaret” describes a desperate period in history (the end of Germany’s pre-Hitler Weimar Republic) and its stereotypes are those of an earlier time. But the musical was being performed in the nineties by young college men and women. My own son wants to be an actor, and I could have happily imagined him up on the stage playing Chester – tapping out significant lines for his novel-in-progress, wooing and winning the beautiful Sally Bowles, heroically resisting the Nazis. But if he were my actress-aspiring daughter? Would I feel as sanguine about her future on the stage?

              “Cabaret” provided a fine theatrical experience for both my son and me. Yet, its unvarnished gender stereotyping and the devaluing portrait of females it reinforced  raise some serious concerns about its appropriateness, especially for an impressionable adolescent like my son. I had to ask myself if the experience had been worth it, and couldn’t decide. But the question remains for every parent: how much do we try to shelter our children, especially when they are young?

Sheltering & Equipping Your Daughters

             It is impossible these days to isolate children from the cultural stereotypes that flood our print and electronic media. But alert parents can train their children to be aware of sexual stereotyping and to help them resist its influence. Though we cannot control the media’s content, we can help buffer our children from its worst excesses by helping them form habits of mind that critically question media portrayals. Rather than taking the media at face value, children can be taught to analyze, question and even deconstruct the stereotyped images of males and females that pervade television, film, newspapers, and magazines. Eventually young people eventually have to make up their own minds about the information they are exposed to, so the better equipped they are to assess media stereotypes, the less likely they are to be unduly influenced by them. It’s mostly a matter of training. 

            What we see in the media affects the way we see ourselves. The images of impossibly thin models in magazines and on TV, for instance, have a profound effect on how girls think about their own looks. Melissa Bernard is a communications professor at Sonoma State University who has studied the correlation between girls’ body images and the images of thinness that abound in the media. To demonstrate what she calls “the insidious relationship between body image and the media,” she has her classes ask other female students to rate their own looks after being shown magazine pictures of fashion models. When the “anorexic chic” models were shown, only 19 percent of the college women answered that they were proud of their own bodies. And only 27 percent said they liked their faces. When a more average-looking model was shown, more than 30 percent of the students said they were proud of their bodies and 41 percent said they liked their faces. “As the ideal gets thinner we think of ourselves as fatter,” she concludes. “Thirty minutes of watching TV can affect our own body image.”[31]

 Sexism in the Media

            The preferred method for dealing with gender stereotypes is not to let them form in your daughters in the first place. This is much easier said than done in a media culture which inundates us with images of males and females which all too often reinforce negative stereotypes. A recent study conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation and Children Now found that across the spectrum – in films, television, commercials and teenage magazines – women are often portrayed as being more preoccupied with romance and personal appearance than they are with having jobs or going to school.[32] And despite the fact that there are more women than men in the country, the study showed that men accounted for 63 percent of the characters in movies and 55 percent in television. In music videos, 78 percent of the performers were men.

            Conditions have certainly improved for women on television since the days of Ozzie and Harriet when they appeared largely as props for male leads or as mothers to serve the menfolk. But TV programming is still very much controlled by male executives, written by male writers (80 percent), and is aimed largely at male tastes: witness the disproportionate amount of male sports, for instance. Even Saturday morning TV shows have predominantly male characters starring in boy-oriented action stories. I pointed out earlier that television executives know (and admit) that girls will watch boys’ programming, while boys won’t watch girls’. The simple economics of television dictates that TV mirrors a male-centered world.

             True, you can find women starring in television programs and in reasonably strong roles as doctors, journalists, police officers, writers, lawyers. The Kaiser study found that women in both film and television were shown as intelligent problem-solvers. But these are outweighed by a preponderance of gender stereotypes that dominate the media in both movies and television. For instance, the Kaiser study found that women were more likely than men to have their looks commented upon and more likely than men to be perceived as thin. Forty-one percent of the men on television were shown to be working while only twenty-eight percent of the women were. In movies the proportions were worse: sixty percent of men and only thirty-five percent of the women worked. 

            And many women in both film and television are still portrayed mainly as sex objects, often in erotic and even pornographic images, as in MTV videos. Advertising too still features women as sex objects and presents their bodies in ways that are unmistakably sexual.

             The sum total of television’s portrayals of women is still decidedly stereotypical, and gives girls the powerful message that women are valued most for their bodies, that their bust size may be more significant than their IQ, their creativity, or their competence. And it is this cumulative effect that is so troubling. Summarizing the Kaiser study, Lois Salisbury, president of Children Now remarked: 

            “A girl could mute the ads on her television set, but still get [stereotyped messages] on the program. She could turn off her television, but she’s going to get  them at the movies. She could decide just to read, but she would have to boycott most popular magazines for girls.”[33]

             Parents need to be rigorously selective about the television programs they allow their young daughters (and sons) to watch. At the same time, they cannot begin too early to equip their children to become competent critics of the media, while limiting their viewing hours. If  your daughter can be shown how to detect sexism in books, magazines, television and movies, she can learn to transfer her perceptions to other areas in her life. 

Making Your Daughter A Critical Viewer

             Perhaps once or twice a week, sit down with your daughter to watch television from a critical standpoint. While watching, make observations and ask your daughter questions that demystify what she sees:

 Women’s Images

 ° “Did you see there wasn’t one woman with normal weight in that commercial?”

 ° “Have you ever seen one woman in the supermarket who looks like the models on TV?”

 ° “How many times have you seen a woman who looks like that in the supermarket?” 

°  “Do the women you know dress like that?”

 ° “Why does the woman in the commercial hardly have any clothes on? Do the men have their clothes on?” 

Have her think about women’s roles in the most popular programs: 

° How many times during the past week have the plots featured a girl or woman being violently attacked? 

° Are the women characters independent? 

° Do the women depend upon men to make important decisions, to rescue them from trouble, to provide the centers for their lives? 

° Are the women victims in the story, or are they controlling the action and events? 

° Are the women skilled and powerful, or do they require the help of a male? 

° On the news or magazine shows where there are both men and women, who is usually in charge? Why do you think that is? Can that change? How?

 Television as Background 

            Don’t leave the television on all the time as background “white noise.” Its messages are subtle enough to infiltrate consciousness whether anyone is actively watching or not. And such time-filling, essentially mindless use of television can fragment children’s attention spans. Also, don’t have the TV on during dinnertime. In many homes, television has become the conversation during mealtimes when family members eat and watch, instead of interacting..

 Magazines 

            I have already described a number of girl-friendly magazines in Chapter Four which you can make available to your daughter. You will have to find your own balance between these conscious, non-stereotypical magazines and the glossy, popular ones that your daughter’s friends will probably be reading. Here’s a good rule from a mother of a thirteen-year-old I know: you agree to pay for the non-stereotyped magazines, while your daughter agrees to pay for the commercial ones. Simply forbidding her to look at mainstream magazines may only glamorize them.

Books

            As we saw in Chapter Four, more and more books. are becoming available for girls that have strong female protagonists and plot lines that appeal to girls’ sensibilities. Still, you have to be careful in your choices, especially if you’re used to pulling books at random for her from the library shelves. Here are some guidelines you can use to evaluate children’s books for their sexist content.

 Checking For Gender Stereotypes

 ° Look at copyright dates. Non-sexist books were generally not published before 1973. It wasn’t until the early 1970s that children’s books began to reflect the realities of a diverse society and when minority writers began writing about their own experiences.

 ° Assess the illustrations. Make a quick check to see if there are at least a roughly equal number of illustrations of females and males, and if the females are portrayed in positions of power and influence or as submissive and compliant.  Look for stereotypes such as a completely domesticated mother in an apron, a demure, passive girl or a wicked stepmother. Ask: Who is doing what? Are males in the active or leadership roles, the females passive? 

° Evaluate the plot lines of girls and women. Are the achievements of the girls and women portrayed based on their own initiative and intelligence, or is their achievement or success due to their good looks or to their relationship with boys? 

° Assess the gender roles. Are girls and women incidental or critical to the characterization and plot? Could the same story be told if the gender roles were reversed? 

° Weigh relationships between people. Do the females function only in supporting roles? 

°  Consider the effects on a child’s self-image. Are the female characters only “fair” and slim of body? Do males perform all the brave and important deeds? 

°  Watch for loaded words. Look for sexist language and adjectives that exclude or ridicule women. Look for the use of the male pronoun to refer to both males and females. 

            See Sources and Resources for several  annotated lists of good books for girls.

 Films and Videos 

            There are an increasing number of sensitive, provocative films made with strong female characters and with story lines that follow the interests of girls and women. These are well worth watching with your daughter to provide her images of strong girls and women, and to offer points of discussion between you. Watching them on a VCR allows you to stop a film and discuss a point that is being made or dissect a stereotype. Films can be terrific teaching tools when used conscientiously and with discrimination. See “Films for Girls” in Sources and Resources in the back.