2008 Woodie Awards
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Starr Symposium speaker discusses media effects on girlhood
David Cordill
Issue date: 3/10/08 Section: News
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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.
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