"Packaging Girlhood" Chapter 3: What else they hear from peers: gossip

Thanks in part to the tween marketing campaign and its obession with sexy looks and crushes between eight-year-olds, by the time they're twelve most girls are looking forward to the teen years. Becoming a teen appears to be more exciting, and glamorous for girls in the end of theirreteen years. They have been exposed to and are actively seeking TV shows, movies, clothes, and magazines that vault them into full teen mode. All these factors contribue to the desire to be an older, sexy teenager whose obessions include shopping, boys, and gossip. Even the youngest of the teen magazines have articles about being a good kisser, and the rest have monthly tips about how to keep boys happy and avoid being the school slut. It's all about what others will think of you, based on your actions. There are crowds in middle school that take the job of defining the norm through cliques and gossip.  Both Sharon Lamb and Lyn Mikel Brown conducted a survey with middle school girls, and they claimed that the latest gossip is about bodies and appearance, attitude, relationships, and sex. These girls monitor themselves if they're going to be "normal"  and have good reputations. It begins to be a moral failing if a girl does not take care of herself, which means buying and wearing the right things. This constant struggle to be considered cool, calm and collected adds more unecessary pressure to preteens. Still, girls continue to snipe at each other with humiliating, repuation-damaging words. It is not always the case that boys externalize their rage and girls internalize it, but the higher levels of depression, eating disorders, and self-cutting behaviors that girls display demonstrate a sense of long-term impact these words have.

"Packaging Girlhood" Chapter 4: Reading Between the Lines: What Girls Read

While we realize that girls read books that are full of stereotypes, from cereal boxes dominated by male characters to the birthday cards that tell them how pretty and "special" they are, but feature boys having wild, rollicking birthday fun, we've limited this discussion to the core reading material marketed to girls: books and magazines.
Specifically, teen series books tend to contain a lot of stereotyping because they're written very quickly and depend heavily on cliches. The authors of the book, "Packaging Girlhood" interviewed an author who worked for a company that published books for girls. This author told them that as editors and writers, they sit around a table brainstorming an idea. The editors made sure that the writers would make their girl characters more like-able by putting some spinach in her front teeth. The topics of these books are generally boyfriends, magic, shopping, girl talk and dreams-the usual. Since the hyped-up mean girl phenomenon, a new spate of books about girl-against-girl competition has arisen, as in several series: The Clique; The It Girl; and The A-List.  One cliche that I have noticed throughout these books is that the lead girl is dissatisfied with herself and her body. The message I received from this was that to be a girl you have to be somewhat down on yourself and awkward. It makes girls feel as if their body will never be good enough, or always imperfect. Sooner or later some kind of competition is set up between the lead character and the more beautiful girl. There's always a girl who is prettier than the lead character and is a source of jealousy. Quite often the author makes her snobby or unlikeable, undoubtedly because the way to save girls' self-esteem is to teach her to say, "At least I'm nicer! At least I'm not her!" Comparing yourself to someone else only discredits who you are as a person. Girls generate their self esteem based off of how they compare to other girls. This only sets them up to feel bad about how they look or how they view themselves. Many of these books I never picked up only because I wasn't interested in knowing that being cool meant wearing a specific pair of shoes or getting clothes from specific stores. Many of these cliches are why girls act the way they do because it's all their exposed to by these writers and editors.

"Packaging Girllhood" Pretty in Pink: What Girls Wear

"Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketers' Schemes" is a book written by Sharon Lamb, Ed.D., and Lyn Mikel Brown, Ed.D. that exsposes the stereotypes of young girls and the very limited choices presented to girls of who or what they can be. Sharon Lamb and Lyn Mikel Brown gives guidance on how to talk with daughters about these negative images and provide the reader with the tools and information to help girls make more positive choices about the way they define themselves in the real world.
Chapter One emphasizes the clothing choices that young girls are given within stores such as J.C.Penney, Wal-Mart, Kmart, Old Navy, or any similar department or clothing store. When the two authors walked in J.C Penney, there were shirts tucked between racks of gliterry fairies, rhinestone-emblazoned  "Born to Shop" slogans, and pink "Angels Varsity Track Champs" shirts and only one plain red T-shirt stylishly fitted in its own plain way. A girl can choose her idenity, but the choices are frightfully limited: Professional Drama Queen, Paradise Princess, Pretty Princess Beauty Queen, 100% Angel, Princess Soccer Club, or Cheer Bunny. There used to be a distinction between little girl and preteen. Not any more. Pre teens and little girls are given a narrow range of choices of slogans that correlate to their personality type. One can either be the varisty track super star or the spoiled princess. I remember walking into Limited Too as a young girl being surrounded by a plethora of shirts that said, "Snow Bunny" or "Spoiled Rotten." This book directly relates to how others would perceive me depending on which shirt I decided to buy. I don't remember which one I opted for but I didn't have that many to choose from. The problem is not the single, silly T but the sheer quantity of products that offer so few options to girls and come with the marketing tentacles that seem to reach out, grab, create or remake everything into a narrow sexy image.