Youth Lens

Teenage rebellion is typically portrayed in stories, films, and other genres as a testosterone-based phenomenon. There is an overplayed need for one to acknowledge a boy’s rebellion against his father, his life direction, the “system,” in an effort to become a man, or rather an adult. However, rarely is the female addressed in such a scenario. What happens when little girls grow up? Do they rebel? Do they, in a sudden overpowering rush of estrogen, deny what has been taught to them from birth and shed their former youthful façades? Do they turn on their mothers? In Sharon Olds’ poem, “The Possessive,” the reader is finally introduced to the female version of the popular coming-of-age theme as a simple

Everyone can recall a time where they felt overwhelmed from the pressure to act a certain way, or conform to some idea of “perfection”(oppression?). In the poem “Girl,” author Jamaica Kincaid uses a variety of stylistic devices to portray the common frustration and plight of young females through a lecture given by a mother to her daughter in which the former guides the latter on proper behavior and fulfillment of her social duties. The first way Kincaid uses style is her individual sentence structure. The poem starts off with a list of domestic rules. “ Wash the clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothlines to dry” “cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil” “soak your

Little girls have become infatuated with looking, acting and dressing like princesses. In “What’s Wrong With Cinderella?” Peggy Orenstein writes “There are now more than 25,000 Disney Princess items. ''Princess,'' as some Disney execs call it, is not only the fastest-growing brand the company has ever created; they say it is on its way to becoming the largest girls' franchise on the planet” (Orenstein). The author explains how enormous of a franchise Disney princess items have become. The author physically cannot hide from their products; they are virtually everywhere.” As my daughter pointed out Disney Princess Band-Aids, Disney Princess paper cups, Disney Princess lip balm, Disney Princess pens, Disney Princess crayons and Disney Princess notebooks -- all cleverly displayed at the eye level of a 3-year-old trapped in a shopping cart -- as well as a bouquet of Disney Princess balloons bobbing over the checkout line. The repetition was excessive, even for a preschooler” (Ornstein). The over saturation of Disney does not leave girls with many other choices, they are being forced fed a brand and ideology from a very young age. This could have the potential of taking a toll on how young girls grow into mature emotionally developed women. Not only is Disney ingeniously marketing these characters to young girls, but it has become prevalent in everyone’s mainstream lives. Peggy insists “I'd smiled politely every

In Peggy Orenstein’s article, “What’s wrong with Cinderella?”, she analyzes the obsessions young girls have for stereotypical feminine products and toys, such as princesses and the color pink. Orenstein claims that such obsessions have negative effects on girls as they grow into women, restricting them into playing a specific role in adulthood. Although the author expresses much bias, she effectively supports her claims through her positions as a feminists and parent.

Coming of age presents major challenges and issues with which teenagers need to cope in order to find their identity especially in a conservative society that thrives on traditions and con-formity. Feminist literature like the two short stories “Boys and Girls” by Alice Munro and “The Women’s Swimming Pool” by Hanan al Shaykh portrays that sort of struggle between two young girls trying to come to terms with an older generation fostering fossilized gender roles and expectations. By focusing on two young girls’ internal and external conflicts, the authors depict the impact that the social order’s expectations have on adolescents and the life decisions they

In today’s generation no matter what gender a person is, they have expectations of society to act like either a “women” or “man”. Back in the day when our parents were growing up it wasn’t the same social standers. Girls didn’t have to deal with such high expectations. Adults usually can’t relate to our situation. In the two essays, Mary Piper’s, “Saplings in the Storm” and Sandra Cisneros “Barbie-Q”, gave a better perspective of girls going through adolescents. During this stage in their life they have to deal with social norms, which pressures girls to compare themselves to others and strive to be an unrealistic model of femininity. This emotional battle to blend in leads to metal distress while not allowing adolescent girl be themselves

Society has created in their minds the way a woman is supposed to act and the things they are allowed to do. In Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl”, we see a young woman being forced to live by the likeness of the society in which she dwells. Although this is not the life she wants to live, she has no other choice than to become the woman she was made to be.

Increasingly more frequently, people are considering how important gender roles truly are, and if they have a beneficial impact on people’s lives. As Margaret Mead, a famous female anthropologist from the 1920’s recognizes in “Sex and Temperament,” countless individuals may suffer from strict standardization of gender roles and temperaments. These standardizations in America equate women to being “feminine;” beautiful, caring, soft, sweet, emotional, and dainty—the fairytale princess, while men are constantly expected to be strong, stoic, and aggressive much like a knight in shining armor. Although when women realize that they are not locked in towers guarded by dragons and they do not need to wait around for a prince to come and save their lives and bring them home to a kingdom to be queen, they have potential to do so much more and take whatever path they choose. Men also do not need to train their whole lives in order to save this damsel in distress’s life. Beyond that fantasy, in order to sustain lives in reality, there has obviously always been a need for certain roles in a family—one person to raise and take care of children, and one to go out and bring back provisions so life can continue here on Earth.

More often than not, princesses are portrayed as feminine and dainty, interested only in clothes, jewellery, and seducing the handsome prince. These are not ideal traits to be teaching children, yet we expose them to media reinforcing these traits with hardly a second thought. The need to fit the dainty feminine role of women portrayed by these princesses is becoming very evident in the adolescents of today. There is evidence that young women who hold the most conventionally feminine beliefs — who avoid conflict and think they should be constantly nice and pretty — are more likely to be depressed than others. In a survey released last October by Girls Inc., school-age girls overwhelmingly reported a paralyzing pressure to be “perfect”: not only to get straight A’s and be the student-body president, editor of the newspaper but also to be “kind and caring,” “please everyone, be very thin and dress right.” Sounds like they need a fairy godmother just as bad as Cinderella

My research for this essay will focus on uncovering how teenaged girls have been portrayed in the film industry, particularly with regards to decades since the 1980s. I hope to discover and learn from multiple literary opinions about the patterns as well as the thematic differences between the struggles of teen girls in films throughout the last 30 years. While mainly focusing on Mean Girls (2004), Clueless (1995), and The Breakfast Club (1985), I plan to direct my research towards how these specific decades portrayed in each film are the source of the aforementioned thematic differences. For example, I might try to find research explaining the cultural aspects behind Claire from The Breakfast Club’s struggle with finding her true identity in a culturally segregated high school in the 1980s.

As women are expected to be a particular way depending on their culture, by challenging what is normal in their society they find a sense of individuality and in this case can be dangerous. As women find their true selves, they become stronger than a society’s masculinity can hold. Therefore, there are expectations that cultures place on women but not men to keep them in their place. These include the nurturing, doting wife and mother role or the polite, dainty and modest bachelorette role. When a woman breaks from this, she finds no need for a man to care for her, and can

Furthermore, higher levels of stereotypes behaviours for girls could be problematic according to Dinella, “Grown women who self-identified as “princesses” gave up more easily on a challenging task, were less likely to want to work, and were more focused on superficial qualities”(Coyne et al., 2016).

It is often questioned whether tween literature is too mature for its targeted age group. With themes of murder, sexual abuse, neglect, and other forms of violence, both physical and psychological, there seems to be one topic that is slightly more prevalent when speaking about tween literature. Tween literature and culture is often marketed towards young girls and their parents, because of this, it becomes easy to talk about themes of feminism in tween literature. More specifically, due to the time period in which tween culture became mainstream, postfeminism is a topic that is often heavily discussed around tween literature. Both Gail Levine’s novel, Ella Enchanted, as well as Louise Fitzhugh’s novel Harriet the Spy, can both be analyzed using a postfeminist lense. By using a postfeminist lense in analyzing these books, the issues of postfeminism become apparent when addressing issues such as a false sense of choice for young girls, an idea that they must be ashamed for who they are and the views that they hold. It is further complicated when it becomes apparent that due to postfeminist ideology, women, and specifically young girls have lost the ability to articulate sexism when it affects them. Through these points of contention regarding postfeminism, it becomes aparent that society is not quite ready to hold postfeminist views, since there is still an imbalance of power that women face on a day to day basis.

American popular culture of the Cold War period is associated with the ideas of non-conformity among those who do not possess much power in the society. As it can be seen from the Chapter 12 in Major Problems in American Popular Culture, the two groups associated with rebellion are teenagers/schoolchildren and young females. Clearly, these two cases are quite different, provided the concerns around the behaviours of school kids are mostly linked to delinquency, while young female popular culture is often criticised for the excessive sexual liberation. Nevertheless, increased interest in sex is also a concern for the critics of teenager popular culture, primarily, comic books that, in the views of many, promoted violence and sexuality.

Men, for the most part, agree with the social norms of beauty. Watching television, reading magazines, or simply walking down the street with their fathers, girls see the appreciation thin, beautiful women receive from men. In turn, the girls believe that if they were thin and beautiful, they would have a better relationship with their father. Fathers though, have a difficult time with dealing with the fact that their daughters are beautiful, even if they are, because of the facts that they do not want their little girls to grow up and also because they cannot relate to what they see as 'premature sexuality' (Palazzoli). When girls begin to express themselves sexually, then, fathers become more distant from the relationship, often seeing the situation as one the mother should deal with. If the father does feel the need to play a role in this stage of his daughter's development, it is mostly to warn her against the evils of boys her age and the threat and consequences of pregnancy and disease. There is rarely a sit down discussion of what it means to be woman from a man's perspective between fathers and daughters. This indifference leads the daughter to work harder for her father's approval, and often has disastrous results.