Girls Gone Skank

Instead of advancing women’s social and professional empowerment, popular culture trends appear to be backsliding into the blatant sexual exploitation of women and girls at younger and younger ages. This study investigates the effects of mass marketed sexual images and cultural trends on the behaviors and attitudes of young girls and describes many ways in which young girls are increasingly taught to go to outrageous lengths in seeking male attention. Topics include the powerful effects of cultural phenomena such as revealing fashions, plastic surgery, and beauty pageants in influencing teen and preteen girls to willingly participate in and promote their own sexualization. These chapters also explore other cultural factors contributing to this early sexualization of young girls, including absentee parenting and material overindulgence. Later chapters focus on the sexual representations of females in the mass entertainment media, focusing specifically on how popular magazines, television programs, films, and the Internet prey upon, promote, and reinforce young girls’ physical and sexual insecurities.

Patrice A. Oppliger is an assistant professor of mass communications at Boston University. She is the author of books on gender and social issues and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Patrice A. Oppliger
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 266
Bibliographic Info: bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2008
pISBN: 978-0-7864-3522-7
eISBN: 978-0-7864-8650-2
Imprint: McFarland

Acknowledgments      vii
Introduction      1

1. Fashion      7
2. Sexuality      22
3. Pornography      39
4. Strippers      51
5. Plastic Surgery      69
6. Beauty Pageants      79
7. Bad Behavior      95
8. Music      113
9. Print      132
10. Radio      141
11. Television      149
12. Film      161
13. The Internet      171
14. Sports      180
15. Fantasy      192
16. Empowerment or Exploitation?      205
17. Conclusions      219

References      237
Index      257