Today in Media and Gender Talk I’m talking with Dr. Laura Carroll, associate professor of English in the Department of Language and Literature at Abilene Christian University. Dr. Carroll studies rhetorical theory and has a special interest in feminist rhetoric of the 20th Century.

I asked Dr. Carroll to share some thoughts with us about the way that culture shapes the vision of the ideal woman, the ways that public rhetoric has changed that ideal throughout the 20th century, and the ways that feminism has been challenged and needs to continue developing in current days.

We talk about the Cult of Domesticity and the way that ideal womanhood promoted in the 19th century quickly changed during the World War II when women were needed in the factories. This was true both in the United States

Example of public rhetoric promoting women working in factories during WWII http://www.rockwell-center.org/essays-illustration/shes-a-wow/

US Government Publicity photo of American machine tool worker in Texas

and in the United Kingdom and Common Wealth

Salvage – Up Housewives and at ’em – put out your paper, metal, bones. Artist Yates-Wilson

Things changed again post World War II when men returned home and needed jobs in the US, or didn’t return home in  Europe.

Dr. Carroll also discusses the Womanist Movement and in particular, the work of Audre Lorde. For more on women who have made significant changes to the feminist movement, see this article. 

See the digital story below for a look at some of Dr. Carroll’s most recent work on Monuments and Memorials and the Rhetoric of Place.

This week on Gender and Media Talk I’m talking with two experts, Lori Day and Pia Guerrero about the challenges that girls face in becoming leaders and strategies that caring adults can use to help build their skills and confidence.

Lori Day is an educational psychologist and consultant with Lori Day Consulting in Newburyport, MA. She is the author of Her Next Chapter: How mother-daughter book clubs can help girls navigate malicious media, risky relationships, girl gossip, and so much more. She also speaks on the topic of raising confident girls in a disempowering marketing and media culture.

Pia Guerrero is a media literacy and youth development expert with a focus on body image, race, and representation in the media. From Harlem to Hawaii, she has led presentations to hundreds of teachers, youth workers, and youth on the impact the media has on identity. Pia has also worked with and/or advised the Department of Education, PBS, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and the Independent Television Service (ITVS). Her work with Adios Barbie has been mentioned in MSNBC, BBC 4, The New York Times, Forbes, Al-Jazeera, Seventeen, Fitness, Glamour, among others. Pia has also appeared numerous times as an expert on CNN’s Headline News (HLN) and Huffington Post Live. She is also the Executive Director of SheHeroes, a non-profit that profiles exceptional career women for their accomplishments and character with the purpose of empowering girls to pursue rewarding careers.

Today we’ll be discussing a new report that was just released by Harvard’s Making Caring Common. The report is called Leaning Out: Teen girls and leadership biases. This report indicates that girls continue to face challenges in being perceived as leaders, and shares some common biases that many girls, boys, men and women have that keep girls from developing their full potential. Thankfully, the report also shares some strategies that parents, teachers, and other caring adults can use to support girls in developing their leadership skills.

We’ll also talk about this article on the report from the Washington Post. In the same vein, we’ll spend some time discussing this article from The Conversation, which reports on research suggesting that even now, when people across the world think of science, they think of men.

I’ve asked Lori and Pia to share their thoughts on the Harvard report and the articles, challenges to girls as they strive to develop leadership skills, and strategies to support them.

You can find out more about Lori and Pia and the work that they do to empower girls at the links below.

Lori Day

http://www.loridayauthor.com

http://www.motherdaughterbookclubs.com

Pia Guerrero

http://www.adiosbarbie.com

http://www.sheheroes.org

Today on Gender and Media Talk we’re talking with Dr. Elizabeth Daniels, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs. Dr. Daniels is a developmental psychologist who studies gender, media, body image, and positive youth development. I became aware of her work as I was working on my own research on sexualized media.

In media, women are often presented as objects rather than as agents. What do I mean by that? Objects are things that serve the purposes of others, while agents are active participants who advance their own agendas. The view of women as objects is very passive and doesn’t have anything to do with what the woman herself wants or needs. The view of women as agents is active and focuses on her own goals.

In two studies, Dr. Daniels has investigated how boys and girls respond to sexualized images of female athletes compared to athletes pictured performing in their chosen sport.

Dr. Daniels wanted to see if adolescent girls and college women would tend to look at themselves first as objects of desire after viewing the sexualized pictures of female athletes as compared to viewing a female athlete playing a sport.

In another study, she wanted to see if adolescent boys focused on different qualities of female athletes depending on if they were viewing sexualized, objectifying or performance-oriented photos.

There has been some hope expressed by many that the depiction of female athletes in popular media can help girls and boys see female bodies from a different perspective, less objectification and more agency.  Meaning, instead of viewing girls and women primarily as objects of desire, we can see them as has having strong, healthy bodies that are used to accomplish a goal for themselves, such as playing a sport.

Research has shown that girls who are actively involved athletes tend to be less likely to engage in risk sexual behaviors. In my own work, I’ve found that adolescent girls who play sports do tend to have more body confidence and express a stronger ability to see themselves as agents in their physical relationships.

But, a lot of female athletes are also highly sexualized in the media, from the Sports Illustrated’s “International Athletes” section of their swimsuit addition to Danica Patrick’s Go Daddy images. Dr. Daniels says in her 2009 article,

In other words, they take great examples of women who are acting as agents, and objectify them.

In both of the studies I mentioned above, it was found that adolescent girls and boys who view sexualized images of female athletes are more likely to then reflect objectified views of women. For the girls, this meant that they viewed themselves as objects of another’s desire. For boys, this meant that instead of focusing on the athlete’s abilities and strength, they focused on her as a sexual object.

I asked Dr. Daniels for her thoughts on how we can help kids respond to sexualized media, and she gave some very specific ideas. Below I’ll list a few that we discussed:

What I’m advocating is a kind of media “show and tell” with both younger children and adolescents. Find age appropriate ways to open up the conversation about what it means to be treated as an object and an agent. As we work to increase the media literacy of children and adolescents, these kinds of conversations are vital.

Daniels, E.A. & Wartena, H. (2011). Athlete or Sex Symbol: What Boys Think of Media Representations of Female Athletes. Sex Roles, DOI 10.1007/s11199-011-9959-7

Daniels, E.A. (2009). Sex Objects, Athletes, and Sexy Athletes : How Media Representations of Women Athletes Can Impact Adolescent Girls and College Women. Journal of Adolescent Research 24: 399 DOI: 10.1177/0743558409336748

In his book, Challenging Casanova: Beyond the Stereotype of the Promiscuous Young Male, Dr. Andrew P. Smiler, America’s leading expert on the masculine self, talks about and challenges the Casanova Complex, which is the idea that all men and teen boys are interested in being sexually promiscuous. Smiler says that the truth is that most men and boys are not interested in having multiple sexual partners with no ties to relationship. Instead, most guys prefer their sexual experiences to be a part of a caring relationship.

Smiler points out that boys often miss out on conversations and lessons about how to develop healthy relationships, how to ask for what you want in a relationship, how to gain consent, how to give or withhold consent, and how to have a healthy, mutually respectful relationship. He recommends that parents and other caring adults:

Challenging Casanova is a great book for parents and professionals who want to understand the modern boy. Dr. Smiler’s next book, Dating and Sex: A Guide for the 21st Center Teen Boy is a handbook for teen boys themselves, and will be out in December 2015.

To find out more about his work, check out Dr. Smiler’s website.

Today’s podcast in Gender and Media Talk focuses on the research of Dr. Elizabeth Sweet, who studies gendered toy packaging and how it both effects and reflects gender roles in society. This podcast was recorded on April 3, 2015.

If you watch Saturday morning commercials or other advertisements directed toward children, you’ll see a very gendered approach to marketing toys. Even in toy stores, toys are clearly delineated into blue and pink sections.

What about toys that both boys and girls like to play with, like LEGO, Lincoln Logs, and other building and craft making equipment? These toys are often in the boy aisle. When we do see those products in the “girl” section, they are marketed in a distinctly different way.

For example, consider the LEGO Friends Line. In this article in Bloomberg Businessweek, it is clear that LEGO has done exhaustive work trying to understand what has kept girls from playing with them before and what would make LEGO more attractive to girls. As my friend, Michele, from Princess Free Zone made clear in her excellent post on this topic, perhaps girls don’t see LEGO as attractive because since 2005, as stated in the Business Week article, the company has been aiming straight at boys.

But this type of gendered marketing is fairly new. As this LEGO ad from the 80’s shows, the company promoted the product to both girls and boys as fun building sets.

In an article interviewing the woman who appeared in this LEGO ad in 1981, she stated,

But now, as Dr. Sweet says in her recent article in The Atlantic,

I hope you’ll enjoy hearing her expand on her study of how toy ads have changed, what she thinks that means for children today, and some strategies for responding to gendered advertisements.