Girls, Moral Panic and News Media

Troublesome Bodies

Sharon Mazzarella

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429516658
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Mazzarella examines the representational politics behind journalistic constructions of US girls and girlhood through a series of contemporary in-depth case studies which work to document a wider cultural moral panic about the troublesome nature of girls' bodies.

The public concern and media fascination with youth so evident in the United States today is a century-old phenomenon. From the flappers of the 1920s to the bobbysoxers of the 1950s, from the hippies of the 1960s and on to the ever-present pregnant teens, this fascination has played out in the media and has consistently focused on (primarily White, middle-class, heterosexual) girls. A growing body of research has revealed the manner in which journalistic practice constructs such girls as problems. Girls, Moral Panic, and News Media takes a broad look at U.S. news media constructions of girls, girlhoods, and girl's bodies/sexualities through a series of contemporary in-depth case studies including news coverage of the 2008 Gloucester (MA) High School "pregnancy pact, " teen gun control activist Emma González, and the sexualization of "early puberty." In general, the news media constructs girls' bodies as troublesome and in need of adult surveillance and policing. These case studies document a cultural obsession with girls' bodies—an obsession that often approaches moral panic.

This book will be key reading for researchers and instructors in the rapidly growing international and interdisciplinary field of Girls' Studies, and scholars of Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, Communication and Journalism.

1

CONSTRUCTING “OPHELIAS”

Time Magazine, Neoliberalism, and the Next Female Generation

As will be discussed further in Chapter Four, during the 1990s a number of high-profile books about girls’ lives were published, many arguing that U.S. girls entering adolescence were experiencing a dramatic decline in self-esteem, body image, and academic performance (see e.g., AAUW, 1991; Brown & Gilligan, 1992; Brumberg, 1997; Orenstein, 1994; Sadker & Sadker, 1994). But it was the 1994 publication of the book Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher ¹ that piqued the interest and concern of parents, educators, advocates, and journalists alike. Pipher’s book hit a nerve, due in part to her forthright assertion that girls were growing up in a “girl poisoning culture” (p. 12) and that consequently they faced “incredible pressures to be beautiful and sophisticated, which in junior high means using chemicals and being sexual” (p. 12). The Washington Post summed up Pipher’s concerns as follows:

Where once female adolescence was just a parent-torturing time of door slamming, emotional swings and self-conscious misery … it now can be dangerous, even deadly. She [Pipher] points to body-mutilating diets, piercing, self-cutting, drug-taking, drinking and unprotected sex as symptoms of widespread self-destruction.

(Rosenfeld, 1996)

It is not surprising that Reviving Ophelia generated extensive hand-wringing and media coverage, as many readers believed they recognized themselves, their daughters, and/or an entire generation of girls in Pipher’s case studies of female teens who were anorexic, self-mutilating, failing school, rebelling against their parents, and so forth. Published by trade presses rather than academic presses, books like Reviving Ophelia (Pipher, 1994) “received enough national promotion, as well as critical attention, to make them best-sellers” (Kearney, 2006, p. 105). In fact, Kearney (2006, p. 105) credited these books with contributing, in part, to a “resurgence of girls’ advocacy” campaigns, paralleling a similar movement 100 years earlier. Kearney argued that it was during the 1990s that the “popular discourse constructing female ‘youth’ as troubled reached another crescendo,” a resurgence that, she argued, was “intrinsically related to a concurrent increase in research on girls’ loss of self-esteem during adolescence” (p. 105).

Not surprisingly, the popularity and sales of these books did not go unnoticed by the U.S. press, who entered into the discourse with a wealth of articles discussing girls and girls’ lives. In 2007, Norma Pecora and I published a study analyzing how U.S. newspapers covered girls’ lives during this period (Mazzarella & Pecora, 2007). Grounded in Frame Theory, we documented a consistent framing strategy that situated a generation of girls as being in crisis, lacking agency, and desperately in need of adult intervention. In this chapter, I begin by not only recapping some of the primary findings of this earlier research, but also rethinking those findings through a different theoretical lens and with the benefit of a grounding in an evolving and broadening Girls’ Studies literature. While Mazzarella & Pecora (2007) provided important insights into the journalistic strategies used to construct girls during that time period, it lacked a more feminist, Girls’ Studies approach to understanding the same news stories in particular as they were produced within a broader neoliberal mindset (e.g., Egan, 2013; Gonick, 2006; Harris, 2004; Projansky, 2014)

The main focus of this chapter, however, is an original textual analysis of how one magazine, Time, has contributed to a discourse about U.S. girlhood. (Note that I am purposely using the singular “girlhood” in that preceding sentence, and will discuss that later in the chapter.) Time has a long history (published since 1923), is generally held in high regard, and despite declining sales of all print magazines, continues to have the second-highest weekly magazine circulation after People. Informed by the feminist Girls’ Studies literature cited in the previous paragraph, the goal of this chapter is to critically examine the “popular discourse” about girls and girls’ lives as presented through this iconic cultural artifact. I begin, however, by revisiting Mazzarella & Pecora (2007).

Revisiting Mazzarella & Pecora (2007)

To conduct our textual and content analysis of U.S. newspaper coverage of girls, Norma Pecora and I (2007) examined 169 articles in U.S. newspapers located using the LexisNexis Academic University database originally published between January 1, 1993 through January 1, 1999 (the years immediately preceding and following the publication of Reviving Ophelia). (Please refer to the original article for more details on methodology, coding categories, and operational definitions.) Overall, we found that fewer than 10% offered a purely optimistic view of girls’ lives, a phenomenon we noted was evident even at first glance from article headlines, many of which are reprinted below.

• “Perils of puberty: girls ‘crash and burn’ in adolescence” (Eicher, 1994) (Denver Post)
• “Girls face greater hurdles today” (Brody, 1997b) (The Arizona Republic)
• “Girls at risk: Body size is an obsession for adolescents with eating disorders” (Bronston, 1997) (Times-Picayune)
• “Crossing ‘confidence gap’ poses high hurdle for girls” (Brecher, 1994) (Miami Herald)
• “Suffering in silence” (1998) (The Washington Post)
• “Desperately seeking perfection” (Linfield, 1997) (Los Angeles Times)
• “Starving for self esteem” (Williams, 1994) (San Diego Union-Tribune)
• “A perilous age for girls” (Mann, 1997) (The Washington Post)
• “Young girls face tough time living up to expectations” (Jones, 1996) (The Arizona Republic)
• “Teen girls no longer enjoy an age of innocence” (Manning, 1997) (USA Today)
• “Adolescent girls and the self-esteem gap” (Evans, 1994) (The Washington Post)
• “The rocky road to a girl’s adolescence” (Carroll, 1994) (USA Today)
• “Growing up is risky business for girls” (Brody, 1997c) (Star Tribune)
• “Sexual abuse tied to 1 in 4 girls in teens” (Lewin, 1997) (The New York Times)
• “Emotional ills tied to stunted growth in girls” (Gilbert, 1996) (The New York Times)

The preponderance of negative and often frightening descriptors in these headlines was notable given that headlines purposely function to invite readers into the discourse. Words like “perils,” “hurdles,” “obsession,” “starving,” “ills,” “suffering,” “rocky road,” and “risky business” presaged a growing crisis—a crisis that was further elaborated on within the articles themselves. For example, we found that just under half of the articles addressed problems with girls’ body image, while a comparable percentage mentioned girls’ low self-esteem. Other frequently covered issues included weak academic performance, emotional health problems (depression, suicide, anxiety), a host of sexuality-related issues (pregnancy, sexual behavior, STDs, sexual abuse), and risky behaviors (substance use, cutting) (Mazzarella & Pecora, 2007, p. 13).

But it was not just the numbers that told the story. The discourse of crisis and urgency infused the way journalists talked about that generation of girls. For example, a 1994 article in the Los Angeles Times read:

Superficially, the lives of 12-year-old girls today appear to revolve, much as mine did a generation ago, around lipstick and nail polish, paper-thin 16-year-old movie stars … and the thrills coming from hearing female singers wax on about love … [but] growing up today is a much riskier proposition.

(Marks, 1994)

This article continued on to enumerate the reasons why: “the obsession with weight loss, the idealization of fashion-model subculture, the high rate of teen pregnancy and the incidence of suicide.”

Such warnings were typically introduced in the opening paragraph of the article, such as the following two articles published in The Washington Post and The New York Times, respectively:

The world of adolescent girls, we’ve heard, is a frightening place littered with hazards: sex with its risks of psychic pain, teen pregnancy and deadly disease; impossible beauty standards that encourage eating disorders; alliances with boys who have twisted ideas about manhood.

(Britt, 1996)

The teen-age years have never been easy. They can be especially difficult for girls, who experience hormonal influences that wreck their prepubescent physical equality with boys, cause radical changes in body shape and weight and sometimes touch off emotional and reproductive upheavals. But for many reasons, the challenges facing adolescent girls have never been greater than they are today.

(Brody, 1997a)

Looking back at this research over a decade later, through a different theoretical lens, with a greater understanding of the evolution of Girls’ Studies as a field, and with a grounding in the importance of diversity and intersectionality in the study of girlhoods (plural), has enabled me to see what we missed in grounding our original analysis solely in Frame Theory. For example, in focusing on how these sources constructed the “girl” as being in a very particular kind of “crisis,” we failed to address what these articles were omitting. Typically for quantitative content analyses (which was one of the methods we used), scholars use an a priori coding form to check off when specific content is observed. Our coding form included a list of 18 “issues” that we created from “an initial cursory reading of the articles” (p. 13), a strategy that is typical for content analyses. Looking back at the list now, what strikes me is that all of the issues were, for the most part, individualized—there were no broader social, cultural, or systemic issues. So in other words, while we had “sexual/physical abuse” on the list, we did not include “rape culture.” While we included “academic performance/achievement,” we omitted “inequalities in access to education.” My point is that like the articles, not to mention the wealth of books and reports published during that time period, we too focused primarily on individualized rather than systemic issues in structuring the study. I have since revisited the original newspaper articles, and it is clear that even if we had included more systemic topics on the coding form, it would not have altered the results; however, the lack of coverage of systemic issues affecting girls is something we should have addressed in our analysis. Had we included such topics on our coding form, we would have been better positioned to argue for this shortcoming in the original newspaper stories and to situate their coverage within a broader neoliberal discourse.

Looking back at the original research, it is also notable that most of the articles made no attempt at understanding that girlhoods is a plural and intersectional phenomenon, as the journalists mostly ignored the differences in girls’ lived experiences based on their race, immigration experience, social class, region, sexual identity, ability, and so on. When they did address such differences, usually when reporting on a study that found differences based on race, the majority of the articles still predominantly talked about “girls” as a uniform entity, with a brief and late mention of racial differences. For example, an article titled “Crossing ‘confidence gap’ poses high hurdle for girls” (Brecher, 1994), published in the Miami Herald, did address differences in assertiveness between African American and White girls, but only after an initial lengthy section talking about “girls” in general—or rather about the undefined and normative White girl. As Richard Dyer (1997) reminds us, Whiteness in media is typically understood, unnamed. It was even rarer for an article to challenge the tendency of journalists to conflate “girlhood” with White, middle-class girls. A lengthy 1998 article in The Christian Science Monitor (Gabrels) stands out in retrospect for its rarity in noting: “And as mainstream interest grows, researchers warn against lumping girls into one monolithic category, against thinking that the voices of white middle-class girls define the needs of all girls.” The article went on to quote Sumru Erkut of Wellesley College’s Center for Research on Women as noting the different girlhood experiences that some researchers were then beginning to take into account. “We’re starting to move into the plural ‘girls’ … rather than just looking at the idea of the ‘girl’.” But that was not necessarily the case with all of the scholarship covered in the stories.

Specifically, we reported that 63% of the articles recounted or quoted from one or another book or study published around that time. Given that many of these books and studies themselves have been called out for focusing primarily or exclusively on White, middle-class girls (Erkut et al., 1996), we can assume that the “girls” discussed by journalists were also predominantly White and middle class. If so, then journalists constructed a singular “girlhood” as synonymous with White, middle-class girls, yet we ourselves did not follow up on that.

Moreover, as discussed in this book’s Introduction, Gonick (2006) understands both the “Girl Power” and “Reviving Ophelia” discourses as being about middle-class White girls, with the latter being girls who have failed to live up to the performance of gender of their own group. To support this, she cites the wave of girls-in-crisis books published starting in the late 1990s, notably Reviving Ophelia (1994), and one could also add the resulting news coverage. At this point, rather than go back and reanalyze the original 169 articles, I chose to bring another “voice” into the conversation by focusing on one specific publication but over a much longer time period, and to do so informed by a broader range of critical/cultural scholarship. The remainder of this chapter discusses that project.

Time to Talk about Girls

Moving on from the resea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Constructing “Ophelias”: Time Magazine, Neoliberalism, and the Next Female Generation
• 2. “Precious Years … Lost”: Early Puberty and the Discourse of Sexualization
• 3. “The Perfect Storm”: Constructing the Gloucester High School Pregnancy Pact
• 4. American Girls & Sex Manufacturing a Crisis around Girls and Social Media
• 5. “The Media Loves Emma González”: Activism, Celebrification, and Intersecting Identities
• Conclusion: Making Sense of “The Grand Narrative”
• Index