The books, though, are marketed to the tween demographic in the first place. And I’m not sure what they make of it; even though the narrator (the invisible, omnipresent, omniscient Gossip Girl) has a somewhat facetious tone, I’m willing to bet that they take the books more seriously than they are intended to be. There is a whole lot of product placement–Serena’s latest purse or Blair’s latest perfume or Jenny’s trip to Bergdorf Goodman–and I wouldn’t be surprised if some tweens insist on emulating their favorite characters by having their parents buy certain things for them.

But the point is: the CW (home to pretty white kids with problems) is making a TV series based on the books, to debut this fall. I will probably tune in to the first episode, then finish the semester and watch the rest online during Winter Break. You can watch three clips here. Something interesting I noticed in the clips is that Kati and Isabel–Blair’s two sidekicks/cronies/lackeys in the books–are played by an Asian-American actress and an African-American actress. I don’t recall there being a description of what K & I (as Gossip Girl would refer to them as) look like in the books, so it seems like the CW is trying to ‘diversify’ the very white world of the gossip girl books. Then again, the cover of the first book does depict someone with darker-than-tan skin:

But considering that K & I don’t add much to the books, I doubt they’ll be adding much to the series–this is pretty blatant tokenism (see also). And also, the show’s casting directors changed the main character of Jenny, who is frequently described as being short, having curly brown hair, and huge boobs (to show her un-WASPiness and juxtapose her with her idol Serena, who is tall, blonde, and lithe) is being played by an actress who doesn’t fit at least two of the three given physical qualifications (but still seems to fit the ‘mousiness’ of the role), colorblind casting doesn’t seem too ludicrous. But who am I kidding, that would never happen. This is the CW.

I am looking forward to the show though. With The O.C. (another how about rich white kids, plus the novelty of a poor white kid, with problems, but which actually at least started out tackling those problems pretty cleverly) creator Josh Scwartz at the helm, I think it could be quite the enjoyable guilty pleasure.  Oh, and recently cancelled Veronica Mars‘ Kristen Bell will be narrating!

The author, Colleen Carroll Campbell, gets so much right:

Today’s pop culture tells women that sexual power is the kind that counts most and they can achieve it by showing skin. That message has trickled down to girls, forcing them to trade carefree childhood pleasures for sexual competition.

You can see them in the mall, tugging nervously at their skimpy shorts and halter tops, straining to see how men react to their little bellies flouncing out of low-slung jeans. They look more exploited than empowered as they fuss and cringe, adjust and squirm. How odd that in an age when girls have more athletic and academic opportunities than ever, girlhood has become a high-pressure dress-rehearsal for adult mating games.

This is no doubt, disturbing. As are the following conclusions:

The American Psychological Association recently issued an alarming report on this trend, concluding that girls who view themselves as sex objects are more prone to academic failure, depression, eating disorders, low self-esteem, and poor self-image…A 2005 study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine showed a strong correlation between sexual activity and depression in teenage girls – a correlation far stronger than the one seen in boys, with girls’ depression rates rising as the number of sexual partners rose. The study suggests that sexual experimentation is not a symptom but a cause of depression in teenage girls.

No doubt it’s a problem that sexual activity and depression are so strongly correlated among teenage girls. But I think the author makes a big leap when she says that the study ‘suggests’ that sexual experimentation is the cause of depression. It’s too patronizing and moralistic, and she doesn’t cite it to boot. It’s a justification for the ‘modesty movement’ she describes and supports:

Many parents feel powerless to resist the objectification of their daughters. But others are fighting back. A new modesty movement is sprouting in cities from Denver to Atlanta, with Pure Fashion shows drawing crowds of modesty-conscious mothers and daughters, new retailers like Shade Clothing reporting multi-million dollar sales figures for clothes that keep private parts private, and feisty online communities like ModestyZone.net encouraging rebels against raunchy culture.

The girls and women behind this movement say they are not looking to revive gunny-sack dresses or relive the 1950s. They simply want to be seen as more than the sum of their body parts.

Again, capitalism (note that this is becoming a multi-million dollar industry) is dressed up with a certain ideology, but in this case, it’s an ideology of the ‘struggle for protection from sexual influences,’ not the ‘movement toward liberation through the use of my sexuality.’

Don’t get me wrong; of course children shouldn’t be sexualized. But there comes a time in life called puberty, and at that time, both boys and girls do realize their sexuality. While a teenage girl should entirely have the choice the dress herself modesty, what I see here is not a choice, but rather a reaction against the other ‘choice’ of participating in the raunch culture. Check out Campbell’s credentials–she is very much a part of the Christian Right, who also advocate abstinence-only sex education. Yes, teenage girls and young women are inappropriately sexualized in our society, but I also think they should be allowed the choice of discovering their sexuality, or sensuality, or pleasure in their bodies, or just a love for fashion or what have you. Ignoring the fact that sexuality exists among adolescents only leads to more problems itself.

Another troublesome aspect of both ‘choices’–the raunch culture, or the modesty movement–is that both are about changing how the girls represent themselves; neither are about changing how boys and men look at and treat girls. If we really want to give people more choices in our society, we need to come at it from many different angles, not just the Madonna/whore dichotomy that we still look at women through.

Supermodel Cindy Crawford caused controversy last September by allowing her 5-year-old daughter, Kaya Jordan Gerber, to pose for Melissa Odabash‘s children’s swimwear campaign last summer. It seems like it wouldn’t be a big deal, since it’s for a children’s swimwear campaign, right? Well, the pictures caused controversy because Kaya was wearing a bikini and standing in the typical risque poses that adult models use, not to mention she had a tattoo on her lower back and was posing topless.

I don’t think I even need to explain why this photo is wrong (okay–the toplessness, the lower back tattoo, the coy over-the-shoulder pose–it is basically child pornography). So it’s not surprising to see why the pictures generated controversy–nary a week later, they were taken off Odabash’s website. Furthermore, Crawford’s representative claimed that

“Cindy’s friends own this company. It was just a fun little photo shoot they did in Malibu one day. Kaya is not modeling.”

Which is, um, a total lie. But anyway, I’m glad to see that the sexualization of young girls hasn’t gone so far that people don’t even realize that it’s wrong anymore. In other words, even if parents themselves see no problem with sexualizing their daughters, at least other people in our society, like the ones that got Odabash to take the pictures off her website, do.

What is multiculturalism?  Wikipedia provides a comprehensive summary of its history, but it’s basically the idea that modern societies should “embrace and include distinct cultural groups with equal cultural and political status.”  Basically, it’s the ‘melting pot’ (or more recently, ‘mosaic’ or ‘salad bowl’) ideal of American society that I know I grew up learning about in school.  The multicultural idea posits that a society should not only ’tolerate’ different cultures, but that people can in fact benefit from diversity, as we saw in the examples of “Cheetah Sisters” and Bratz the Movie.

The multicultural phenomenon in popular culture really took off in the mid-1990s in the U.S., which makes sense demographically, given the rising numbers of immigrants, especially from Latin America and Asia–remember when Madonna wore a bindi?  And remember the macarena?  Well, a decade later, we have ample evidence that marketers have kept multiculturalism in mind while creating products for tweens to consume:

• May I point out the more obvious examples from the 90′s, Pocahontas and Mulan?  And Princess Jasmin, Aladdin’s one true love?
• More recently, Disney announced plans to create its first black princess, Maddy, featured in the upcoming movie The Frog Princess.  Set in New Orleans during the Jazz Age, the film will be Disney’s first hand-drawn one since 2004.  Reappropriate and Racialicious both express hope and some apprehension about this.  On one hand, why didn’t this happen sooner?  And will this end up being stereotypical (Racialicious mentions the possibility of “jive-talking frogs and voodoo priests”)?  But on the other hand, isn’t putting a black lead character that girls from all backgrounds will presumably relate to (since Disney will no doubt market it as best as it can) a step in the right direction?
• Also recently, Nickelodeon has announced plans to create an animated series called “Ni Hao, Kai-lan,” in which viewers will follow young Chinese-American Kai-lan around as she interacts with the world and with her multigenerational household.  According to this article that describes the process that found the voice of Kai-lan (to be played by Canadian 10-year-old Jade-Lianna Peters), the show will be “about what it’s like to be bicultural in America.”  And much like Dora the Explorer teaches kids basic Spanish, Kai-lan will teach kids Mandarin Chinese.

So through these examples (which are just a limited sample of a much bigger field), I can see two beneficial effects of consumerism.  For one, it seems like the use of ‘multicultural’ characters, no matter how big a role they play (though ideally, different characters could play the lead no matter what their background was), can positively influence the development of young nonwhite girls.  It seems pretty simple: seeing yourself represented on screen (or as a doll, or in a magazine) tells you that you exist, and that people like you matter.  This applies not only to race, but also to different body types and personal styles.  By incorporating this ‘diversity’ into media in a nonstereotypical manner (e.g. without Kai-lan and her family being portrayed as the ‘yellow peril’ about the take over America, or without fat women in the media always being portrayed as crazed for sex), society can come closer to making everyone feel welcome and appreciated.

But critics will ask, ‘Why does it matter if there’s a cartoon character of such-and-such race?  Doesn’t that just promote the idea that people should only relate to people who look like them?  Why can’t they relate to the characters we have already?’  First of all, nonwhite people have been expected for so long to ‘relate’ to white people when it comes to media representation, much as women have been expected to ‘relate’ to men when it comes to things like reading books with male versus female lead characters.  There is evidence that this actually can be damaging to a person’s self-development on a racial basis, as we saw with Kiri Davis’s “A Girl Like Me.”  So why shouldn’t nonwhite children finally be able to see characters who look like them on television and on screen now?  To be shown that they actually matter?  Secondly, why can’t white people ‘relate’ to nonwhite characters?  If race really shouldn’t matter as you say, then what difference does it make if network and cable television suddenly have a whole lot more color?

Which brings me to the other beneficial point of multiculturalism that I see: people in the majority role (white people, skinny people, feminine girls, whatever) can, in fact, benefit from it.  Everyone benefits from it, especially children.  Exposure to people who look different from themselves from a young age may cause children to ‘normalize’ difference, and thereby hold less ill will or fewer stereotypical notions of those groups.  It’s important to keep in mind, though, that this can only happen if multicultural representation is non-stereotypical, by which I don’t mean that a character can’t hold on to some aspect of his or her cultural background, but rather that these characters are as fully fleshed-out as the white/majority-background characters.  For example, Kai-lan is Chinese-American, which is important to her identity, but hopefully it won’t be the only thing that determines who she is as a person.  This is important not only so that white children won’t hold on to stereotypes (e.g. Kai-lan’s grandfather is a spy for the Chinese government), but also to the children who identify with that cultural background–after all, they see themselves as part of their culture, but also as human beings, and that’s what media representation should reflect.

“Ni Hao, Kai-lan”:

It’s important to keep something in mind about multiculturalism, though: above everything else, it’s about money.  Companies sell the Dolls of the World in part because they know there’s an ‘ethnic’ market for them.  This applies to things like Princess Maddy as well.  And because companies know they’re getting this money, they might crank out products that don’t actually mean much, and which are supposed to placate ‘ethnic’ consumers or the ‘politically correct’ crowd: behold, the phenomenon of tokenism.  As a result, multiculturalism might lead to a narrowly-defined standard of what it ‘means’ to be of such-and-such background, or it might lead to nonwhite characters being there but simply not mattering to the storyline at all (see Lisa Turtle of Saved by the Bell).  Then critics will say, ‘What are you complaining about?  You already got the black guy and the Asian chick!  And a lesbian mom!’

But even above that, multiculturalism is a way for minority consumers to buy into the current capitalist system, which, if you’re not a big fan of our consumer culture, seems like a step down.  But within the current system, it is definitely ‘empowering.’

 Thanks to Robyn for bringing to my attention the trailer for Bratz the Movie, the first live-action film of the Bratz dolls enterprise.  Er, actually, maybe I shouldn’t be thanking you for this?  But either way, here’s the trailer:

Considering that this movie ‘brings to life’ the Bratz dolls that many young girls buy and play with, it’s definitely marketed at least in part (a huge part) to the tween demographic.  Aside from all the pink glittery-ness, it contains so many of the same elements that I mentioned in my post about the Cheetah Girls: diversity, not only of race, but also of image (though the blonde girl does seem to take precedence, based on the trailer); a ‘we will overcome’ attitude; and a message of strength found through unity.  It’s interesting to see that these sentiments expressed in a movie set in the stereotypical popularity contest endemic to Hollywood movies about high school.  It looks like the girls will first be broken up by high school politics, but will come together to not only save their friendships, but also save their school from the ‘mean girl,’ with many materialistic antics involved (I’m guessing by the reference to a ‘super sweet 16′ and the elephant, presumably a sign of gaudiness).  So the archnemesis is a girl, as is almost always the case in these tween ‘girl power’ movies, which is kind of disturbing.  Does it reflect the cattiness of that age, or does it lead to cattiness at that age, or is it both?

Ah well, we’ll see how Bratz the Movie does at the box office this summer.

There’s a post over at the main blog about the Cheetah Girls as a symbol of the Girl Power movement.  As a Disney Channel creation–a made-for-TV-movie based on a book series spawned the real girl group and various merchandise–they’re definitely relevant to the tween market right now.  There’s a lot to positively acknowledge here–they’re closer in age to their market than a lot of other girl groups (such as the Pussycat Dolls) are, they present themselves more age-appropriately while still being ‘cool’ and fashionable, they have a ‘sisterhood’ message as opposed to girls being pitted against each other for men’s attention (again, look to the Pussycat Dolls’ breakout single, ‘Don’t Cha (wish your girlfriend was hot like me)’, and most importantly I think (especially in light of my recent post about tweens and race), they’re diverse–racially, body shape, ‘image,’ etc.

Here is a song/movie clip from the first Cheetah Girls movie, “Cheetah Sisters”:

I think this song has a really great message for young girls who are at an age when they probably start feeling like they need to compete with their friends for boys and popularity.  It emphasizes unity, no matter how different girls are from each other: Cuz we are sisters we stand together / we make up one big family though we don’t look the same our spots are different / different colors we make stronger, that ain’t ever gonna change, and it even emphasizes global unity with We’re from everywhere all around the world.  Furthermore, I think the fact that the girls are fashionable and show off their dancing skills without being sexualized is really important–it’s letting girls have fun without introducing them to things that they’re not ready for yet.  And astonishingly enough, all of the girls seem to matter in the group, with their own personalities–everyone brings something to the table, and everyone has something that makes them special.  In this way, the song teaches girls to trust in themselves more: Got the brains got the power and we speak the truth.

So what problem do I have with “Cheetah Sisters”?  Well, I wonder if it doesn’t emphasize unity a little bit too much.  The girls don’t just benefit from having each other around, they depend on each other for the strength to follow their dreams: There’s a time when we all choose / To either quit, or follow through / To just loose faith, or trust your heart somehow to lead you through the dark / We’re not the only one who’s dreamin’ / Who needs help to carry on / We might geet lonely but we’re not alone.  Saying that the girls need help to carry on departs so shockingly from the other Girl Power narrative we’ve been looking at this semester: the one of the individual woman, underestimated by society, who fights her hardest and maintains her composure, in order to be accepted in a (traditionally male) position of power, e.g. G.I. Jane.

However, the individualistic narrative of ‘girl power’ can be troublesome too, because it so often involves a woman fighting for her own right to occupy a traditionally male role of power, almost always without regard for other women, and often even at their expense.  So the ‘sisterhood’ message of “Cheetah Sisters” seems pretty great for what it is.  I actually wonder if the unity message isn’t so strong precisely because all the characters/singers/actresses are at least part Black and/or Latina (see character descriptions).  Oppressed by the double constraints of gender and race, there is more incentive for women of color to ‘stick together.’  I have a hard time imagining a girl group marketed toward tweens consisting of only white girls or women emphasizing a ‘sisterhood’ message in this day and age.  Another reason for why this might be is that it’s probably harder for nonwhite singers/actresses to break into certain markets if they go solo; we all know Raven (who did not join the Cheetah Girls group that was filmed after the first movie became a success) is still in the tween market, even though she’s slightly older than Hilary Duff, who has gained wider pop cultural fame.  But for now, it seems that Disney’s got the young girls and young-girls-of-color-market hooked.

Which brings me to my bigger problem with the Cheetah Girls.  I usually wikipedia things before I write about them, and when I looked up ‘Cheetah Girls,’ I was expecting to get to the page for the [first]  TV movie (I didn’t know about the sequels), which I had seen advertised incessantly on the Disney Channel.  However, I instead came to this page.  A book series, movies, CDs, DVDs, a video game, concert tours and the associated merchandise, a doll line, even a Cheetah Girls toothbrush–it becomes very clear that the Cheetah Girls, just like most things, are meant to get our money first and foremost.

I mean, I think it’s great that the Cheetah Girls are successful.  But I think it’s important to keep in mind that if they weren’t, Disney wouldn’t have kept them around.  Buying Disney merchandise for young girls isn’t only empowering them to be strong and confident, it’s also acculturating them to society.  By acculturation, I don’t only mean gender norms (the girls are all feminine and ‘acceptable’ on an aesthetic level), but also the consumerist society that we live in.  Tweens develop part of their sense of who they are through consuming, e.g. ‘I’m like Aquanetta so I’m gonna buy her doll!’

Considering the alternatives, though (once again, the Pussycat Dolls), the Cheetah Girls still stand as good role models of who/what young girls are looking up to, identifying with, and buying into.  Here’s a video of another one of their songs from the first movie to leave you with, appropriately titled “Girl Power”:

Ew. (No, not at the picture of Dakota, but at what I’m about to write about).

I mentioned the countdown clock to the Olsen twins’ 18th birthday in a previous post (which is now counting down to their 21st birthdays–which I don’t really understand, because once you’ve been in rehab for a cocaine addiction, does it really matter when you can legally buy alcohol?).  But I wasn’t prepared to find a similar countdown clock to Dakota Fanning’s 18th birthday.  It’s really obscene, juxtaposing a very childlike layout (the color pink, hearts, stars, a picture of Dakota smiling all child-like) with the desire for her to become an adult–why?  So she can legally pose nude and sick people can enjoy their jailbait.

I shouldn’t really be surprised, though.  Any female in the public eye, regardless of whether she’s even an adult yet, is sexualized, or at least judged severely on her looks.  This countdown definitely poses a problem, though, in terms of if pedophiles will go see Hounddog just to see Dakota Fanning’s character get raped.

Sigh.

India Barbie - released in 1982, as a Special Edition, part of the ‘Dolls of the World – Asia’ line

India Barbie 2nd Edition, released in 1996, as part of the Collector Edition for the same ‘Dolls of the World’ line:

Is it just me, or is the 2nd Edition doll noticeably darker than the original?  I wonder what happened in those fourteen years to make Mattel want its doll to represent and appeal to a different, broader range of young South Asian girls (including me, because I think this is the one I had and might still have lying around somewhere)…  Also, the 2nd edition doll is presented in a much more noticeably “ethnic” context (the Taj Mahal, of course).

It’s too bad that Mattel didn’t get the costume/terminology right in either case:

• The 1982 edition is described as wearing a “three-piece sari, including a long rusty red skirt, matching wrap, both trimmed with golden thread, and golden halter-top.”  Uhh, sorry, but that’s not a sari… it’s a skirt, a halter top, and a shawl.  A sari is a looong singular piece of cloth wrapped around the body in different styles.  Great job, Mattel.
• The 1996 edition is definitely a lot better.  However, I’m still trying to wrap my head around how the doll wears both a “traditional costume from far away India” and a “modern, Indian sari.”  Huh?  As for the “simple hand ring,” I believe it’s called a ‘bangle.’

I’m not the only one debating the authenticity of Mattel’s descriptions about its ‘Dolls of the World.’  Nirali Magazine points us toward a discussion by several Indian-American writers/bloggers/professors about the Diwali Barbie Doll released last year as part of the ‘Dolls of the World – Festivals of the World’ line.

So at the same time that it explicitly exoticizes Indian Barbies (“far away India,” “exotic-style jewelry”) presumbably in order to differentiate them from its other products (and therefore make them more appealing to consumers), Mattel can’t seem to get the facts straight.  Ironically enough, I wonder how many of the company’s products are made in India.  And how young the workers in those factories may be.

Davis recreates an experiment from the 1940′s in which the majority of black children, given a choice between a white doll and a black doll, preferred the white doll–and found that the same results hold true today.  This shows that the standard of beauty, overwhelmingly, is still an extraordinarily white one.  Blonde hair, blue eyes, long legs–all features that we are all supposed to acknowledge as the ultimate representation of female perfection, simply by the knowledge we accumulate as members of a society.  I know from my experience with kids that this standard of beauty can reach the youngest members of our society; I remember an incident from a few years ago, when my little cousin was visiting and insisted on playing with the ‘regular’ Barbie instead of the special-edition Mattel Indian Barbie (who was still pretty pale) because it was more ‘beautiful and blonde.’  And who else can represent the female ideal better to young girls than Barbie can?

So nonwhite women are marked from the get-go as being something ‘other’ than the norm of  beauty, as shown by the fact that Mattel has to release a ‘special edition’ Barbie doll to represent them.  And even then we know it’s just an effort to get our money (and one that I apparently suckered my parents into giving in to).

So why not embrace our difference in an effort to see ourselves as beautiful?  Why not exoticize ourselves?  Well, as this post on the Girlpower 1 blog shows, nonwhite women can’t do even that.  Angelina Jolie–part Iriquois, sure, but still white as snow–is apparently the ultimate embodiment of exotic beauty, and what most women want to look like.  And the nonwhite actresses given as examples of ‘beautiful women’ in the article are Halle Berry–who is biracial, and can be said to have very ‘white’ features–and Penelope Cruz, who is a Spaniard–she’s European!

It seems that nonwhite women/women of color simply can’t win at being beautiful.  Even those terms–’nonwhite’ and ‘of color’ mark them as something ‘other’ than the norm, something that can’t be beautiful.  And when they try to embrace it on their own terms, the culture industry only gobbles it up and spits it out, repackaging it as something available for white women to make themselves more ‘exotic’ with–but something manufactured, and so doesn’t actually pose risk for them.  And this extremely white standard of beauty trickles down to the youngest girls.

The post on the main blog brings up how teen pregnancy is usually brought up in the media, though–as a ‘problem’ in poor Black & Latino communities.  So far I haven’t addressed race on this blog, and I think this is a grey issue that relates to some of the other themes of cultural studies.  Obviously, we don’t want babies to be born into the world unwanted.  So why not celebrate pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood?  However, there’s also the fact that a lot of these babies are born into poverty, and that possibly if the parents had received the same opportunities that people in wealthier communities receive–namely, access to the same standard of education and being put on the track to college–they wouldn’t have had the babies.  It’s that question again–can you really be empowered when your options are limited by society?  In the case of the ‘problem’ of teen pregnancy, it definitely seems good that people try to create their own narratives within the system by celebrating pregnancy and making it something worthwhile, even if it’s just for lack of a better option.

The case of Keisha Castle-Hughes, though, is a strange one.  It’s like the reason the mainstream media can celebrate it without decrying her for being so young is BECAUSE of her extreme fame and wealth.  And although she played a Maori character in Whale Rider, and the Maori are traditionally underserved in New Zealand much as the Black & Latino communities are in the U.S., she is half-Maori and half-white, and therefore seems to pass as white in the media.  This is sort of tangential, but I wonder if that had anything to do with getting her the lead role in Whale Rider…

But yeah, racial issues among tweens are very important and will be looked at in upcoming posts.