How To Write A Critical Book Report On Where The Girls Are Douglass

Critical Book Report: Where the Girls Are
WS 203 – Dr. Vander Hoef

In Where the Girls Are Douglas takes you through the life of a typical girl growing up during a feminist revolution from childhood to adulthood. She gives an in depth look at what was going on in the world and how it affected a young girl turning into a woman. Starting in Fractured Fairytales Douglas explores how from the very start young girls are bombarded with images of how women should be and how they should not. Little girls grow up with the mentality that they must emulate the perfect women in fairy tales and grow up to be the fairest of them all. “We learned, though these fairy tales, and certainly later through advertising, that we had to scrutinize ourselves all the time, identify our imperfections, and learn to eliminate or disguise them, otherwise no one would ever love us”(Douglas 31). Disney had created a standard for girls and women that was nearly impossible to achieve. Looking, acting, dressing and appearing perfect all while being selfless and suffering in silence was what was expected of women and young girls. If young girls chose not to live up to the ‘Cinderella standard’ they were left with only one alternative role to fill, “… older, vindictive, murderous stepmothers or queens wearing too much eyeliner and eye shadow”(Douglas 29). They were women in power and Disney
perpetuated the stereotype that any amount of authority given to a woman would turn her into a destructive monster. No little girl would grow up wanting that image and thus the ‘Cinderella standard’ corrupted the young minds of girls everywhere. It was during this stage in her life that Douglas compared the lives of these characters to that of her own mother and realized neither of them had any control over their own lives and that was not how she wanted to end up. Throughout the next few chapters we begin to see how the rules and confinements of being a woman were further pushed on young girls by their own mothers and society. There were certain expectations and limitations that women were expected to live by during this era. Women could work but only at jobs like nursing and teaching and a woman could never take the place of a man in the workforce. They were expected to be mothers, wives, cooks, maids, and supporters all while working a full time job. “Here she was, part of a system that insisted it needed her to consume the home but adamantly refused to admit it also needed her to produce outside the home”(Douglas 56). Douglas’ mom was stuck in the cycle but she encouraged her daughter to strive for more, to go to college and get a career before anything else. Meanwhile, the media was pushing messages that women are only supposed to be perfect housewives. Advertising gave woman a uniformed identity as wives and mothers with strong suggestions about the traits they should embody. Douglas states that as she started to enter adolescence she refused to fit into the ‘categorical’ woman and started to realize a feminist revolution was in order (60). The remainder of the book reveals the role that the media played in transforming the feminist revolution into a negative stereotype and made society into ‘cultural schizophrenics’ – endangering women into a cultural identity crisis as they fought the stereotypes of what the perfect woman is while submitting to the pressures of being that woman at the same time. We all fall victim to it regardless of if we are aware of it or not, every time we see a beautiful model in the magazine there is a tiny voice in the back of our heads telling us we should resemble that in some way. Douglas’ thesis statement summarizes the main idea of Where the Girls Are perfectly;
To appreciate the mass media’s often inadvertent role in this transformation, we must head down a memory lane that has been blockaded for far too long. We must rewatch and relisten but with a new mission: to go to where the girls are. And, as we consider the rise of feminism, we must move beyond the standard political histories of a handful of feminist leaders and explore the cultural history of the millions who became their followers. It’s time to reclaim a past too frequently ignored, hooted at, and dismissed, because, it is in these images of women that we find the roots of who we are now. (10)

The media has used it’s persuasiveness for the past three decades to warp the minds of people into believing that women must look, act and be a certain way in order to be socially and culturally acceptable.
The media then turned feminism into a bad word and associated it with any women who went against the ‘norm’. I agree with Susan J Douglas’s argument as she allows us to explore the history of how media gained control and turned us into loyal followers, allowing media to dictate who we are and what we will become and asks us to not only question it, but stand up against
it. Susan J. Douglas’ critique of the mass media in Where the Girls Are represents a “woman as image” approach to theorizing about gender and popular culture, including pessimism and recruitism, as defined by Joanne Hollows in Feminism, Femininity and Popular Culture. “Film texts construct and reproduce our idea of what ‘reality’ is, rather than reflecting a preexisting reality”(Hollows 44). Films made by people like Disney helped to construct an idea of what women were actually like or should be like. These constructions of women never showed the preexisting reality of women who were mother and workers. Male characters gaining the ‘knight in shining armor’ role diminished the reality that a family couldn’t survive without a mother. “Now the argument can be made that Disney was simply reflecting the times. But Disney wasn’t passively or innocently reflecting anything; he was actively emphasizing and exaggerating certain assumptions about woman while clearly ignoring others”(Douglas 31). Roles that were constructed for women and perpetuated through Disney were either the damsel in distress or the evil witch. A great example of this is Peter Pan where in the original version Wendy is not a helpless moron and Tinkerbell is not a narcissistic hussy, as they are depicted in Disney’s version. Disney never represented the hardworking, independent woman that in actuality was the woman of those times. Young girls who watched these films grew up believing that the Disney princess was a realistic role model to live up to. This idea further proves the ‘woman as image’ approach because the motive behind girls wanting to fulfill the ‘Cinderella standard’ was to be able to get the boy of their dreams. Girls were taught that by presenting themselves as desirable to boys they could achieve true happiness. “We learned through these fairy tales, and certainly later through advertising, that we had to scrutinize ourselves all the time, identify our many imperfections, and learn to eliminate or disguise them, otherwise no one would ever love us”(Douglas 31). This belief led to women being portrayed in film and media as empty, patriarchal constructions for male gaze. In reality perfect women do not exist and men do not only go for the passive, angelic woman. But constantly being surrounded by this idea a new reality was created for generations to live by. It would be easy to be confused as to why people didn’t catch onto this phenomenon earlier and put a stop to it. Why mothers’ didn’t see the effects that Disney had on their impressionable daughters. The answer is that “cinema works to make culturally produced notions of man and woman, masculine and feminine, appear natural”(Hollows 45). Disney had done such a good job of disguising the stereotypes placed in their films that society was completely oblivious and accepted them as natural. Douglas further demonstrates this in the chapter “Throwing Out Our Bra’s” where women were finally coming together and taking a stand for equality. Protesting against the picture perfect woman image and striving for an independent, refined image. However the media was still able to consume the stance and reproduce it as something completely opposite. “Women who threw their bra’s away may have said they were challenging sexism, but the media, with a wink, hinted that these women’s motives were not at all political but rather personal; to be trendy, and to attract men” (Douglas 160). Once again women were being portrayed as self-involved, vain and materialistic only protesting in order to produce a certain image for themselves and gain male attention. Women were perceived as doing all of this so they could ultimately attract men, making them appear as nothing more than a patriarchal construction. Society would believe the media’s twist without question because of the culturally produced stereotypes already established about women. Growing up in a world where women are seen as nothing more than self-absorbed bimbos or power-tripping witches it would be all to easy to accept that any move they made was ultimately to fulfill one of those roles. The media had made us believe that the fight for equal treatment and women’s rights was all a façade; real women would never want anything more than to be a wife and mother. It appeared to society that the ‘natural’ woman was actually a shallow and empty one there for male amusement. The comparison between man and woman, what was considered masculine and feminine was another result of media’s constructions of what is normal “man is defined as the ‘norm’, ‘woman’ only gains meaning as different to – and in opposition to – that ‘norm” (Hollows 45). Media takes this idea and uses it to make the culturally produced notions of a man and women appear natural. This in turn makes it unnatural or socially unacceptable when a woman displays masculine norms and vice versa. When The Beatles came around it threw these norms out the window and gave a young generation new insight to what could be culturally acceptable after all these boys were not the typically brute, hard looking Elvis types. They had long hair, heels on their boots, and small statures. The cultural constructions of what it meant to be feminine had been negative, going against the ‘norm’, masculine. Now blending these gender lines was becoming more socially acceptable and the media had to move fast to keep up. So “the mass media reinforced the importance of individualism and conformity, being more like boys yet still very much a girl, and offered perkiness as a temporary compromise”(Douglas 121). After all women could not forget their role as wives and that in order to fulfill that role they must maintain the image that men want to see. In conclusion I would say that Susan J. Douglas’ take on the mass media and gender and popular culture represents the ‘woman as image’ approach perfectly. The media created roles and then pressured women to conform into them, all while creating a society where these roles seemed natural. Within these roles we see that ‘women’ were made to be hollow, patriarchal constructions for the male gaze. As women we can break out of these roles but only if we “reclaim the word feminist from the trash heap it’s been relegated to by the media and remind ourselves that as woman who says “I’m not a feminist but…” is, in fact, a feminist”(Douglas 294).

Reference:
Douglas, Susan J. Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female With the Mass Media. New York: Times, 1994. Print.
Hollows, Joanne. Feminism, Femininity and Popular Culture. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000. Print.