Analysis Of The Article 'Little Girls Gone Wild'

880 Words2 Pages

Erica Zhang Professor Nelson Intro to Mass Media & Communications 3/11/2013 Media Analysis Assignment In today’s media the sexualisation of women has unfortunately also extended to young preteen girls, through a myriad of detrimental social constructs and internalized prejudices spanning centuries. The commodification of their sexuality is unnerving, as it encourages predators to project their fantasies onto unwilling participants that are too young to understand the nature of these harmful actions, and know how to escape or refuse them. In an attempt to shed light onto this issue as a concerned parent, Rachael Combe wrote the article Little Girls Gone Wild as a response to this sudden boom in increasingly sexualised behavior among and towards preteens. While her intentions remain sincere and her concerns as a mother legitimate, the article is flawed in the sense that she is not delving deeper into the causes behind this phenomenon, shaming the young girls for indulging in their outward appearances and for participating in a role that society has forced them into, instead of the predators that reinforce this sexualised image and make it something to be desired and aspired to. While a girl displaying an interest in her appearance is not inherently sexual; the cultural hivemind that perverts this interest and exploits her selfimage only to turn it around and blame the girl once it has garnered negative attention is an inherently sexist construct. When dissecting issues that involve women’s roles in society, one has to take into account the outside influences that have slowly created these roles and their increasingly constricting nature, and not just blame the woman as the source of her own victimization, which just demonstrates a r... ... middle of paper ... ...ideas of what makes them beautiful, and that it’s completely okay to want to be a “rock diva” or “reality star” instead of someone in a science or mathrelated career. This article has continually asserted young women as the ones at fault for sexualising themselves, stating that they should understand the kind of “messages” that they send out when they wear makeup and tight skirts, and that they should be prepared to handle the type of “reactions” they elicit. The statement in itself is not only incredibly sexist, but further shames girls and paints them as the instruments to their own oppression. To stop the sexualisation of young girls, people should first recognize that the girls are being victimized, and that unhealthy media standards along with oppressive ideals in a sexist society are the things that should really be changed, not their aspirations or identities.

Open Document