Rape Culture On Young Girls

Today’s public is bombarded on a daily basis with advertisement upon advertisement, image upon image aimed at making us think a certain way, making us want to buy a certain thing, making us feel a certain way about ourselves. The most susceptible to these images is arguably the teenaged girl. Adolescence, an already harrowing time for anyone, is compounded with the impending pressure of adhering to societal standards set forth by both historical and modern outlets. Young girls cannot grow up within their own minds anymore, and their circle of comparison is no longer limited to what they see directly around them. Just by turning on the television or attempting to watch a video or read an article on almost any website, girls are shown endless

products that will make them better, and endless people who are already using them to be better. The overwhelming amount of stress felt from this barrage of media is proving to have an extremely negative and dangerous effect on the wellbeing of young girls. This paper will examine the physical and mental health problems teenaged girls face, and how they are exacerbated by patriarchal standards and media images.
A very dangerous element of girls experiencing media overstimulation is sexualization. This sexualization is a result of existing in a rape culture, where sexualization is put onto others without consent and often without their knowledge. However, the sexualization also seeps into the minds of the young girls themselves. In an October 2014 study done by Sarah J. McKenney (Arizona State University) and Rebecca S. Bigler (University of Texas at Austin), which examines how internalized sexualization affects adolescent girls, McKenney and Bigler bring up different theories that may explain the internalization; They propose that gender schema theory plays a role in how girls grow up to sexualize themselves, working to “construct own-sex schemas, or representational structures, that include knowledge and beliefs about the characteristics and behaviors deemed appropriate for their gender within the culture” (1). In the APA’s Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls Members, the topic of self-objectification is touched upon, with the report saying that “girls also sexualize themselves when they think of themselves in objectified terms” (2). Girls are also often found to objectify each other, and police each other’s appearances to “ensure conformance with standards of thinness and sexiness” (2), because patriarchy also needs to women to view each other as competition, because it’s easier to dominate a group that is divided instead of united. The way that girls internalize and recognize what they see around themselves leads them to feeling like they must act, dress, speak, and even stand a certain way to be liked. Even further than just being liked, they are doing things in these ways to be sexually attractive, whether they are doing so knowingly or not.
The term “rape culture”, popularized in feminist circles, is one that says that our society normalizes rape because we view men as the active aggressors, who have a right to “take what they want”, and women as passive and docile, commodities to be taken.

Living in a rape culture means that women’s bodies are never really theirs, and that they are never their own masters. For teen girls, this means being subject to attention they either didn’t want, or wanted because they believe that it’s what they should be doing, but don’t actually have the capacity to handle. Children are pulled up into the adult world and expected to conduct themselves on the adult level, and adults expect from them much more than they would expect from other children, all because they have justified to themselves that these young girls are in some way older than they really are. Recently, there was a participant on Brazil’s MasterChef Junior who experienced the very real fear of growing up in a rape culture. An article for the Huffington Post, written by Carol Patrocionio, tells the story of a 12-year-old girl named Valentina, who had done nothing except participate in a children’s cooking competition when men on the internet started talking about how they want to rape her. A tweet from one of these men read “@luantipatico relax my friend!! These hot chicks should be blamed for pedophilia!”; another read “@jefreymendes what about valentina cooking all those dishes on masterchef..... Quite slutty....”. The mere presence of girls in a public space isn’t safe for them. They are constantly under the eye of the adult men around them, and with the expansion of technology those men don’t even need to be in the same room

anymore.
The way in which men interact with young girls is a terrifying example of how pervasively patriarchal our society is. If the actions of the grown men are unwelcomed, these girls (even as young as they are) know that they are effectively powerless, and so often end up feeling too scared to actually attempt to get out of a situation that they are in. The way that the child looks, dresses, and the words she uses will be dissected to see if if she did anything to bring on the attention. In the case of Valentina, the reason that was given for these men thinking it was fine to talk about her in the way that they were was that she looked a certain way. Whether a child is purposely attempting to look older, they are never responsible for what happens to them, and it is never their fault. However, the situation can be even more insidious when the actions are welcomed. A 16-year-old girl who gets involved with a man twice her age can think that she genuinely has pull in the relationship, and that her and the man are on equal ground. The girl will not view herself as a victim because her partner will assure her that she is not a young child but a woman, and the only woman that he needs. In every case, it is not the child’s fault.
A major way that girls learn about their futures is the toys they play with growing up. The things that children are given by their parents when they’re young shape their ways of thinking about how they should be spending their time, and often prepare them for what they will be doing in the future. An article from the National Council on Family Relations, entitled “Implications of Sex Typed Child Rearing Practices, Toys, and Mass Media Materials in Restricting Occupational Choices of Women”, details how dangerous it is to gender the toys that children play with, and how the polarization of products is harmful to the children's development. When girls are given “sedentary toys which provide minimum opportunities for invigorating physical activity” (373), like play ovens and baby dolls, to play with in their childhood, and then rewarded for playing with the toys that adhere to their assigned gender roles, these girls will see that spending time cooking and taking care of children is what they should be doing for continued rewards. More than just determining social differences, the toys and activities that children are given to choose from have been shown to impact how they go about making job decisions in the future. From the same NCFR article, “boys at an early age are active in team sports having more complex rules than girls' activities,which in comparison have few rules, are not team oriented, and not specifically competitive” (373).
The institutionalized way in which education carves out the different gender expectations is also a large part of how young girls are socialized into more subordinate positions. In Rosemary Gordon’s 1998 article, “‘Girls cannot think as boys do’: socialising children through the Zimbabwean school system”, she looks at the ways that Zimbabwean school children learn about their gender roles through the school system, and the ways in which the options that they are given by their schools shape their future decisions.