Sexy, Super Skinny and Searching for Love: The Kids are Watching WHAT?!
A study just released by the Institute on Gender in Media echoes the research we do, but could be shocking for many Beauty Redefined followers who haven’t spent their free time critically analyzing kids’ media options! And we’re not talking about pop culture choices you’ve never heard of – we’re referring to the most popular G-rated movies and TV shows from Disney, Fox, Nickelodeon, you name it. Read on to find out what the kids are watching, how it may be affecting them, and what you can do to make a difference for good in a media-filled world in need of light!
Get this: The average person spends 4 to 6 hours a day watching TV and movies. Do the math and that means by the time we reach age 70, we will have watched 7 to 10 years of 
TV and movies! Our research and the work we cite tells us the messages we get from those sources – not just the advertising but the “entertainment” – powerfully shape how we see our reality. Our feelings about everything – our bodies, beauty, worth, potential, etc. – are formed as our media choices whisper (and often YELL) what we should believe about ourselves. Most often, those voices tell us women are to be valued for their sexual appeal and thinness, they should spend their lives striving for those ideals, and they cannot be loved and desired without reaching those goals (which are unattainable). That is why the media literacy messages we share are so vital for us all. Reputable scholars stand behind us as we claim our ability to think critically about inescapable media messages is essential to our health and well-being. The scary thing is the U.S. is the only industrialized country without media literacy in public schooling curriculum. While we teach our kids how to read classic literature, we have yet to help them understand and deconstruct messages that shape their entire lives. That’s why Beauty Redefined is hard at work spreading this knowledge!
Geena Davis, actress and founder of the Institute on Gender in Media
Geena Davis, star of “A League of their Own” and “Thelma and Louise,” among other hit movies, told The Wall Street Journal about the “shocking” research on children’s media she helped fund and we can only hope it’s jarring enough to get media makers to change their approach. In the largest study of its kind, the Institute on Gender in Media found the more hours of TV a girl watches, the fewer options she believes she has in her life. And the more hours a boy watches, the more sexist his views become. Youch.
Scary? Oh yes. But there’s more:
- In G-rated movies, for every one female character, there are three male characters. If it is a group scene, it changes to five to one, male to female.
- Of the female characters that exist, the majority are highly stereotyped and/or hypersexualized. Startlingly, the female characters in G-rated movies wear the same amount of sexually revealing clothing as the female characters in R-rated movies.
- The only aspiration for female characters in nearly every instance is finding romance, whereas there are practically no male characters whose ultimate goal is finding romance. Their No. 1 goal is becoming royalty.
- The vast majority of female characters in animated movies have an “ideal” body type that cannot exist in real life. (We could’ve told them that :)
Those findings truly echo the reasons we have taken up this battle for girls and women everywhere. When the millions of images of women and girls we see in media reflect a distorted reality where females are valued solely for their (unattainable) thinness and sexual appeal, their only goal in life is to find Prince Charming, and they are outnumbered by males at least three to one, we have a problem and we must not only speak up, but fight back. These messages, found in the most “innocent” of children’s programming and movies, are dangerous at best and deadly at worst. Hospitalizations for little girls 
with eating disorders went up 100 percent in the last decade, reports the American Academy of Pediatrics. No wonder that is the case when the only images little girls see in media aimed at them (and that media aimed at their sisters and moms) represents “underweight” as normal and the only form of desirable. Cosmetic surgery increased 446 percent in the last decade to reach $12 billion in 2010, with 92 percent of those voluntary procedures (mostly liposuction and breast augmentation) performed on females – some younger than 18. No wonder that is the case when even the “mildest” of entertainment represents females of any age as sexual objects made up of digitally and surgically enhanced parts. Today, girls who watch TV and movies grow up believing they have very few options available to them: find someone to love them, steer clear of school and jobs in math, science, and engineering (according to research that shows women make up a tiny percentage of those career paths), and focus the majority of their attention and energy on keeping their weight down and their sex appeal up.
This is not a media environment we want anyone growing up in! And we don’t want to live amid all these lies either! So let’s get to the uplifting stuff. Here’s what Davis and her team are doing:
Her goal is to increase the number of positive representations of girls and women in films and TV aimed at kids and she is going straight to the source! It sounds as though she’s following our strategy that tells us media decision makers can be powerful forces for good. She has approached the major studios and produces, the Writers Guild, the Animators Guild, the Casting Directors Guild, and the news media to correct this horrific problem. As a powerful voice for good, Davis is – while probably unaware – collaborating with Beauty Redefined and all those passionate about these issues to make change happen and leave us all more happy, healthy, and hopeful.
Like Davis, we are enlisting as many as will join the fight to take back beauty and health for girls and women everywhere. Along with our commitment to break the silence that surrounds so much dangerous media that is so normal in our lives, we hope to give others a voice for the things they feel but maybe don’t have the words to really articulate. If you’ve ever calculated your Body Mass Index and felt shocked and hurt by the diagnosis it gave you, our research can give you the real facts behind the profit-driven “health” measurement known as the BMI. If you’ve flipped through a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue and been shocked by the sheer amount of nudity and pornographic poses in America’s most popular sports magazine, our research gives you the words to explain why those images are so hurtful to you. If you have watched Gossip Girl and noticed how sexual assault is framed as something normal for guys who are “players” and girls who hang around them, our work speaks to the ways that is wildly harmful for the millions viewing. The list goes on, but the point is, media literacy, as pointed out by Davis’ research and the work we do, is so necessary to get us back to reality – where we can work to attain real health and beauty and move on to everything more meaningful and uplifting.
There are so many valuable ways you can fight back against profit-driven media that wreaks havoc on our happiness and skews our sense of reality. Try these suggestions, and please check out our full lists of strategies at “How Girls and Women Can Take Back Beauty” and “How Boys and Men Can Take Back Beauty.”
Don’t let TV babysit: If you have kids or watch kids, make a rule that you can only watch TV and movies together. That way, you can engage in dialogue the whole time. If you see positive female role models doing things that are non-stereotypical (like a girl playing basketball or a woman working as a scientist), point it out! If you see messages that may have a negative impact (like a sexualized girl, an unattainably thin female character, or a lack of any positive female representation), point that out too! Talk to your kids about alternatives like “Couldn’t a girl have played that part?” and speak up about unattainable ideals like Photoshopping, soft camera lighting, and animated characters that could not be alive in real life based on their body size and shape.
Make time away from the big screen: If it scares you to think that by age 70 you will have watched 7-10 full years of TV, think of how many years of screen media your kids are viewing! Today’s kids watch more media (computer, TV, movies) than adults, which means finding time away from the screen can be a valuable way to get back to reality. Set a goal to only watch certain TV shows or movies and only during specific times. That way, media isn’t just used to pass the time, entertain, or otherwise take the place of time that can be spent being active, helping a neighbor, visiting family, or being otherwise productive.
Be an advocate for change: If our suggestion to turn away from media that degrades or otherwise hurts you is just not enough for you, consider your fierce influence as an advocate for women. When you see a children’s movie that features girls in only stereotypical roles, a company’s ads that fuels female insecurity, or a magazine that objectifies women even as it claims to empower them, speak up! Blogging your disapproval is a great start, and so is posting links to news stories and site posts that reveal harmful ideals on social networking sites. Join us on Facebook for regular links to share and continue this conversation! If you’d like to go a step further, write to and/or call your local cable company, network TV station, newspaper and any other media outlet perpetuating harmful messages. Since it is rare to see an ad that does anything positive for female body image, we have launched a campaign to fund a billboard that will promote positive body image here in Salt Lake City and that billboard is now in the works! Do you know the potential you have to do so much good if you want to?
And check out our examples of Photoshop as an industry standard, My (Sexy) Little Pony: Teaching Toddlers Sexual Objectification, and the rest of our strategies for even more empowering information you can use in your battle.
Fantastic article! I really applaud the work you girls are doing – it is just so important to send positive, healthy and helpful messages to our children. It is terrifying to realise how harmful what we consider ‘normal’ TV viewing can be. I also think it’s wonderful that you are validating the feelings of insecurity and shame that many women experience when they are exposed to these images and messages – there is often a sense that we should “just get over it” or be used to it by now, but it really can be so damaging to our self-esteem and body image. Research like this is much-needed – I look forward to spreading your message!
Thank you so much, Olivia! De-normalizing all of this really harmful stuff is an incredibly important work, so thank you for helping us do that! And if it was possible to just “get over” the shame so many women feel in comparison to media ideals, this world would be a much happier, healthier place! Thanks for your support!
This was a fantastic article! Thank you for the work you are doing. My husband and I decided a few months ago to completely cut out television after my husband went to a training meeting. The man giving the training had written the book Stop Teaching Our Kids To Kill. It is shocking the research that is out there! This is one more nail in the coffin for our tv.
Amazing that nearly every household in the U.S. has at least one TV (and sometimes not enough money for food or other true necessities) and they’re sending some pretty scary messages right into our living rooms. There’s an endless supply of research out there on the harmful messages being spread by these taken-for-granetd household staples. If only more people could hear it and believe it like you! RIP Emily’s TV.
What a great post! I agree completely the the images our girls see while shape and define how they see themselves fitting into our world, and their role in it.
That premise is the exact reason I created Pigtail Pals – Redefine Girly in May 2009. I refused to raise my daughter on images of princesses and sexed up fairies. Pigtail Pals designs show girls as doctors, pilots, astronauts, giving a dinosaur a bubble bath, pirates, scuba divers….as Geena Davis was quoted in the media just recently, “If you can see it, you can be it.”
Here are my company’s designs: http://www.pigtailpals.com/pipade.html
I think our girls are being sold short. I think they deserve better.
We second that 100%! Amazing work, Melissa. Thanks for sharing!
Melissa,
As I was reading this post, I thought it was right up your alley! Not surprised to see your name here.
The figures about voluntary cosmetic surgery are inextricably linked to the portrayal of women in the various media forms and outlets. As a girl in my mid-late teens, I had the pressing, urgent desire to have my nose reshaped. It’s fine – it wasn’t broken, hit with a frisbee or anything when I was a child, but it ‘unfortunately’ developed into a very pronounced Roman nose. That is to say, it is very narrow and has a huge bump in the middle.
I could have dealt with this (the only places I ever really see it from terrible angles are in dress shop changing rooms), except that every single female character that is portrayed as being attractive in television, movies and especially cartoons has a tiny, button, barely-sits-out-from-the-face nose. The only time women are seen with pronounced nasal bridges is when they are portrayed as being bitches. The Roman noses are generally left for the manliest of male characters.
Hence, I felt I could never be attractive and feminine with the nose I had. In the end, though, I decided I would rather spend $10,000 on the trans-Siberian trip of a lifetime.
Hence, there needs to be a huge shift in even small details like the cartilage structure of facial features for the proposed changes to have a serious impact in the lives of many girls.
Those small details are so incredibly important! Thanks so much for your insight on how something as basic as NOSES are represented in power-laden, harmful ways. I hope you took that trip of a lifetime and loved every second of it with your beautiful fully functioning nose! Thanks so much for your comment.
Love the post, love the work you’re doing. We just need to reach a critical mass of voices speaking to the truth to reclaim the images and messages our kids get. Thanks for being a great part of the right message.