The SPARK blogtour starts here!

Last week, Courtney mentioned the SPARK Summit, which is happening in NYC on October 22nd. SPARK stands for Sexualization Protest: Action, Resistance, Knowledge. SPARK is both a Summit and a Movement designed to push back against the increasingly sexualized images of girlhood in the media and create room for whole girls and healthy sexuality. SPARK will engage teen girls to be part of the solution rather than to protect them from the problem.

The Summit is focused on working with girl leaders and activists to jump start an intergenerational movement. Attendees will be girls (ages 14-22) and those working closely with them. There will also be a virtual Summit so that girls and adults who can’t make it to New York City can participate.

Today, Feministing is kicking off the SPARK blogtour, which will be moving around the internet as the summit approaches, featuring the voices of girl activists who are committed to doing something about the sexualization of girls in the media. Don’t miss tomorrow’s tour stop, at Shaping Youth, and Thursday’s at The F Bomb!

To kick off the tour today, we are thrilled to have a guest post from Carmen Rios, a Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Public Communication major at American University. Rios is also the editor of THE LINE Campaign’s blog. Here, she writes about the psychological and cultural impact that sexualized images of girls can have on the girls who are, inevitably, watching. I’ll let Carmen take it from here…

How old were you when Britney Spears wore a midriff top and miniskirt to Catholic School? How old were you when Twilight was released and tweens everywhere discovered that sexy relationships were about control and abuse? How old were you when Hannah Montana became Miley Cyrus and took off her clothes? And how old were you when Lea Michele, from the family programming Glee, did the same?

Someone was a girl when all of that happened. And she was watching.

For young girls, the mainstream media is a minefield of blows to their self-esteem and self-development. The American Psychological Association (APA) found that ample technology has only resulted in ample sexualization for girls, and that it causes self-sexualization, body image anxiety, and depression. In May 2008, an Alternet story entitled “Sexpot Virgins” looked deeper into sexualization of girls and found:

Targeted by marketers at increasingly younger ages, girls are now being exposed to the kind of unhealthy messages about sexuality that have long dogged grown women. Girls are told that their worth hinges on being “hot,” which in mainstream media parlance translates into thin, white, makeupped and scantily clad. Meanwhile, acting on their sexual impulses earns them the epithet “slut.” Teen magazines advise girls on how to tailor their look and personality to please boys (in order to entrap them in relationships). Advertisements present violence toward women as sexy.

The sexualization of girls in the media is important. It is not old news. It is not a “minor” problem. It isn’t something that only happens to any one group of girls. Media sexualization is pervasive, and the impact of the media on the development of all people has been studied and confirmed widely. Every day, girls receive the following messages from the media and more: that they are only worth having as sex objects, that they have no value outside of sexual relationships, and that normal sexual behavior is not about their pleasure or their sexual health.

So what can you do about it? My work with THE LINE Campaign has shown that the voices of real people are different from those in the media. Real voices care about consent, ending sexual violence, and progressing the access to sexual information and health. The media has written a script for young people, just as they have for girls. And it’s incorrect.

This is important to remember, because girls who receive messages from the media usually take them seriously after they’re reinforced by the people in their lives. We may not notice that dressing our daughters as “sexy nurses” and letting our pre-teens watch MTV’s Spring Break without pause or discussion actually proves to them that those messages are truthful and real. In order to end the sexualization of girls in the media, we have to start speaking up and speaking out, and we have to start speaking to the girls in our lives.

New York, NY

Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia. She joined the Feministing team in 2009. Her writing about politics and popular culture has been published in The Atlantic, The Guardian, New York magazine, Reuters, The LA Times and many other outlets in the US, Australia, UK, and France. She makes regular appearances on radio and television in the US and Australia. She has an AB in Sociology from Princeton University and a PhD in Arts and Media from the University of New South Wales. Her academic work focuses on Hollywood romantic comedies; her doctoral thesis was about how the genre depicts gender, sex, and power, and grew out of a series she wrote for Feministing, the Feministing Rom Com Review. Chloe is a Senior Facilitator at The OpEd Project and a Senior Advisor to The Harry Potter Alliance. You can read more of her writing at chloesangyal.com

Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia.

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