While waiting for “The
Dark Knight Rises” to begin, I saw a pre-show commercial (those ads when the lights are still on even before
the good previews) that actually caught my attention! No, it wasn’t about
buying popcorn or the latest celebrity trivia… this ad was about young girls dropping out of sports at double
the rate of young boys. What was most interesting about this commercial is
that it blamed this dropout rate, as least in part, on the media for sending girls
certain messages. The acknowledgement of the media’s influence is what caught
my attention and made me think about/relate the ad to this class…
The ad starts by showing
girls on a soccer field. Background voices filter in, speaking the messages
that we see every day in magazines and commercials… “ Hide your flaws…“ , “ What
guys notice,“ “Are you ready for swimsuit season?”. The girls on the field then
turn in to make-up covered, high-heel strutting, hair-flowing females …
basically, real life Bratz dolls…. The final message of the commercial is “Don’t
let them walk away from their potential”.
This ad is claiming
that these media messages are causing females to drop out of sports due to the
pressure they put on girls to be feminine and sexy. The background
voices in the ad were saying the exact same things as Seventeen magazine says - like my group found during our in-class activity. It was clear in our magazine
exploration that the media encourage young girls to be boy-crazy and
fashion-obsessed. I don’t think any of our groups saw mentions of sports or
other hobbies in any of the magazines we read. The only hobbies we found were
facebooking your crush or finding that right shade of foundation.
What struck me the most
was the fact that this ad was about media’s effects on girls’ participation in sports. This approach
is different than simply looking at media’s effects on girls’ sexual behavior/attitudes/expectation/etc.
In class we have read a lot of studies
that look at these latter sorts of effects. Readings
such as Brown et al., (2005) and Taylor (2005) show that media content leads to
more permissive sexual attitudes and possibly more sexual behavior. What the
readings have thus far failed to acknowledge is how the media are affecting other aspects of youth’s lives. This ad
shows that these messages trickle in to every aspect of a girls’ life, from her
boy-crush to her after-school activities.
It seems that people often look at sports
and sports organizations directly when they critique the lack of female sports
participants - blaming them for not providing as many opportunities or equal quality
of instruction. However, it is rare to see the blame being put on the media in direct
regards to sports participation. It seems clear, now, that media heavily
influence girls in their decisions to not play sports…seeing as how media so
overtly tells girls to be docile and pretty - and, heaven forbid they be
competitive or athletic.
Overall, this commercial was
interesting as it looked at a less commonly acknowledged effect of all the ‘be boy-crazy’,
‘be beautiful’, ‘be sexy’ messages in media.
