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...and the messages they're getting?
My fifteen year old stepdaughter is gorgeous, though still only awkwardly conscious of it. She's mostly unconscious of the affect she has on men/boys, and hasn't dated yet. Yet she's also obsessed with her looks, and her favorite shows are "Top Model,", "Project Runway," "The Hills," "Gossip Girl," etc. She wants to be an actress - because she wants to be famous like Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie. She grudingly does her homework because her dad and mom take her texting away when she gets a failing grade, but she really sees school as something to just suffer through until she is "discovered" like Lauren Conrad and swept into a glamourous life filled with boyfriends, cool apartments, and night clubs.
What pop culture is teaching her -despite the fact that her mom is a feminist and her stepmom (me) has struggled to attain real stature in a male-dominated field - is that because she is beautiful, she doesn't have to do anything else in life except play up her looks and be charming and doors will open for her.
How will she respond to the average boy her age when he finally gets the courage to ask her out? She sees herself as, by birthright and beauty, above average and she sees her looks as a commodity. How does any young man/boy who really wants a connection with this girl (who, at her core, is sweet, good, and caring) have a chance, while she still buys into the superficial cover story that she's being sold?
How did we get back here again? This may be a time-old story, but when I was growing up, my role model was Mary Tyler Moore, not Kim Kardashian. After all we've been through as women these past generations, how does a girl growing up in a household where her dad and stepmom are self-made, relentlessly hard-working, and involved in intellectual as well as community affairs STILL come to believe that her pretty face and body will get her the American dream?
It breaks my heart, because I'm in the same business that makes the entertainment that has taught her to value these superficial things, despite everything she has grown up around.
Mixed messages come from the media, and we can't underestimate the power these messages are having over the young men and women just now coming into their own sexuality.
