Mean Girls Attempt to Positively Address the Young Population The movie, Mean Girls, addresses many cultural ideologies in a negative way, due, in part, to the formula that the movie follows. Mean Girls fits into the film genre teen comedy, which is a genre that targets teens and teen’s special interests, such as coming of age, first love, rebellion, and conflicts with parents, body image and alienation. Often these normally serious subject matters are presented in a glossy, stereotyped or trivialized way. Teen comedy films play up these factors to the extreme to add humor to the film and use satire to make fun of a somewhat teenage reality. This is exactly what the movie, Mean Girls, does.
Anam Ghias Mrs. Gralian English 10 b Oct 23 2011 The Trouble with Liberty The trouble with liberty is a fiction book by Kristin Butcher is in the orca sounding series of high-interest contemporary themes for teenager readers. This is a book about “popular and pretty, liberty who enjoys being the center of attention and will do almost anything to get her way. Even accusing her music teacher of rape.” She would even steal boyfriends. This book takes place in Sutter’s Crossing. Liberty has just moved to Sutter’s Crossing where she finds Val as so called a new best friend.
Compare and Contrast Smooth Talk vs. Where are you going? The story “Where are you going, Where have you been?” was based on a fifteen year old teenager who had thought of herself as pretty, others such as her mother and sister considered it as ignorance. The movie “Smooth talk” was also based on this story but had some differences between them. The movie showed how Connie had friends and one of her friends didn’t want to follow the same footsteps as her and it showed how they had grew apart. However, both the movie and the story stated how Connie and her other friend snuck off across the street to hang out with older kids.
These stories, the young girls create using theses dolls, make it seem okay if these types of unhealthy relationships occur. The fact that their storyline for these play characters never changes is frightening because these are the types of stories they’ll view as being fun and exciting and influence their interactions with other people in their life years to come. These young girls are receiving an unrealistic image of the ideal women by playing with these dolls because these dolls encompass the image that the media sets to be “society’s standards” of what every woman has to be. “Striped swimsuit, stilettos, sunglasses, and gold hoop earrings.” (Cisneros, pg 576) Very few women in the world walk around wearing such outfits. With this think, these girls will strive to achieve an impractical goal.
The emotional effect media has on a woman’s mindset, or ethos, could very well send her overboard into what is commonly known as an eating disorder. The bar is already set extremely high for young girls these days. It can be as simple as a gorgeous movie star wearing your favorite brand of clothing. Now all that runs through your mind while in the fitting room is how much better the clothes looked on that tall, lean body of your idol because it’s someone you look up to and trust. The world is continuously comparing themselves to figures from the media that they forget who they even are.
With Ginny’s permiscouous ways she is wrong about the keys to popularity. This is shown when none of the boys say anything to her whenever they see her outside of their cars. Most relationships in the 1940’ s-50’s were about popularity and not personality. Continuing in the same scene, they see the new girl Caroline Ames as a good-looking girl who always dresses nice as one guy puts it “she always dresses nice and looks good”. They invite her over to sit and right away they strike up a conversation about the school play.
Cher and Dionne wear expensive designer clothing, with short skirts and are always meticulously groomed. These two girls convey affluent and fashionable young women who are popular in their teen world. In a number of dolly shots we see Cher and Dionne being the center of attention, while they are making their way through the school footpath. In Emma Clothing has not been described as much as personalities differing. The best camera angles taken in Clueless are the dolly shots.
This is an example of how our society associates thinness with beauty and adds all kind of negative connections to being overweight. The standards applied to Britney Spears and other celebrities come from our social constructions of what it means to be beautiful. As a society we decide what is positive and what is negative, and what is meaningful and valuable to us, and thus we construct reality. These sets of values are filtered into our everyday life and affect us when we interact with others, read a magazine, and even when we browse the Internet. These images have a very strong effect on teenage girls because they are at a stage where they are trying to develop their sense of self and personal identity.
Cheerleaders are perceived as snobs, brats, and blonde on the inside just because they wear the uniform that distinguishes them from everyone else. According to many of the male students that attend schools in Jupiter, pep rallies are just a getaway from class to watch twenty preppy girls shake their butts and do frilly jumps. After the homecoming pep rally, a cheerleader captain was walking back to her second hour classroom when I witnessed a male student approach her and retort, “Aren’t you supposed to be blonde?” The young man and his friends simply walked away laughing. Even the girls they were with laughed along with them.
There is no exact age as to when a girl is required, or pleases, to wear makeup, but in our society girls would like to wear makeup when breakouts first occur (usually around the age of middle schooled children). Nevertheless, it is now a norm in our society to see teens and preteens believing that they must wear makeup because of what the media tells them a “beautiful girl” appears like. Popular celebrity magazines like Entertainment Weekly, People, US Weekly and many more, as well as movies, the internet and any other place the media influences can be blamed as to why our younger generations choose to begin wearing makeup at such a young age. At an early age female children should not try to imitate mother by wearing high heels, makeup and what not; instead female children should be gaining proper morals promoted by parents and loved ones in order to produce a idealistic child that every parent wishes upon. The media works hard and goes to any extent when they attempt to gain capital in our capitalistic country.