Essay For Kim Woods

Book: From Inquiry to Academic Writing

Elline Lipkin

From Girl’s bodies, Girl’s selves: Body Image, Identity, and Sexuality

Elline Lipkin is a scholar who also writes poetry and nonfiction. Since 2008, she has held the position of Research Scholar at the Center for the Study of Women at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). This excerpt is from her book, Girls’ Studies (2009), which examines the his-tory and theories of studying girls’ lives. “Girls’ Studies” is a growing field within research on gender, as scholars focus on the way our earliest expe-riences shape lifelong expectations of ourselves and our place in society. As Lipkin says, “A girl’s body, almost from birth (when her first weight is taken), often reflects cultural expectations and conventions — in how she dresses, how she is allowed to use her body, how she presents it to the world, and how comfortable she feels within it” (para. 5). As you read, you might consider how her examples and arguments might apply to boys’ bodies and cultural expectations, too.In this piece, Lipkin draws extensively from the research of cultural historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg, whose book The Body Project: An Inti-mate History of American Girls (1997) was one of the first to examine the body — particularly the female body — as a “project” in which every part of the body might come to be seen as a “problem” that needs to be solved (often with products). Lipkin notes of “body projects” ranging from hair-removal and weight-loss to makeup and cosmetic procedures, “the effect on the owners of the bodies means often feeling a disquieting angst that they are never good enough as they are, that they are forever being mea-sured and found lacking” (para. 13). Lipkin offers an overview of Brum-berg’s argument that this problematizing of girls’ bodies is hardly a new phenomenon; for hundreds of years, consumer culture has inspired anxi-ety about and “cures” for the female body. While Lipkin notes that many beauty standards are set by “Endless images of alluring, flirtatious, slender, usually white, and presumptively heterosexual young women” (para. 2), be sure to read carefully for ways girls of different races and ethnicities are affected by — or resist — these standards. What other examples can you think of that affect girls of all kinds? (The long section on eating disorders offers some useful statistics.) What other examples can you think of that demonstrate how girls of all kinds resist them — often in quite creative ways, using social media or other technology? While a focus on beauty culture may seem frivolous, Lipkin draws on Brumberg’s research to argue that our fundamental sense of ourselves as healthy and sexual beings is affected by cultural “norms” that often are harmful physically and psychologically. As you consider the long history of this trend, consider what it would take to change it. How might research, reading, and writing be part of that change?

T he signs are everywhere — literally. Look up at a billboard in any major American city and what’s being sold isn’t just the newest soft drink or face wash. It’s usually also an attractive woman, most often below the age of twenty-five, smiling or posing suggestively. Movies, television shows, music videos, magazines, video games, and ads for products varying from clothing to toothpaste to cell phones feature young women, and in Ameri-can culture, a certain look for these girls and women — slender body; flaw-less (and more often than not white) skin; delicate, even facial features, enhanced by makeup; carefully coifed hair — is ubiquitous. This often isn’t even cause for comment — but the images are absorbed and “normalized” by viewers at almost every turn.“Children are born anthropologists,” girls’ historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg writes in her foreword to photojournalist Lauren Greenfield’s 2002 exposé Girl Culture , “able to expertly deconstruct and mimic what culture offers them, especially in terms of gender roles. Before they even abandon their teddy bears, contemporary girls embrace the erotic. They also understand that their power as women will come from their beauty, and that beauty in American culture is defined, increasingly, by a certain body type displayed in particular ways.” For the most part, advertising, media, and other cultural vehicles reflect certain physical “standards” for girls and women — that thinness is attractive, that clear skin and cer-tain kinds of Caucasian features are beautiful, that heterosexuality is the norm. Endless images of alluring, flirtatious, slender, usually white, and presumptively heterosexual young women imprint as “normal” and desirable “standards” of feminine appearance into girls’ (and others’) minds, without those viewers necessarily realizing how these values have infiltrated.Greenfield’s images in Girl Culture paint an alarming portrait of how different girls respond to this cultural focus on the female body: One eighteen-year-old is shown being “blind weighed” with her back to the scale at a treatment center for eating disorders (implying that she can’t face the disheartening result); a five-year-old girl picks out clothing in an upscale Beverly Hills boutique; and college girls in bikinis strut by hoot-ing men at spring break competitions, some seeming self-confident, others seeming uncertain.The girls in Greenfield’s photos often see themselves as too thin, too fat, not stylish enough, too trendy, attractive or ugly or desirable or hid-eous. Comfort with one’s body appears all but nonexistent. “I don’t know a girl who’s happy with her body,” states eighteen-year-old Ashlee in text accompanying pictures of the debutante Cotton Ball in Chattanooga, Ten-nessee. Ashlee, a vegan who says she dislikes wearing makeup and dress-ing up, attended the ball and participated in its rituals, including shaving her armpits, to appease her family. “I just don’t understand shaving every day,” she says. “I like my armpit hair. My boyfriend likes my armpit hair, too. People just buy into the unattractiveness of unshaven armpits. My whole family cheered when I shaved.”

A girl’s body, almost from birth (when her first weight is taken), often reflects cultural expectations and conventions — in how she dresses, how she is allowed to use her body, how she presents it to the world, and how comfortable she feels within it. When she is younger, her body is measured against standards of health and growth, as it would be for any child. But near adolescence, a girl’s growing breasts, widening hips, and changing skin become the site for many other standards. Her breasts are not just a physical aspect of her body, but a way in which others will perceive her as a teenager rather than as a child — custom will dictate that it’s time to wear a bra, parents might deem her old enough to handle more priv-ileges and responsibilities, and she might receive more sexual attention from acquaintances and strangers. Adolescent girls find themselves on the receiving end of increasingly sexualized expectations — from peers who cast a critical eye on girls’ appearance and behavior, from parents who might either assume girls will date or fear that girls will date too soon, and from a culture that is often uncomfortable with women who don’t embody certain sexualized stereotypes. A changing body means other changes in a girl’s life — some that she might be emotionally able to meet, and some that she resists. But there is no doubt that as she moves from childhood to adolescence, an overlay of expectations — sexiness, attractiveness, availability — can blanket a girl’s individual pacing of her desire to venture into womanhood.While boys and men are increasingly presented with images that also stray far from the reality of the average male body, the use of male models to sell mundane products isn’t as pervasive, and the presence of a con- ventionally attractive or sexualized male body isn’t considered as strictly standard to sell a product or tell a story. When women are consistently objectified — that is, used as vehicles to sway public view through their sexuality or projected attractiveness — it sends girls a clear message. The onslaught of images of impossibly perfect-looking, sexually contextualized female bodies reinforces the idea that physical “perfection” and sexual attractiveness are both normal and expected of women, and by endlessly recreating scenarios that reinforce traditional gender roles, advertisers simultaneously teach girls and women a set of lessons about what it is to be female in America.

The Body as Battleground

In the 1997 book The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls , author Joan Jacobs Brumberg traces the history of how teenage girls within America have made different body parts into “projects.” Examining historical views of aspects of girls’ bodies — such as menstruation, body hair, skin conditions, weight — Brumberg delineates the ways that girls (and parents, doctors, and advertisers) have conceptualized those aspects as “problematic” and devised ways of addressing each one. Recollecting a discussion in which her female college-age students discuss the “neces-sity” of bikini-line waxes, Brumberg realizes that yet another body part has become a “project” for girls to attend to, mold to a standard, and then maintain. Asking herself why these students were adding another area to manage to the long litany of bodily concerns they already had, she rec-ognizes that girls are now sexualized at a far younger age, and that con-cern with their bodies is yet more pervasive and rampant, with advertisers eager to instruct on depilation, control, and constant maintenance.Examining the diaries of girls before World War I, Brumberg explains that the girls whose diaries she finds and reads (most hailing from middle-class families) were often praised for lack of attention to their bodies: Feminine virtue was found in a kind of unself-consciousness in which vanity about one’s body was considered immoral or wrong. From decades later, the girlhood diaries that Brumberg collects and reads cite numerous instances of self-consciousness; by the 1950s, girls felt the need to improve their hair, skin, teeth, and weight, among other “body projects” that required honing and then maintenance in order to hew to acceptable standards.Throughout her book, Brumberg considers how girls’ bodies (and specific physical issues such as having clear skin, maintaining virginity, or hiding menstruation) have been commodified and valued as ways in which physical perfection (or the attempt at its attainment) becomes a class-based goal. As print media began to circulate more widely after the turn of the twentieth century, through magazines, newspapers, and books, advertisers also had an opportunity to sell girls (and their parents) prod-ucts intended to improve overall beauty and health, contributing to anxiety about not meeting a standard of “normalcy,” which, as Brumberg shows, historically has altered but has never left American cultural consciousness.In her chapter “Sanitizing Puberty: The American Way to Menstru-ate,” Brumberg writes, “In the effort to sell products, menstruation finally burst out of the closet in the 1920s when popular magazines, such as the Ladies’ Home Journal and Good Housekeeping , began to run ads for Kotex. These advertisements constituted the first real public acknowledgement of menstruation.” She writes that later, in the 1930s and 1940s, “Newly estab-lished educational divisions within the personal products industry (i.e., Kimberly-Clark . . . Tampax, Inc. . . .) began to supply mothers, teachers, parent-teacher associations and also the Girl Scouts with free, ready-made programs of instruction on ‘menstrual health.’ ” Postwar, “marketing strat-egists understood that sales to the baby-boom generation — soon to be the largest cohort of adolescents in American history — could turn menstrual blood into gold.” With menstruation, as with other functions and features of the female body, Brumberg shows how marketing strategists and cul-tural scripts intertwine until the messages girls receive are impossible to separate out and are just accepted as part of an overarching gender code.In her chapter “Perfect Skin,” Brumberg looks at the history of teenage acne, noting that as far back as 1885 a physician at New York Hospital realized that girls were three times more likely than boys to seek help for their skin. “Although boys surely suffer from the stigma of acne,” Brum-berg writes, “girls’ pimples get more cultural attention. Because of cultural mandates that link femininity to flawless skin, the burden of maintain-ing a clear complexion has devolved disproportionately upon women and girls. . . . Skin care was really the first of many body projects endorsed and supported by middle-class parents for their adolescent children.” In Brumberg’s accounting, a girl’s face was a key to her future: a good mar-riage (i.e., a marriage that put her into the same or an even higher social and economic position than she was in). As twentieth-century advances in dermatology also made acne treatment more available, families could “invest” in a daughter with skin issues so that her visage wasn’t marred. Brumberg mentions a Victorian-era skin-care product called Kosmeo that was advertised in the Sears, Roebuck catalog with this copy: “When a man marries, nine times out of ten he chooses a girl with a pretty complexion.” Brumberg’s research concludes, “In order to avoid an unhappy future as a spinster, thousands of American girls ordered Kosmeo, and then rubbed earnestly with camel’s hair brushes and Turkish towels in order to increase friction and improve blood circulation to the face.”Another historical shift Brumberg notes involves girls’ response to makeup. She writes, “In the effort to look like the attractive women they saw in movies and magazines, American women in the 1920s put aside long-established objections to face makeup and began to purchase and use a wide range of cosmetics.” Brumberg details products marketed spe-cifically to African American girls and women to lighten their skin, and she recounts the “hierarchy of hue in the African American community”; describing 1950s magazines’ range of ads for lightening products, she elab-orates, “Until recent times — probably the 1960s — the color of a girl’s skin was central to her sense of self, as well as her place in the community of people of color. Although skin bleachers are still sold today, they generally are not used by the current generation to bleach the entire face, the way older generations did, before the Black Pride movement of the 1960s and 1970s.” Reflecting, again, on how commerce intersects with “standards” that girls are told they must adhere to in order to be pleasing, or attractive, she writes, “The fact that skin bleachers and fade creams sold so well is a painful and compelling reminder of how much class and racial anxiety has been invested in skin in American society, particularly among groups who suffer from exclusion and bigotry.”What makes the female body such a battleground? The claims that parents, advertisers, and culture make on girls’ bodies are dizzying — body odor must be banned, underarm hair removed, breasts lifted to a certain perk, skin made clear enough to touch, hair made glossy and enticing. The effect on the owners of the bodies means often feeling a disquieting angst that they are never good enough as they are, that they are forever being measured and found lacking. Contemporary “body projects” that girls today might undertake include the ones that Brumberg shows have lasted for decades in girls’ awareness: weight, skin, haircut and color, among oth-ers. But consider how many other “body projects” are also undertaken in the twenty-first century: eyebrow grooming, development of fuller eye-lashes, chemical peels and dermabrasion, tattooing, nail art, “bikini line” maintenance, colored contacts or Lasik surgery, tooth whitening, use of push-up bras or minimizers, contemporary “smoothers” to cover up panty lines, cellulite erasure, and skin buffing. And the list could go on.Body weight and body shape come up consistently in Brumberg’s history as factors to be controlled. In the chapter titled “Body Projects,” under the subtitle “The Century of Svelte,” Brumberg gives a brief history of the cult of thinness in America, and she also shows how trends in and expectations about girls’ body shapes have changed, demonstrating again how subject the female figure has been to cultural trends and demands. She cites 1920 as the first time that “teenage girls made systematic efforts to lower their weight by food restriction and exercise” as adolescent girls “were motivated by a new ideal of female beauty that began to evolve around the turn of the century.” New fashion trends that emphasized a trim silhouette replaced more voluptuous Victorian hourglass figures, with small waists and large hips. Instead, the American woman migrated toward the look of the “flapper” — flat chested, long limbed, and decidedly slender. Brumberg writes that girls around this period (starting around 1908 and progressing through the 1920s and 1930s) “bade farewell to cor-sets, stays, and petticoats, and they began to diet, or internalize control of the body.”The changing fashions of girls’ breasts (whether their owners are try-ing to appear flat or large chested) is another point Brumberg explores by looking at the evolution of the training bra and undergarments sold to girls and women, especially around teenage anxiety about “developing” too quickly or too slowly. Different decades dictated that breasts either be disguised or enhanced, but the focus on controlling one’s weight remained a constant, as it still seems to be. Another historical trend Brumberg traces is the focus on female legs: “Americans have talked about glamorous ‘gams’ ever since the Rockettes made good legs a requirement back in the 1930s,” she writes. “But American taste in legs has changed considerably in the past half-century.” She notes that whereas the Rockettes had “shorter, chunkier limbs than today’s long-stemmed, lean favorites,” changes in fashion have accounted for an emphasis on “tight, narrow thighs.” After miniskirts became popular in the 1960s, girls and women felt more empha-sis put on their legs — particularly their thighs, which were meant to be as trim and cellulite free as possible. The phrase “thunder thighs,” notes Brumberg, entered the American lexicon “in the early 1980s both as short-hand for female anxiety about the body and as a misogynistic slur.” Dis-cussing the cellulite avoidance industry, through use of thigh creams and liposuction, she concludes, “Our national concern about ‘thunder thighs’ says a lot about what Americans value. . . . Not surprisingly, there is more self-hatred [of the body] among women than men, and women tend to be especially dissatisfied about the lower body — the waist, hips, thighs, and buttocks. . . . This sad reality needs to be factored into our understanding of girls and the way in which they develop their sense of self.”Without question, being thin is widely held up in American culture today as an ideal to be achieved. Cultural differences play a large role in these perceptions; what’s considered a “normal” body shape in a rural Midwestern community might look very different from what is considered “standard” in Manhattan. A Latina girl might have a fuller, larger frame presented to her as positive, as might an African American girl. But no matter a girl’s cultural background, what is seen within American society at large is a narrow standard that’s often in direct opposition to the bod-ies of most real women. And from the scores of models who advertise the “waif look” alongside whatever product they are hawking to the scores of slender television and film stars, the image of the thin woman is every-where. And recent teen pop-culture icons varying from the Olsen twins to Destiny’s Child, Lindsay Lohan, and Miley Cyrus tend to embody the same extremely slender stereotype.Why value thinness? The concept that women’s presentation matches the status they hold within a patriarchal culture — meant to be diminu-tive, shrinking, not taking up excessive space, and standing in contrast to a larger male form — is one possible explanation. There are many other via-ble responses as to why women are told through cultural code that being thinner and smaller is better, including the fact that most women do have smaller body sizes than men do. But the pervasive glorification of taking up less space with one’s body, and the idealized feminine body shape being slight rather than large, is a widely accepted tenet of American culture, sometimes with drastic consequences.The media literacy organization Mind on the Media reports, “Eighty percent of ten-year-old American girls diet. The number one magic wish for young girls age eleven to seventeen is to be thinner.” The media are most often cited as the instigators of pressure to be thin. In many sources the height of the average American women is listed as five feet four inches, and her weight is listed as approximately 140 pounds. In a more recent study by the National Center for Health Statistics, the average American woman’s weight is now listed as 163 pounds and her height is listed as just under five feet four inches. The height of the average fashion model, on the other hand, is approximately five feet nine inches to above six feet tall, and her average weight is approximately 117 pounds. This means that fash-ion models are on average significantly thinner and taller than the major-ity of the female American population, and yet they present an image to which most women and girls feel they ought to aspire. Seen in this light, the bloatedness of the diet industry — in which book authors, pharmaceu-tical companies, dieting organizations, makers of special exercise equip-ment, magazine publishers, and support groups feed anxiety to women about weight while filling their own bank accounts — becomes quietly disturbing.

According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), anorexia nervosa is “a serious, often chronic, and life-threatening eating disorder defined by a refusal to maintain minimal body weight within 15 percent of an individual’s normal weight.” Asserting that anorexia most often occurs in pre- and postadolescent girls, NAMI’s website explains that “one reason younger women are particularly vulnerable to eating disorders is their ten-dency to go on strict diets to achieve an ‘ideal’ figure. This obsessive diet-ing behavior reflects today’s societal pressure to be thin, which is seen in advertising and the media.”Bulimia (or bulimia nervosa), another well-known eating disorder, occurs when girls eat excessively (or “binge”) and then purge their food, whether through vomiting, use of laxatives, or diuretics. With both buli-mia and anorexia, overexercising can be common, along with a sense of “body dysmorphic syndrome” — the sense that one’s own body is distorted, bloated, and unacceptable, despite what a mirror or scale might reveal. Left untreated, both disorders can be fatal, and even with treatment both can cause lifelong damage to the body through inadequate nutrition and through the development of a vexed relationship with food.Estimating that between one-half to 1 percent of all females in the United States will develop anorexia, NAMI also states that “because more than 90 percent of all those who are affected are adolescent and young women, the disorder has been characterized as primarily a woman’s ill-ness.” The complex motivations underlying different cases of anorexia are many — girls might experience starving themselves as a way to exercise control over their changing bodies, or they may see it as a way to comply with a cultural standard of extreme thinness, promoted to them daily and tacitly praised by parents who admire models’ or actresses’ bodies.In response to these concerns, activists and girls’ advocates have pushed in recent years for magazines aimed at adolescent girls (and magazines geared toward women) to employ diverse models with “real” figures that exemplify different body types. Agitating for change with how girls and women are perceived by the public — and hence, perceive their own bodies — is nothing new, although advocating for change has taken different forms. Feminist activists of the 1960s and 1970s prom-inently crusaded against the sexist and racist standards of beauty pag-eants: The group New York Radical Women organized a protest in 1968 in which two hundred activists in Atlantic City, New Jersey, gathered to express outrage over the Miss America Pageant’s objectification of girls and women, likening them to animals being judged for their physical attributes. According to Rory Dicker in her work A History of U.S. Fem-inisms , the protesters carried signs with messages such as C AN M AKEUP C OVER THE W OUNDS OF O UR O PPRESSION ? and T HE R EAL M ISS A MERICA L IVES IN H ARLEM . Dicker explains that the last sign made reference to the pageant’s embedded racism: “Until 1940, contestants had to be white, and as of 1968, no black woman had competed in, much less won, the contest.” These campaigns of the past, and those of the present, have often been met with mixed success. In 2004 the skin- and hair-product company Dove launched a Campaign for Real Beauty, during which scouts recruited a variety of “ordinary-looking” women and asked them to pose in basic white underwear while looking naturally proud of their nonmodel-size bodies. Dove also set up the Dove Self-Esteem Fund, which sponsored a series of videos and online resources meant to promote body acceptance among women and girls, no matter their shape or size.Dove’s campaign sought to use “real women” to defy use of expected body shapes and types, as well as ages, of models, and it pinpointed bol-stering self-esteem in girls as a crucial starting point to having grown women appreciate their bodies as they are. In a “Girls Only” part of its web site, the campaign offered interactive tools for girls to use to think about issues of body image and self-esteem, with activities designed to help girls figure out who best supports them in their lives, identify where their inner strengths lie, and determine what they need to feel good about them-selves. In the site’s “Girls Only Interactive Self-Esteem Zone,” users could learn how to decode media messages aimed at girls and women and view “before” and “after” images of models whose bodies had been cosmetically retouched and digitally manipulated.And yet it is critical to look more closely at what this media campaign is selling — just as Dove advises media-literate girls to do. Detractors are quick to point out that, fundamentally, Dove is still hawking products to girls and women that they probably don’t fundamentally need — but with different, “affirming,” packaging. And a further catch? One of the original ads for the Dove Real Beauty campaign was for a cellulite-firming cream, pointing to the disconnect between promoting women’s self-acceptance and selling a product that diminishes the size of women’s thighs.Reporter Rebecca Traister critiqued the campaign — and other media campaigns that use a “feel good about yourself” tactic to fundamentally tell girls and women that they need to do (or buy) more — in a 2005 Salon.com article, citing the tagline used in the Dove marketing: “For too long/beauty has been defined by narrow, stifling sterotypes [sic]./You’ve told us it’s time to change all that./We agree./Because we believe real beauty comes/In many shapes, sizes and ages./It is why we started the Campaign for Real Beauty.” Traister, pointing out the cellulite-firming cream conun-drum, writes, “As long as you’re patting yourself on the back for hiring real-life models with imperfect bodies, thereby ‘challenging today’s stereo-typical view of beauty and inspiring women to take great care of them-selves,’ why ask those models to flog a cream that has zero health value and is just an expensive and temporary Band-Aid for a problem’ that the media has told us we have with our bodies?” Traister also describes a simi-larly conflicted girl-focused ad campaign, colaunched by Bath and Body Works and American Girl dolls, that purportedly focuses on “Real Beauty Inside and Out” by selling young girls “personal care products ‘designed to help girls ages 8 to 12 feel — and be — their best.’” The products — ”body lotions, splashes, soaps and lip balms, all dressed up in girl-friendly ‘hues of berry’” — arrived “with an inspirational message like ‘Real beauty means no one’s smile shines exactly like yours,’ ‘Real beauty is helping a friend,’ or ‘Real beauty is trusting in yourself.’ ”ln 2007, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) launched a letter-writing campaign to Unilever, Dove’s owner, citing the hypocrisy in Dove’s hyping its marketing campaign for girls “while simul-taneously advertising Axe Body Spray by degrading them.” The organiza-tion’s press release cites CCFC director and cofounder Dr. Susan Linn: “Even as Unilever basks in praise for its Dove Real Beauty campaign, they are profiting from Axe marketing that blatantly objectifies and degrades young women.” Unilever’s Axe product line, marketed to boys, featured ads trading on the humor of over-the-top sexist, stereotypical gender roles: In one promotional online music video for Axe, the Bom Chicka Wah Wahs, a young female singing trio wearing only panties, bras, gar-ters, and high-heeled boots, gyrate seductively atop a bus, fondle their own breasts, cuddle up to a variety of phallic objects, and sing pantingly about how the scent of Axe “attacks” and overwhelms a woman’s “com-mon sense.” The singers writhe around stripper poles and along the floor while the camera repeatedly cuts to the women’s crotches and bottoms. A “nerdy girl” with glasses who is first seen ironing and mentions she needs to get to work is then transformed into a sex kitten like the other singers; claiming she wants “true love like Romeo and Juliet,” she is then “converted” to the other singers’ hypersexual look with their implication of sexual licentiousness. “[The group’s] suggestive theme song and video is all about how the Axe aroma causes women to lose control sexually,” CCFC writes. “Sample lyric: ‘If you have that aroma on, you can have our whole band.’” Bob McCannon, copresident of the Action Coalition for Media Education, calls the Dove campaign “marketing masquerading as media literacy.” Whether it’s viewed positively or negatively, it’s cer-tain that the Dove campaign for girls and women has caused a stir — and maybe one that will edge change forward by other marketers. However, if change simply means new types of marketing for products that funda-mentally tell women their bodies need improvement, does it really mean true progress?

Freedom and Choices

In the final chapter of The Body Project , Brumberg writes, “At the end of the twentieth century, living in a girl’s body is more complicated than it was a century ago.” She lays out a late-twentieth-century dilemma that still resonates in the twenty-first, in what some still consider a “postfeminist” era: Girls, she explains, are told “on the one hand . . . that being female was no bar to accomplishment. Yet girls of [this] generation learned from a very early age that the power of their gender was tied to what they looked like — and how ‘sexy’ they were — rather than to character or achieve-ment.” Absent the Victorian-era “protective umbrella” that once shielded girls (and restricted them) from sexuality, girls have more freedom than ever, but, according to Brumberg, “their freedom is laced with peril.”Yet openness about sexuality in a post-sexual revolution era also gives girls options they would never before experience: the choice to explore their sexuality before marriage or committed partnership, to understand their own desires and needs, to discover whether or not they are hetero-sexual, bisexual, lesbian, or want to move between definitions.“Knowledge is power” is a popular saying, and it is remarkable how much more informed girls can now be — through Internet resources if there isn’t open discussion within their own families or good information given through school or other community resources. Knowing more about their bodies and about sex leads girls toward making their own choices, although careful media education is still needed to decode options that are “normalized,” such as being sexualized at early ages or at a moment when a girl feels she “should” be, but might not be, ready.Artist Barbara Kruger’s famous statement “Your body is a battle-ground” is often heard within circles where women examine issues per-taining to bodies, gender, and cultural expectations. Girls’ more recently won freedoms — to participate in sports, to envision and plan for careers previously limited to (often privileged) men, to access accurate informa-tion about sexuality and sexual health — intersect with a consumer cul-ture that sees girls and women as both bait and targets, and a society that has not come as far in abolishing limiting and harmful stereotypes of gender and sexuality as it likes to think. The site of a complex locus of cultural issues surrounding power, identity, and sexuality — often converging at uncomfortable angles — a girl’s body is hardly peaceful to inhabit.