Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: Brief Article

Susan Douglas, "Pundit Watch" columnist for The Progressive, has written a witty, perceptive account of the conflicting images the media have displayed about women from the 1950s to the present. Rather than taking a reductionist view of the media, Douglas points out that the media conveyed both feminist and antifeminist messages. "The common wisdom about the unremitting sexism of popular culture, and our lemming-like acquiescence to it, can't be quite right," she says, since girls who devoured the media's offerings soon became feminists. "The truth is that growing up female with the mass media helped make me a feminist, and it helped make millions of other women feminists, too." The media have been schizophrenic about women, providing a vast array of mixed messages, thus explaining the love-hate relationship that many women have toward the media.

Showing an appallingly encyclopedic grasp of popular culture, Douglas takes the reader on a breezy tour through the sitcoms, the nightly news shows, the fashion magazines, the popular music scene. "In my tour through the images of the past four decades, my goal is to expose, review, and, at times, make fun of the media-induced schizophrenia so may of us feel." She succeeds admirably. She has a...