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Summary: Hilarious yet serious look at media depiction of women
Review: Imagine a serious, quality work of media studies/women'sstudies that makes you laugh out loud and haul out your Shirellesrecords for another listen. Susan J. Douglas employs an ironic tone and hilariously on-target observations to explore the complex, baffling, and fascinating relationship between baby boomer females, the first TV generation, and the media images of women that shaped and contradicted their perceptions. While the ladies on TV mopped floors with manic glee (and pearls around their necks), real-life moms were cranky, disheveled, and unfulfilled by gleaming linoleum. No wonder their daughters got such confused messages about being a woman in America.</P> Exploring feminine manipulation, Susan J. Douglas finds a parallel between Katie Couric and Gidget (would you believe perkiness as a strategy for empowerment? H. Ross Perot isn't laughing). Looking at the relationship between virginity and frigidity, she deconstructs those angst-ridden girl group songs of the Sixties and those Sandra Dee "I'm not that kind of girl, Johnny" flicks. In her searing criticism of media coverage of the women's movement, she asks if we really needed to know that Kate Millett didn't wash her hair enough, and why male commentators unfailingly ridiculed even the most benign, sensible observations, criticisms, and suggestions from Seventies feminists.</P>
WHERE THE GIRLS ARE is a fascinating and funny look at how women have sorted through powerful media messages to define themselves. As for the future, Douglas includes advice on how to raise the next generation of girls to deconstruct destructive media messages just as their mothers and aunts have.
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Summary: A worthwhile read
Review: Informative and thought-provoking without being too "scholarly".If you are at all interested in the way women are portrayed in pop culture (quickly becoming the only type of culture, I fear) you owe it to yourself to check this title out
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Summary: good book
Review: men suck!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Summary: oh, dear.
Review: Of course men don't suck; but what did you get out of this book if you can't assert that men don't suck without vilifying women who are "unshaven"? One of the goals of feminism is indeed to liberate women from the strictures of certain absurd beauty practices. Yes, I shave my legs (& I even like them that way!) but I certainly don't consider somebody who doesn't shave hers to be a man-hater. All those silly newscasters in Douglas' book turned the women's movement into a catfight between "hairy-legged" feminists and well-kept attractive housewives; let's not give them the satisfaction of being right.
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Summary: Who says scholarly writing can't be fun?
Review: Reading this book is like spending a long weekend with a new friend about your own age, wallowing in music and decades-old sitcom reruns while you trade memories that begin "Did you ever see . . . ?" and "Remember the one about. . . ?" You laugh yourselves silly, but also come away with a new appreciation for how TV, movies, and music helped you define who you were and how you saw the world. OK, I'll be honest. _Where The Girls Are_ is also a first-rate introduction by example to the field of media studies, a brilliant defense of feminism, a scathingly funny critique of American broadcast journalism and an insightful exploration of the complex ways that girls and women relate to the steady stream of female images they're fed by the mass media. But if I led with that paragraph, the book wouldn't sound like it was any fun at all. And it *is* fun. Oh, my, is it fun. Susan Douglas starts from the idea that, although her experiences and those of her friends (white, middle-class, suburban, straight, Baby-Boom-era women) aren't universal, they *can* be used to illustrate larger truths about how people relate to the mass media. She proceeds, for 300 pages, to do just that. Her analyses are always sharp (you will *never* look at "Charlie's Angels" the same way again), and her prose is as far from academic-ese as you can get: funny, pointed, and (when the subject warrants it) wrath-of-God angry at some of the manifest injustices she describes. Read this book. Even if you're not part of the Baby Boom generation. Even if you're not a woman. Trust me.
Rating:
Summary: Who says scholarly writing can't be fun?
Review: Reading this book is like spending a long weekend with a new friend about your own age, wallowing in music and decades-old sitcom reruns while you trade memories that begin "Did you ever see . . . ?" and "Remember the one about. . . ?" You laugh yourselves silly, but also come away with a new appreciation for how TV, movies, and music helped you define who you were and how you saw the world. OK, I'll be honest. _Where The Girls Are_ is also a first-rate introduction by example to the field of media studies, a brilliant defense of feminism, a scathingly funny critique of American broadcast journalism and an insightful exploration of the complex ways that girls and women relate to the steady stream of female images they're fed by the mass media. But if I led with that paragraph, the book wouldn't sound like it was any fun at all. And it *is* fun. Oh, my, is it fun. Susan Douglas starts from the idea that, although her experiences and those of her friends (white, middle-class, suburban, straight, Baby-Boom-era women) aren't universal, they *can* be used to illustrate larger truths about how people relate to the mass media. She proceeds, for 300 pages, to do just that. Her analyses are always sharp (you will *never* look at "Charlie's Angels" the same way again), and her prose is as far from academic-ese as you can get: funny, pointed, and (when the subject warrants it) wrath-of-God angry at some of the manifest injustices she describes. Read this book. Even if you're not part of the Baby Boom generation. Even if you're not a woman. Trust me.
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Summary: Intriquing, Fun and Scholarly
Review: Susan J. Douglas has accomplished a major feat in Where the Girls Are (Growing Up Female with the Mass Media) in creating a work that is intelligent and scholarly and insightful, while always being great fun and very entertaining. Her observations on television shows and pop songs are surprising and will make you look at various aspects of the past pop culture in a new way. It was wonderful to see the Shirelles and certain television sitcom sixties genies and witches as important and subversive. This book is well written and the author makes all of her points convincingly and she will have you on her side as she begings to discuss the more serious matters later in the book. A wonderful discovery.
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Summary: Thought provoking analysis of portrayal of women in media
Review: Susan J. Douglas selects prime examples of popular media depictions of women from 1950's to the 1990's and meticulously dissects them, revealing the mixed messages presented to the unwitting public. While Ms. Douglas' analyses are often insightful and enlightening, her point is repeated so often, it becomes annoying. However, parents of young daughters will want to read this book to obtain a better understanding of how the media sends mixed messages about women. After reading this book, it will be difficult to look at magazines, advertisements, commercials, television shows and movies without doing your own critiques on their portrayals of women.
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Summary: AN AMAZING and entertaining BOOK!!!
Review: The effect a culture as a whole has on its women is incredible. The author uses this idea and develops every piece of the culture in which she grew up to prove her point. She brings society's contradictions into the limelight. "Like millions of girls of my generation, I was told I was a member of a new, privileged generation whose destiny was more open and exciting than that of my parents. But, at the exact same time, I was told that I couldn't really expect more than to end up like my mother (25). Douglas uses her witty style to fills her reader's mind with the hypocrisy of the society at that time. The reader will find herself laughing out loud at the outlandish ideas that were being forced on these adolescents. Although at times they become repetitive, each of Douglas' arguments is legit. She begins the book explaining how this generation gained so much social and cultural attention. "But precisely because there were so many of us, we, as kids, became one of the most important anything can become in America: a market (24)." From here on Douglas' examples will amaze you, and the way she presents them will make you chuckle. Her voice is one of an intelligent feminist who has clearly thought all of this through beforehand. Examples are so specific that their meanings can be lost to those who aren't a product of the baby boom. However, most will be entertaining to any reader, male or female, who already realizes the effect mass media has upon our lives. "I especially wanted to avoid ending up like Mom (42)," she says at the end of the first chapter. Females of Douglas' generation, the mothers of today's adolescent generation, will remember the attitude of their teenage years. It was one of hope for changes in the women's place in society. They dreamt of being more than teachers, homemakers and secretaries. Girls of this generation didn't want to "end up like Mom," and they weren't looking towards them as role models. Instead, heroines of sitcoms, models in advertisements, and even characters in Disney movies became the females who showed young girls the way. The older generation was no longer providing direction for the large market of adolescent girls in the Sixties and Seventies. Instead, they looked towards the mass media. Douglas' insightful mind finds hidden messages in almost everything. It is almost funny that when women were trying their best to become more intelligent and independent than the previous generation that they were ignorant to the fact that the media was effecting them everyday. These teenagers watched shows like Charlie's Angels without recognizing that, "while it reinforced traditional male power through Charlie's faceless voice and agenda-setting instructions, it also tired to pretend that there was no such thing as patriarchy, as least the way feminists characterized it. Instead, there were just a few bad men, isolated deviants, and if only these guys were exterminated or locked up, women would have nothing to fear. There wasn't a system that oppressed women, only a few power hungry bad-guys (216)." After reading this book, one will never look at a re-run in the same manner. Douglas teaches us to open our eyes to the manipulation that was caused by shows like Charlie's Angels, Bewitched, and The Flying Nun. Where the Girls Are follows the timeline of cultural history from the Sixties' Queen for a Day and Jacqueline Kennedy, to the loudmouthed Roseanne Barr, who became the most popular sitcom actress in 1990. Bringing her readers to the present Douglas teaches them to keep at least one eye open at all times when looking towards the media. The last chapter of the book pokes at more recent flaws of the media to which today's generation can relate. During the Epilogue, Douglas makes the tone more personal by showing us what she sees happening to her own daughter. If you haven't already fallen in love with her style at this point, when Douglas allows us to hear the voice of a mother everything becomes personal. She says that the media has made improvements to things that have been brought to its attention, but this has left doors open for new negative ideas to flow in. Because so many baby boomers have children who are part of today's generation of adolescent females, readers can relate to her desire to keep her daughter safe from the messages being thrown at her. "I will try to teach her to be a resistant, back-talking, bullshit-detecting media consumer, and to treasure the strong, funny, subversive women she does get to see...At least, this is my hope. For she will see with her eyes and feel in her spirit that despite all this, women are not helpless victims, they are fighters. And she will want to be a fighter, too (307)." Douglas' Where the Girls Are is an amazing, informative, and incredibly entertaining history of American culture and its effects, those positive yet mostly negative, on the girls and women who are subject to its media. This book also teaches the methods of looking deeply into the media to seek out its hidden, and usually negative messages. This book will appeal to anyone who grew up during the Sixties and Seventies because of its specific, in-depth analysis of sitcoms, advertisements, and other pieces of culture that someone who grew up at this time will certainly remember. It is a chance to re-live one's past, but see it through different eyes. Someone of today's generation can compare their world to that of their mother's and perhaps see that not much has changed. Douglas points out that, "many folks are ready for some media activism, if not for their own sakes, then for their children's (309)." She provides a list of semi-current "major offenders" to which a reader can voice his or her own opinion. Readers of Where the Girls Are will find themselves, in the end, educated about the effect media plays in their life, and inspired to do something to help the present situation. Douglas' book not only educates the general public, it continues the activation of the feminist movement by instilling desire in its readers to recognize the media's poisonous effect...and do something about it.
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Summary: "Deconstruction makes us stronger, so let's move on!"
Review: The writer of this entertaining, informative and consciousness-raising book is a professor of American culture on the East Coast. In this book she deconstructs (I love that word -- and that concept!) media images about and directed to women, starting with the Baby Boom generation. As funny as it is insightful. I now recommend this book to every woman I know
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