“I don’t know how to live without your love
I was born to make you happy
’Cause you’re the only one within my heart …
That’s the way our life should be …
I was born to make you happy.” 

When I hear the ever popular, singer-turned-actress Britney Spears sing these lyrics, I’m reminded why I stopped listening to pop music. I’m not a feminist, but the words “I was born to make you happy” sure do invalidate the meaning of girls’ lives. They make girls into objects to please guys, reminding me of magazine covers of models/actresses wearing barely enough fabric to be clothes. 

I can criticize these images and words all I want. I can call them “stupid” or “sexist,” or acknowledge that they damage my self-esteem. But the truth is, like the rest of the teen population, I can’t really escape the media’s messages about gender.

Gender Stories

How do we learn to be girls or guys, feminine or masculine? Gender roles have little to do with biology and more to do with the media’s influence on society.

Our gender roles are not created naturally, according to Sut Jhally, Ph.D, a professor of communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, MA, and executive director of the Media Education Foundation, in Northhampton, MA.

“Gender isn’t with us when we pop out of the womb. It becomes a part of the social process in which we grow up,” he says. 

In this process, according to Jhally, the media creates “stories” for us. These stories become models for what we consider “normal behavior.” They pigeonhole genders into narrow categories, which often negatively influence our behavior.

So, what’s a common story about the female gender?

“Girls are being defined almost exclusively through their bodies and their sexuality, and this creates a strong relationship between thin images and eating disorders, unhealthy dieting and exercising,” explains Jhally.

“Beyond that, they hear the story that the only important things for them are bodies and sex,” he adds.

Jhally says that girls are also told two “conflicting stories” by the media. One story says that they should be “virgins,” the other that they should be “sluts.”

“The stories put women into an impossible situation. Sexuality is everything, but the moment you express it, you’re a slut. This causes men to draw a fine line between adoration and contempt of women,” he says.

These “virgin/slut” stories still pervade our culture, even though “psychologists will say that trying to live under these double standards will drive a person crazy and keep him or her anxious all the time,” explains Jhally.

Girls aren’t the only ones hit by narrow gender categories. According to Jhally, the media’s stories force guys to focus mainly on having a toned, athletic body, which can cause them to use or abuse steroids.

The stories also portray guys mainly as heterosexuals who must “keep their women in line.” This attitude can contribute to the rise of teen dating violence, explains Jhally.

“In the media, men see women portrayed in terms of sexuality so often that they think they’re entitled to women’s bodies, and girls who don’t comply with this idea become ‘teases,’ ” he adds.

Talking Back

All this negative influence makes some teens reject the media’s stereotypical gender roles.

“I distance myself as much as possible from a lot of the images of girls I see on TV and in magazines because it’s definitely disturbing. I mean, should teen magazines really be telling young girls to flaunt their sex appeal?” explains Acacia, 17, of Edison, NJ.

“I don’t consider myself prudish, but I don’t think it’s OK for Seventeen magazine to give a 12-year-old girl a replica of one of the outfits Britney Spears wore in a video as a sweepstakes prize,” she adds.

Amy Haack, 18, of Stockton, CA, definitely feels influenced by the media.

“The media makes me feel like I have to be skinny and dress in a way that exposes myself to get attention. The smaller the shirt, the better. … It takes a lot of tight pants and shirts to look as good as the girls portrayed in the media on a daily basis,” she says.

The media’s gender stories affect guys, too.

“Guys can’t run around arm-in-arm with their friends, like girls can. You always see commercials where girls are all fun and fancy-free, skipping around and giggling. Guys have to be stern and controlled,” explains Mike, 15, of New York City.

“Guys are told they an be sweet around girls. But they shouldn’t act that way when they’re with their boys, though,” adds Jason, 14, of New Brunswick, NJ.            

The media’s stories about guys also show a bias against homosexuals, according to Dyana, 16, of Edison, NJ.

“You watch a lot of movies, like Bring It On, where male cheerleaders constantly spend their energy in school defending their sexuality. What the media says is masculine goes, and if you don’t fall into that category, people think you’re homosexual,” she explains.

Challenging the Stories

So, how can teens break free of these narrow gender roles?

Jhally stresses the importance of education, which helps us see these images for what they are: pictures that don’t represent reality at all.

“A very famous media scholar once said: ‘We’re not too sure who discovered the water, but we’re pretty sure it wasn’t the fish,’ ” notes Jhally. 

This means that the fish can’t recognize its own environment because it’s so used to the water surrounding it. Similarly, we can’t stop paying attention to these images because they’ve become the water that we swim in.

But we can continually ask questions and challenge these media stories.

As for me, I’ve stopped looking at magazines and watching music videos, and I feel much happier now about my own looks than I did as a 14-year-old engrossed in Seventeen and MTV.

Back then, I used to go to the drugstore every day to waste money on a new hair or makeup product, until I finally realized that I was being tricked into buying products that didn’t do anything. I was trying to be someone that I wasn’t. 

I don’t listen to pop music much anymore, but when I do hear the infamous Britney sing ridiculous lyrics like “I can't live without your love,” I just laugh and write her off as another follower of the media’s narrow gender roles.

Acacia Stevens, 16, a SEX, ETC. national correspondent from Edison, NJ, contributed to this story.

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Summer 2002