Abstract
Shayla Thiel-Stern analyzes media coverage of teenage girls over more than a century in the United States to build a convincing case for the way in which journalists mitigate the power of young women as a public, social force. Written in a lively and accessible style, the book provides a wealth of evidence from phenomenon ranging from dance halls to social-networking sites to demonstrate how teen girls are systemically constrained from empowered participation in the public sphere. Thiel-Stern, an associate professor in journalism and mass communications at the University of Minnesota, contrasts the lived experience of the young women—finding many sources to give their authentic voices—with the moral panic manufactured by the media. Through careful historical study, she demonstrates convincingly how the media work to keep young women within defined hegemonic roles that do not threaten a capitalistic, male-dominated society.
There are two key factors in this book that make it particularly valuable: the way in which it convincingly demonstrates an ongoing media campaign to disempower young women as well as the way that this historical force can explain much of the media hysteria surrounding teen girls online today. This is particularly useful as researchers often struggle to articulate how media norms and social history affect the online sphere. With her historical approach, Thiel-Stern is able to build a convincing narrative that shows how teen girls represent a particular threat to society when they challenge narrow roles laid down for them. Over more than a century, teen girls have continued to struggle with being framed by the media as either sluts or sexual victims. This framing existed with their visits to public dance halls, participation in sports, being fans of Elvis Presley, being punk rock fans, as well as in the digital sphere. By quoting contemporary media accounts and tracing the narrative of moral panic, Thiel-Stern convincingly demonstrates how media simultaneously silence the nuanced, authentic experience of women as they participate in these windows of public life. At the same time, the media exaggerates or fabricates narratives or events to show how participation threatened women’s morality or physical well-being—particularly their ability to be wives and mothers.
In each case study, the book discusses the current state of the U.S. media and how changes in the media environment contribute to coverage and consumption. Much of this is very useful and helpful in understanding the shape of the coverage, although it might have been helpful to consider in more depth the rise of images in popular media after the spread of television. In addition, although the discussion of popular television series (such as CHiPs and Quincy) was useful in terms of defining popular metanarratives about punk girls, it was difficult to compare this information with that in the other case studies that was related to the news media. A valuable aspect of the book is its inclusion of voices from minority groups, particularly African American teen girls, in particular with use of minority media archives.
The discussion of social media demonstrates how the digital sphere both follows and amplifies the double bind of young women in U.S. society—an object of sexual interest, yet not an owner of her own sexual worth. The Internet brings problems of the collision of the public and private sphere to all, but a great deal of the moral panic has been about teen girls. Anyone who actually talks (and listens) to teen girls about how they negotiate the digital world—as Thiel-Stern did and as dana boyd does in It’s Complicated—will quickly find that teenage females have a lot of agency in the digital panopticon, although there are drawbacks as well. Teenagers sometimes make bad decisions about what to communicate online (such as nude photos) and these poor judgments are amplified by being shared and stored indefinitely. More worryingly, however, the digital world is both shaped and patrolled by hegemonic commercial and state forces, powers that teen girls can neither readily perceive nor control.
Thus, the collision of private and public is often expropriated in two ways. First, in the commercial sense teen girls are particularly attractive and lucrative content creators who also are harvested for their consumptive potential by commercial algorithms. In addition, the digital sphere provides a very powerful communication tool for hegemonic control, a place that seems to facilitate broad self-expression but really only provides a communicative façade to further consolidate and indoctrinate girls into the disempowered position as either sluts or victims. This book presents convincing evidence of the campaign against teen girls when they step into the public sphere: Girls are framed as either excessively sexual or sexual prey. Sadly, this illuminates the otherwise puzzling and repellent phenomenon of the highly sexualized threats made against women in the online sphere—even when there is no sexual aspect to the online conversation (such as rape threats received by actress Ashley Judd for tweeting her support for a basketball team). Thiel-Stern mentions that sexual attacks from strangers have not increased since the mid-1990s despite the moral hype about the Internet as vehicle for endangering girls, which is a very telling point. As Thiel-Sterns writes, “The narrative of crisis surrounding girls and social-networking sites . . . is simply a continuation of the same type of historically cycled patriarchal discourse that privileges a specific kind of femininity and morality.”