The Lost Boys of Disney

How does one address issues of girlhood and girl culture without considering everyone's favorite youth empire: Disney? I must confront the Disney fates now, as a particularly salient point about the conglomerate's television network and marketing appeared in the New York Times online a couple days ago. This article sets up yet another "crisis of boyhood" scenario, however, it is Disney Channel that is most put out by this crisis. That is, with programs like Hannah Montana driving the sales of related merchandise, girls are literally investing in the brand, but boys are not (although, interestingly enough, males make up 40% of the audience tuning into Disney Channel).

The most frustrating component of the article is the way in which Disney Channel relies on scientific experts to decode the complex psychological terrain that is boys' brains. Girls are easy and transparent, so to speak, and so they become devoted to a program and its related products much quicker than savvy and capable boys with multiple interests:

"The guys are trickier to pin down for a host of reasons. They hop more quickly than their female counterparts from sporting activities to television to video games during leisure time. They can also be harder to understand: the cliché that girls are more willing to chitchat about their feelings is often true."

Boiling viewers and consumers down to demographics communicates media reliance on the false, yet persistent, dualism that girls are superficial and boys are complex. Clearly, gendered expectations contribute to rubrics that girls and boys must live up to, lest they perform "abnormally." What's more transparent than their female viewers, I'm inclined to argue, are Disney's marketing strategies.

Girls and Reproductive Rights

Very recently, a judge ruled that over the counter emergency contraception should be made available to customers 17 and older (the age requirement was previously 18). Not a month later, a teenager in Fairfax, VA received a two week suspension and a recommendation for expulsion when she was seen taking her daily birth control pill during lunchtime. These are not unrelated stories in the contemporary context of reproductive rights discourses, and specific to this blog, as they are related to questions of girls' rights. Both instances raise concerns about girls' bodies and to what extent they are capable of making decisions regarding their individual bodies - especially as those decisions affect the capacity for reproduction (which is certainly highly classed and racialized - although the Fairfax teen's identity was not revealed, is it not fair to ask the question, "Would a black or Latina teenager have been condemned similarly for essentially preventing a possible pregnancy?"). Now, it seems that all instances of students popping pills, be they aspirin or Ecstasy tabs, are grounds for punishment, but the significant element in the case of a female student taking birth control pills is that this medication is related to reproduction and (hetero)sexualized, warranted or not. Interestingly, the Washington Post reports that the suspended teen spent her time away from school poring over the Student Responsibilities and Rights handbook that indicated her fate. Her close reading indicated the following:

"If she had been caught high on LSD, heroin or another illegal drug, she found, she would have been suspended for five days. Taking her prescribed birth-control pill on campus drew the same punishment as bringing a gun to school would have."

Indeed, is birth control - in the broadest sense - akin to gun control? Is emergency contraception in the hands of a 17 year old somehow reminiscent of Columbine? I have a bit more confidence in girls than these strange discursive relationships indicate we should/might. What are reproductive rights to girls (in the U.S., at least), and who knows "best" in terms of upholding those rights?