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.
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