Thoughts on Girlhood Studies

Some thoughts …

I wonder how long the Pink Think mentality will persist in our culture.  Despite women’s advancements since the 1960, Pink Think is still going strong – just flip through the pages of a girls’ magazine or stroll down the girl aisle at your local Toys R Us, and you will be inundated with pink and with toys focusing on girls’ appearance or their role at nurturer.  I don’t necessarily think this is pernicious, but I believe it does set them up to be more passive as adults.  But what will it take to change -- anmd will it *ever* change?  I am reminded of some Laurie Anderson lyrics (from the 80s, so the figures have changed I am sure): “For every dollar a man makes, a woman makes 63 cents.  Now, fifty years ago it was 62 cents.  So, with that kind of luck, it will be the year 3,888 before we make a buck.”  Pink Think maintains the status quo.  I wonder, in my lifetime, how Pink Think will evolve and where it will lead.

I am also interested in the psychology of Pink Think, and the psychology of Western girlhood in general.  Girls are taught to be passive, but at the same time extroversion is preferred in our culture over introversion (interestingly, in the East, the opposite tends to be true.  As you can tell, I am pretty fascinated by the introversion-extraversion spectrum).  So, girls have to walk a fine line – they have to be extroverted, but not *too* extroverted or they might be perceived as aggressive / abrasive.  Interestingly, when I look back on my grade school and high school experience, I think the girls who were bullied / ostracized tended to be introverts.  I guess this speaks to a larger phenomenon: it seems the further a girl falls from the traditional, “girly girl” definition of girlhood, the more likely she is to be ostracized by her peers.  I guess this is true of boys, too – children have an acute sense of normalcy and tend to punish any form of eccentricity.  Not that Pink Think is responsible for every ill that girls experience – I mean, some girls will *always* be ostracized, it’s just an inescapable social dynamic – but … Pink Think is not entirely innocuous, either.

Also, I would like to do more research on the experience of minority girls, particularly, African American girls.  Generally speaking, they are not taught passivity to the same degree as Caucasian girls.  (I remember reading somewhere that black women experience abuse at the hands of their mates at the same rates as white women, however, black women are twice as likely to fight back.)  How does Pink Think affect these girls? They are given conflicting messages from their culture and from society at large.  Also, I would like to look at body image issues among African American girls, and how they resist (or not) the stereotypical white ideal of beauty.

So I guess I am most concerned in how Pink Think affects girls as they mature into adults, and I would be interested in studying this in greater depth, especially from a psychological angle.