Sex, Girls, and Media

The media is an inescapable reality of today’s society. Throughout their lives, women are surrounded and saturated with television, radio, advertisement, news print, and internet in which women are underrepresented and over sexualized. The physical appearance and sexual aspect of women is over emphasized in the media. Media, like Cosmo or Seventeen Magazine, which is targeted to women revolves largely around sex, relationships, fashion, and beauty products. Exposure to these images during a sensitive period could have a large impact on mental health, the development of self image, and the development of social roles in adolescent women.
How are adolescent girls affected by over sexualization of women in the media? Do adolescent women develop different identities or social roles for themselves as a result of this presentation? Are the images of women in the media to blame for the increasing amount of adolescent females diagnosed with anxiety, depression, and eating disorders? Do these images have an effect on their mental health, body image, or sexual behavior?

For the purposes of this discussion:
• Poor mental health will be defined as having poor body image, self objectification, and internalizing problems. Internalizing problems may include anxiety, depression, and social withdrawal. (Peter & Valkenburg, 2007).
• Sexual behavior will include at what age an individual becomes sexually active, how sexually active they are, and their attitude toward being sexually active.
Adolescents, as defined by Erik Erikson’s psychosocial stages of development, spans the ages from eleven to eighteen and is a stage during which adolescents either develop a sense of identity or role confusion. During adolescents, according to Erikson, a person becomes concerned with how he or she is perceived by others. During this time the person develops identity if they feel confidant that their inner self matches their outer self, and they develop a sexual identity.

Self objectification is a feminist theory that women and girls internalize the image of women as sex objects, and the unrealistic images of thin women as the ideal. Women come to view themselves in terms of external perspectives. They define themselves as objects to be viewed, admired, and possessed (Aubrey, 2006). In Western culture the depiction is specifically sexual; women view themselves as sex objects for men to use, possess, and approve of. According to feminist theory, this self objectification leads to high levels of anxiety, body shame, and poor self esteem (Peirce, 1990).
Teens under the age of eighteen spend an average of between six and seven hours a day with mass media in some form. Older teens spend about twenty hours a week listening to music or watching music videos. In prime time television there is an average of about eight sexual incidents per hour. Women are primarily depicted as sex objects. In fact women are, “rarely portrayed as anything other than sexual objects to be lusted after or aggressed against.”(Brown& Witherspoon, 2002). Magazines and advertisements focus mainly on women’s bodies or body parts, sometimes omitting the woman’s head and face altogether. This focus on women’s bodies and body parts, contributes to the problem of self objectification. In television programming that is popular among adolescents, the second most common plot is women and girls being judged by their physical appearance and sexuality (Aubrey, 2006). This depiction leads adolescent women to judge themselves by this same appearance standard, rather than by their own values of talent, intelligence, or personality.


Despite the growing prevalence of television, music, and movies, magazines remain one of the most significant forms of media for adolescent women. Adolescent females rank magazines as second only to friends in importance as a source of information (Brown & Witherspoon, 2002). Seventeen Magazine, which is targeted directly to adolescent females, focuses on showing adolescent girls in sexual situations. It contains extensive cultural level scripts for romantic and sexual situations which have been revealed to oversimplify female sexuality, “to guide real-life sexual behavior and to perpetuate gender inequalities.” (Carpenter, 1998). Also, the scenarios often focus on sexual victimization, reminding readers of negative consequences of sexual behavior for females without mentioning similar consequences for males (Carpenter, 1998).


The ideal woman in the media is also becoming thinner and less realistic. In 1985, the average fashion model was a size eight; ten years later the average model had shrunk to between size zero and size two(Mundray & Ogden,1996).


A definite correlation has been drawn between a female’s exposure to media and their body image and mental health. In particular exposure to the thin, sexy ideal image, “results in a small, but statistically significant, increase in body dissatisfaction.”(Aubrey, 2006).

Magazines have been proven to be a reliable indicator of body satisfaction in adolescent females, and television is linked to anxiety, shame, self dissatisfaction, and eating disorders (Aubrey, 2006). This may be a result of the fact that these forms of media saturate adolescents with sexual, stereotypical images of women and impossible ideals of female beauty. The adolescent can not achieve these ideals, and can not reconcile what they see in the media with the values given to them by family, educators, and religious leaders. This discrepancy can lead to dissonance, which increases anxiety and depression.

The depiction of thin, sexy women in the media is closely associated with eating disorders, body dissatisfaction, shame, anxiety, and depression. Even more disturbing, it is increasingly common in adolescent females for body dissatisfaction to generalize into dissatisfaction with one’s self and one’s life (Miller, 2007). It is not surprising that being inundated with unrealistic images of women drive adolescents to self objectification, and extreme dieting in order to achieve the ideal. It is, however, important that adolescent males appear to be suffering from self objectification as well. The image of ideal men in the media emphasizes muscularity, with the depictions becoming more and more unrealistically muscular over the last 20 years (Good, Mills, Murnen, & Smolak, 2003).
Surprisingly, over sexualization of women in the media does not seem to affect adolescent female’s sexual behavior. While the media becomes more and more saturated with sexual material and images of females in sexual situations, the age at which teens become sexually active is actually getting higher, with females being older than males when they become sexually active. The United States still has a higher rate of teen pregnancy and STD infection in teens than European countries, but it is uncertain whether or not this can be linked to depiction in the media. (Berkey, Camargo, Colditz, Field, Roberts & Taylor, 2001).

It is clear that the image of women in the media needs to change. Instead of showing bodies and sexual images which are unrealistic and unhealthy, the portrayal of women should be expanded to include women of all ethnicities and body types with lives and identities which are valuable independent of appearance and sexuality.









Works Cited:
Aubrey, J. S. (2006). Exposure of sexually objectifying media and body self-perceptions among college women: An examination of the selective exposure hypothesis and the role of moderating variables. Sex Roles, 55(3-4), 159-172.

Bartini, M. (2006). Gender Role Flexibility in Early Adolescence: Developmental Change in Attitudes, Self-perceptions, and Behaviors. Sex Roles, 55, 233–245.

Berkey, C.S., Camargo, C.A., Colditz, G.A., Field, A.E., Roberts, S.B. & Taylor, C.B. (2001). Peer, parent, and media influences on the development of weight concerns and frequent dieting among preadolescent and adolescent girls and boys. Pediatrics,107(1), 54-60.

Brown, J. D. & Witherspoon, E. M. (2002). The mass media and American adolescents’ health. Journal of Adolescent Health, 31(6), 153-170.

Carpenter, L.M. (1998). From girls into women: Scripts for sexuality and romance in Seventeen magazine, 1974-1994. Journal of Sex Research, 35(2), 158-168.

Fitzharris, J. L., Morrissey, K. M. & Werner-Wilson, R. J. (2004). Adolescent and parent perceptions of media influence on adolescent sexuality. Adolescence, 39(154), 303-313.

Good, L., Mills, J.A., Murnen, S.K., & Smolak, L. (2003). Thin, sexy women and strong, mascular men: Grade-school children’s responses to objectified images of women and men. Sex Roles, 49(9-10), 427-437.

Hansbrough, E., Walker, E. & Ward, L. M. (2005). Contributions of music video exposure to black adolescents’ gender and sexual schemas. Journal of Adolescent Research, 20(2), 143-166.

Miller, M.A. (2007) Effects of highly sexualized images of women in visual media on adolescent females' objectified body consciousness and feminine ideology. (Doctoral dissertation, Walden University, 2007). Dissertation Abstracts International, 68, 1963 B.

Mundray, K. & Ogden, J. (1996). The effect of the media on body satisfaction: The role of gender and size. European Eating Disorders Review, 4(3), 171-182.

Peirce, K. (1990). A feminist theoretical perspective on the socialization of teenage girls through Seventeen Magazine. Sex Roles, 23(9-10), 491–500.

Peter, J. & Valkenburg, P. M. ( 2007). Adolescent’s Exposure to a Sexualized Media Environment and Their Notions of Women as Sex Objects. Sex Roles, 56(5-6), 381- 395.

Fragments of Time

The film “The Tracey Fragments,” directed by Bruce McDonald and staring Ellen Page as Tracey Berkowitz, is a highly experimental film. At its core the film tells the story of Tracey Berkowitz, an emotionally distraught adolescent girl, as she travels around the city looking for her little brother who has gone missing. It also incorporates elements of Tracey’s home and school life, and her relationship with Billy Zero, played by Slim Twig. As the story opens, Tracey is riding a city bus late at night wearing only a shower curtain. From this post Tracey speaks directly to the audience narrating the story, which unfolds in a highly inconsistent and fragmented narrative.
Since the story that Tracey tells is highly inconsistent, and Tracey herself proves to be a very unreliable narrator, it is next to impossible to construct a satisfactory summary of the plot of the film. What seems to be certain is that Tracey, an outsider and target of abuse at school, falls in love with the new kid, Billy Zero. Meanwhile, Tracey’s neglectful and abusive parents ground Tracey and leave her to watch after Sonny, her much younger brother. In deliberate defiance of her parents, Tracey goes outside despite the record breaking blizzard that is on its way. Sonny follows her and the two run off, playing in the park surrounding her house. Tracey, distracted by the sudden appearance of Billy Zero, stops watching Sonny. By the time Tracey goes to look for Sonny he is gone. Their parents blame Tracey, and she, desperately concerned for Sonny’s safety in the oncoming blizzard, runs away to try to find him. She rides the bus and wonders aimlessly around the city searching for him. Along the way she nearly freezes to death and is rescued by Lance, played by Maxwell McCabe-Lokos, a less than savory character with whom Tracey intends to wait out the coming storm. Unfortunately while Tracey is staying with Lance, his loan shark comes calling. Tracey hides behind a shower curtain while the loan shark beats Lance severely. The loan shark finds Tracey and strips her of her cloths, clearly intending to rape her. In self defense, Tracey slashes his throat with the jagged lid of a tin can lying on the floor and runs out, grabbing the loose shower curtain to cover herself. This is only a very minimalistic summary, excluding essential details such as her interactions with her parents, Billy Zero, the girls at school, and her psychiatrist, Dr. Heker.



The narrative is presented in a highly fragmented format, with scenes frequently interrupted, repeated or shown out of sequence. To further complicate the timeline, at any given moment during the film a single screen includes multiple frames. The frames may show the same scene from a different angle, the same angle played at a different speed, or something different all together. All these make analyzing time in the film a complicated undertaking. Gérard Genette and Heike Klippel both offer theories of time to be used when analyzing narratives. Of these two theories, Klippel’s theory will prove to be most useful in analyzing time in “The Tracey Fragments.”
The theory of time that Genette puts forth in his essay is primarily concerned with breaking narrative time into three basic elements: order, duration, and frequency. Gennette’s idea of order relies heavily on the ability to establish a chronological order, running on the assumption that if a narrative is not presented in a logical series of events then it is because the artist has “reorder[ed] the temporality of events” (Gennette, p 26). He discusses order as the sequence in which the story is told and the sequence of “actual” events. Gennette’s theory does account for anachronisms, which he divides into two categories: external and internal. External anachronisms happen well outside the “main narrative,” as Gennette calls it, while internal anachronisms happen within the main narrative. These internal anachronisms are further subdivided into completive and repetitive. A completive internal anachronism fills in a blank that has or will appear in the narrative, while a repetitive internal anachronism can be used to call attention or give meaning to another event in the narrative.
The second element of Gennette’s theory, duration, is a way of measuring the speed of narration and changes in narrative speed. Gennette proposes measuring duration in number of pages and names four fundamental forms of duration: summary, dramatic scene, narrative stasis, and ellipsis. The summary is when the “narrative duration is greatly reduced with respect to the historical duration”(Gennette, p30). The dramatic scene is when the narrative duration is approximately equal to the historical duration. Narrative stasis is when the narrative discourse continues while the historical time stands still, as in the case of a lengthy description. Finally, an ellipsis is when the narrative skips a length of historical time. Gennette suggests that examining what kind of narrative duration is used is an important aspect of understanding time in any narrative.
Finally, the third element of Gennette’s theory is frequency. Gennette separates narratives into three types with respect to frequency. The first type is a singulative narrative, in which an event that happens once is narrated once and an event that happens several times is narrated several times. The second type is repetitive narrative in which an event that happens once is narrated several times, with or without variation. The third type is an iterative narrative in which an event that happens several times is narrated by one statement.
Although Gennette claims that his theory applies “to all narratives, regardless of their complexity of degree of elaboration” (Gennette, p25), using it to analyze “The Tracey Fragments” is problematic. First of all, Gennette’s theory of order requires a plot “that could be easily represented by a graph and in which the relationship between the time of events and the time of the narrative could be summarized” (Gennette, p27). Any attempt to create such a graph of this particular narrative would be next to impossible. Such a graph would have to somehow account for the multiple frames, as frequently the frames at any given instant will contain images from different moments in the film. For example, the first three minutes of the movie contain images, clips, and audio that will not appear in the main narrative until as much as an hour into the film. Simultaneously it shows images, clips, and audio from ten minutes, fifteen minutes, thirty minutes, forty minutes, and so on. Clearly, attempting to graph or summarize the order of event would be futile.
The narrative contains far too many of what Gennette would label internal anachronisms. While many of these anachronisms are just repetitive and some are completive, the vast majority of them are completely contradictory. Gennette’s theory, which places a heavy emphasis on a single, orderable main narrative, would require that these anachronisms be separated into true and untrue events to negate these contradictions. While this is possible some of the time, it is not always clear which events are to be taken for true and which are not. For example, the representation of her relationship with Billy Zero is one of the story lines most fraught with these contradictory anachronisms. Using logic and certain visual clues it is possible to separate many of these clips into reality and fantasy. For example, Tracey’s repeated assertions that Billy Zero is her boy friend seem to be a fantasy. The series of clips which portray Tracey and Billy in a relationship are often in black and white or an unreal light or color scheme. Furthermore, the images which depict Tracey and Billy as a rock star couple followed by paparazzi seem most certainly to be a fantasy. From these set of images the audience might judge any scenes which are in black and white or an unrealistic color scheme to be part of a fantasy but this set of standards is quickly challenged.
Throughout the movie there are several scenes which appear perfectly normal and are in line with the main narrative, but which intersect or refer back to these fantasy plot lines. For example, during her search Tracey enters a convenience store. The scene appears no different than any other scene in the search sequence. While in the convenience store, Tracey picks up a tabloid and finds candid shots of her and Billy together with the headline “Tracey and Billy Caught! Is it Love?” The color scheme, lighting and fragmentation are indistinguishable from the rest of the scenes which would be labeled as real. How then can the audience distinguish between what is real and what is unreal in order to construct an orderable main narrative? There is another series of scenes which blurs the distinction between the real and unreal. The scenes that depict Tracey’s sessions with Dr. Heker, her psychiatrist, are visually unrealistic. They appear in a completely white background with no distinguishable features. The only things visible in the scene are Tracey and Dr. Heker, sitting in the foreground on white chairs with a class coffee table between them. The audio of the scene is also unrealistic because Dr. Heker’s voice is frequently distorted to the point of nearly being unintelligible and it is only Tracey’s responses that allows the audience to interpret the psychiatrist’s words. During other, apparently real scenes Tracey fights with her parents about her attending a psychiatrist, making it seem as if Dr. Heker is actually real and not a fantasy or hallucination. These confused boundaries make it difficult to construct a single real main narrative.
Duration is a particularly troublesome element of Gennette’s theory in “The Tracey Fragments.” For a narrative in the form of a film, “number of pages” might be translated into screen time in relation to the length of the entire film. The running time of the film is about one hour and seventeen minutes. However, if one were to measure the screen time allotted to each event in the narrative, because of the multiple frames, the sum of all the narrative events would add up to far longer than the total running time of the film. How then can one calculate the duration of events in the film? This question of duration is further complicated by the fact that it is nearly impossible to determine the amount of ‘historical time’ that passes over the course of the narrative. The narrative draws from events as far back as Tracey’s early child hood, and the rest of events are nearly impossible to pin down even in relation to one another. The images can only definitely be divided into three categories: events that happen before Tracey runs away, events that happen after Tracey runs away, and events that happen after Tracey looses her cloths in Lance’s apartment. Beyond that the only thing the audience is given in reference to time is the impending blizzard. Tracey’s search through the city, what Gennette would consider the main narrative, is merely clips of her wondering around the city or on the bus. It is impossible to determine how long Tracey is searching.
The final element of Gennette’s theory is frequency. Of the three options that Gennette provides, singulative, repetitive, and iterative, the film is most certainly a repetitive narrative. The film is made up of a series of images that are continuously repeated, sometimes with and sometimes without variation. In fact, the repetitions are so numerous that it would be difficult to quantify them. It is possibly to approximate the number of repetitions. For example, images of Billy Zero are repeated more frequently than images associated with Sonny. Does this mean that Tracey holds more anxiety about Billy Zero than her little brother? Or that Billy is more important to her than Sonny? This does not seem likely. The mere frequency of repetitions is not the key to understanding the significance of events in the narrative.
While Gennette’s theory can be applied to the narrative of “The Tracey Fragments,” it is problematic at best. It requires the reader to discount the uncertainties and ambiguities built into Tracey’s narrative and construct a ‘true’ narrative and a ‘false’ narrative. For the most part this would mean taking what is only visually represented realistically as fact and what is visually represented unrealistically as false. However, the subjectivity of these two kinds of narration is made clear throughout the film. Furthermore, Gennette’s theory would require a judgment call about the reliability of the possibly mentally ill narrator. It requires superimposing a normal concept of time and progression on a highly impressionistic representation.
The theory of time that Klippel proposes in his essay “The Radiance of Truth,” deals largely with a theory of understanding time as it pertains to memory. Klippel’s theory has two main points. The first is the idea of self-evidence, and the second is his concept of durée or duration. The concept of self-evidence “refer[s] to the truth of memories as it is subjectively perceived, regardless of whether they can be proven or not” (Klippel, p145). This idea suspends the need to assign events in the narrative as real or unreal. Instead, Klippel draws on Freud’s theory of “screen memories.” According to Freud, a screen memory is “impressibley vivid, but [is] related to occurrences that can be proven not to have taken place” (Klippel, p150). Never the less, Freud posits that these memories are completely genuine, if not true, and equally as important as memories based in fact. He goes on to say that “historical accuracy [is] wholly irrelevant with regard to remembrance” (Klippel, p152). Since the narrative of this film comes entirely from Tracey’s memory, it is possible to apply these ideas to her narrative. This theory allows the audience not to place a value on the events in the narrative that logically seem to be untrue. If all of Tracey’s memories are equally genuine, then all the events in the narrative can be examined on equal ground, without discounting those events which seem to be a fantasy.
Klippel’s theory of duration is very different than that of Gennette. To form his theory of duration, he incorporates concepts of memory and consciousness. Klippel posits that the duration of memory cannot be understood in spatial terms, and so cannot be understood in a normal temporality. He claims that in memory time periods pass into one another without differentiation. Furthermore, he states that “duration is less determined by a sequence of events than by their simultaneity and co-existence” (Klippel, p148). This theory argues that these events which are recalled simultaneously matter in their relation to one another and not in their relationship to historical time.

Klippel’s theory frees the audience from attempting to construct a time line of the events and images, and invites them to consider the reason that those particular images are showed simultaneously. For example, frequently when Tracey thinks of Billy Zero, images of him coincide with images of the snowy forest in which Sonny was lost, or the hat which was the only trace she was able to find of him. Additionally, when these two images coincide an audio clip of Tracey saying, “It really wasn’t my fault,” is repeated. Though the concrete connection is not revealed until the very end of the film, there is a very significant connection between Billy Zero and Sonny’s disappearance. At the very end of the film, Tracey reveals that Sonny got lost while she was distracted by Billy Zero. Tracey is reluctant to reveal the event not just because of her feelings of guilt over Sonny’s disappearance, but also because of Billy’s mistreatment of her. Billy Zero, the object of Tracey’s passionate, adolescent love and who does not even remember Tracey’s name, invites her to sit in his car, has dispassionate sex with her then pushes her out of the car before she even has a chance to pull her pants back on. Only Seconds after Billy’s car pulls off, Tracey realizes that Sonny is gone. These images and audio appear together throughout the narrative, because Tracey closely associates her love for Billy with her shame at his hands, and her guilt and sense of loss over her missing brother. Klippel suggests that through memories, a person is capable of reverting to a previous state of mind or point of view, which explains Tracey’s conviction that she and Billy Zero are in love. Klippel’s statement that “the act of remembering could unify the Ego(s) of different times and places and hence ward off fragmentation” (Klippel, p153), also offers an explanation for the fragmentation of the narrative. It is possible that Tracey’s narrative is so fragmented because she is unable to unify these egos in her memory. The experiences and resulting states of mind are so contradictory and conflicting that Tracey could never unify them into one coherent memory. Instead, she remembers them all separately but simultaneously.
Klippel, who describes film as “the description of preconceptual layers of consciousness” (Klippel pp145-6), seems the perfect filter through which to understand “The Tracey Fragments.” Rather than imposing the critic’s preformed ideas of reality and logic on the narrative, Klippel’s theory allows the film to exist in its own logic and temporality, that of Tracey’s memories and experiences.

Cited:
Gennette, Gérard. “Order, Duration, and Frequency.” Narrative Dynamics. Ed. Brian Richardson. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2002. 25-34.

Klippel, Heike. “The Radiance of Truth: Remembrance, Self-Evidence and Cinema.” Time and Memory. Ed. Michael Crawford, Paul Harris, & Jo Alyson Parker. Boston: Koninklijke Brill N.V., 2004. 145-161.

The Tracey Fragments. Dir. Bruce McDonald. Writer. Maureen Medved. Perf. Ellen Page. Shadow Shows, 2007.