The concept of jammer girl...without the label?

The good girl/bad girl identity battle is such a prominent issue in girl’s society. I feel like it’s a trap, labeling girls as something so black and white. One either strives for this unattainable "perfectness" or they do a complete 180 and fight against it. Yet the majority of girls don’t fit into either of those categories. That’s why I found some huge benefits for girls by creating a third healthy identity-Jammer Girl. Jammer girls "seek choice, change, place, and media that celebrate the individual, physical, and intellectual qualities of girl-ness, and encourage speaking out about the damage done to girls by the steady stream of commercial messages." If this could become a mainstream ideal I think girls could have a much more positive growing environment. I really like how it completely unrelated to the words good or bad, I feel like it creates a new space for girls to decide how they should act. It reminds me of the "virtual bedroom" in the sense that its safe place for them to define themselves whichever way they see fit without the rest of the world trying to force them into templates. The only thing I don’t like about the Jammer Girl is it still labels girls (and in itself labeling is a huge problem). Whether positive or negative it is still saying "I am this and you are not." Don’t get me wrong, I still think it’s an amazing idea, but I would really like to see girls acting as healthy individuals going against stereotypical identities without giving it a name. That’s where the internet comes into play. Girls can create a space for themselves without labeling each other as anything. They can fight against the media, speak out against consumerism, and do activism without needing a title.
Also I wanted to make a statement about how the website About-Face.org urges girls to use guts and humor in their rebellions. Humor is such a great tool because you can take a serious issue and present it in a light that isn’t threatening to anyone, which makes it so much easier to be accepted. Kathy Bruin's changing of the Calvin Klein ad and posting it up was brilliant!

Comments

Ali said…
Yeah, I like the concept of a Jammer Girl too, but had similar reservations to yours. I was kind of taken aback by Merskin's assertion that "Jammer Girls are teen girls who are not affected by advertising messages which promote the notion that self-worth, value, popularity, and agency come from conforming by buying the right products."

They may choose to resist these advertising messages, but how could they not be affected by them? I think this is almost another unrealistic standard to live up to. So now you can either be good, bad, or a perfect resistor, unaffected by the insidiousness of advertising. This still renders way too many girls invisible.

To me, it's like adding another party to our political system instead of addressing the base nature of disempowerment in the representative system. Girls are simply given something else to be, another identity to adopt, rather than room to grow and create their own identities.

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