Maiden USA: representing teenage girls in the '90s.

Made-in USA

Myriad choices exist for American girls within the image systems of this post-feminist era. Women's sports have hit the popular airwaves with professional basketball teams, an Olympic hockey team and stellar media focus on teenage figure skating, gymnastics and tennis stars. Women run companies, have careers in medicine, law and politics - domains previously off-limits. Women "making it" in the corporate world abound as role models for girls. Yet alongside the career triumphs of American women, and the frequent use of the hype-term "Girl Power" in current advertising and journalism, reports of a chronic loss of self-esteem, eating disorders, bodily mutilation, teenage pregnancy, sexually-transmitted diseases and suicide among American adolescents proliferate. In fact, the decline in girls' self-esteem has become a given in mainstream news reportage.

The visual landscape of teenage girlhood in the United States is contradictory, with wealthy models, actresses and sports stars defining the terms of youth success and "regular girls" often presented by the news media as troubled or in trouble. The ultra-thin body of the teenage girl-woman continues to serve as the commodified Maiden, Made-in the USA, a "model citizen" against which our culture measures its standards of beauty. For young girls, Barbie is the ideal teenager with the sparkly, dreamy clothes, the tiny, Cinderella shoes, and that impossibly sexy body. For feminists, she's the bimbo we love to hate. The teenage girl's own body falls under the scrutiny of her own often cruel comparative gaze, a gaze that alternately identifies with the Maidens of popular culture and rejects them wholesale as objects of a consumerist culture. And yet this supermodel aspect of the Maiden continues to wield clout as a substantial on-the-arm consort of the male power structure. Cultural taboos surrounding menstruation and the expression of girls' sexual desire continue to mute the language of the female body, while beauty panic causes girls to scrutinize every inch of their skin, muscle, bone and fat cells in a hobbled language of fashion-based imitation - the performance of the feminine.

Although teenage models and actresses are continually glorified by the mass media in their nymph-beauty state, real-life teenage girls are being scrutinized as an "at risk" population by many scholars and journalists. Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (1996) by psychologist Mary Pipher was designed as a clarion call, an "eye-opening look at the everyday dangers of being young and female," and was on The New York Times bestseller list for over two years, 1996-98. This book has become a popular Bible for the documentation of this "national phenomenon" of girls' diminishing self-esteem, as well as their eating disorders and self-mutilation - a guidebook that raises many fear-based questions and concerns. "America is a girl-destroying place," says Pipher.(1) The statistics of self-esteem loss are grim - less than a third of girls polled in the American Association of University Women's (AAUW) 1990 study of adolescents aged 11-15 entitled "Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America," responded positively to the statement "I am happy the way I am" compared with nearly half of the boys.(2) Yet little focus has been given to the girls who do succeed - not as models, rock stars, actresses or Olympic athletes - but as happy, productive, outspoken, creative individuals.

Peggy Orenstein's SchoolGirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap (1994) documented the effects of the drop in self-esteem among adolescent girls indicated by the AAUW's startlingly high statistics. Exploring the "real life" applications of these findings, Orenstein profiled female students in two middle schools, one largely middle-class and predominantly white, the other a multicultural, inner-city school. What she revealed in her investigative journalism is a system ill-equipped to foster self-confidence in girls. "The lessons of the hidden curriculum teach girls to value silence and compliance, to view those qualities as a virtue."(3) Boys learn to get ahead, girls to "get along." White adolescent girls, she observed, continue to be trapped by the polarities of "the slut" and "the perfect girl." The perfect girl often achieves her ends by using bulimia and anorexia to acquire the "perfect body" and by keeping quiet to avoid giving the "wrong answer." African American girls, comparatively free from the white beauty ethic, are statistically less prone to a drop in self-esteem. Their drive to succeed, however, is limited by the social stigma of achievers seen as "acting white" and a system that through overcrowding, funding cuts and neglect, sorely underserves and ignores them.

Although some film productions have responded to this "girl crisis" with several feature-length films and videos that have gained considerable recognition, many independently-produced films, as well as Hollywood features, still abound with depictions of wild, seductive Loll?as like Christina Ricci in Buffalo 66 (1998, by Vincent Gallo). With Drew Barrymore's character in Ever After (1998, by Andy Tennant), the Cinderella myth is revamped with a more self-actualized, scrappy teenage heroine who fights back against her victimhood. But it's still a fantasy about getting the prince. The stories of womanhood and the definitions of gender have begun to change, but it remains difficult to move beyond the norm. For girls coming of age in the '90s, the visual sphere of representation combined with complex and contradictory social messages have contributed to the complexity of growing up female. What does it mean to be a girl in the '90s?

Teenage Girls Read Movies

These days, Hollywood marketing strategies still seek to lure the teenage audience to create a box-office hit with films starring, but rarely about, teenagers. Examples include Scream (1996, by Wes Craven) and I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997, by Wes Craven). Like Bully the Vampire Slayer (1986, by Fran Rubel), most of these teen-oriented goose bump flicks play with the sexual titillation of "young thing" victimhood. Big-budget action and special effects movies desperate for repeat teenage viewers, however, nod to the common denominator of the male protagonist who determines the action of the film, paired with a female companion who may start off an intelligent character but who often ends up a helpless idiot. Exceptions in the blockbuster arena tend to be women who adopt a classically "male" tool - the gun or the car. In this context, the female icons of power display for teenage girls what could be termed "male power in drag." What remains to be explored by the filmic landscape is an expression of female desire that extends beyond getting the guy or getting his gun.

Nineties Hollywood also produced Clueless (1995, by Amy Hekerling), Dangerous Minds (1995, by John M. Smith) and The Craft (1996, by Andrew Fleming), all of which focus on '90s teenage lives. Clueless, ostensibly a modernized version of Jane Austen's Emma, centers on a teenage heroine, Cher, the most popular girl at Beverly Hills High. It doesn't hurt that her Daddy, the toughest prosecution lawyer in town, gives her a nifty Jeep to drive (badly, of course) and unlimited credit at the boutiques on Rodeo Drive. In the end she lands the cutes? guy and is a successful matchmaker for a couple of declasse teachers. Just like the Disney scenarios featuring teenage heroines, Cher's mother is dead. Mothers and daughters rarely coexist as team players on the Hollywood screen.(4) The paucity of big screen examples of mothers supporting or mentoring their daughters sets a cultural precedent for the assumed difficulty young women have in finding guidance from older women. Many Hollywood scripts begin with the Disneyesque formula of an adolescent girl, often motherless, who must compete with an adversarial post-menopausal monster. Snow White, Cinderella and The Little Mermaid are the most salient examples of this archetype, which extends into other areas of mainstream storytelling including soap operas, tabloid talk shows and sitcoms. As far back as Stella Dallas (1925, by Henry King), girls coming of age must renounce their mothers to succeed, or scenarios eliminate them from the beginning. Fathers and father figures, are however, frequent denizens of the teenage heroine-centered feature film. Quite frequently, these pairings have sexual overtones, like Bernardo Bertolucci's 1995 film Stealing Beauty and Adrian Lyne's much-publicized 1998 remake of Lolita. The coming-of-age cominglings of young girls and fathers or father figures sets a visual standard for the girl's script of desire in the patriarchal representational sphere. Though scholars and critics continue to be wary of dot-to-dot connections between filmic relationships and "real life" ones, the impact of the media on social situations, stereotypes and gender codes cannot be denied.

While the "wanna be with daddy" fantasies of filmmaking feed certain cultural myths, the real life consequences of sexual relationships with older males can be devastating to teenage women seeking an articulation of their nascent sexual power. As revealed in the study guide for Carol Cassidy's 1997 documentary about teenage motherhood, Baby Love, adult men (aged 21 and over) father over 50% of the babies born to teen women, age 15 to 17.(5) Even though statistics prove that the majority of these adult men leave their teenage partners impoverished single mothers, this persistent fantasy of surrogate daddyhood rises up on the filmic horizon as often as the stereotype of the backbiting, jealous and destructive middle-aged mother or stepmother. On the one hand, media imagery encourages an intergenerational closeness between older men and younger women and on the other, reinforces the intergenerational rift between young women and their mother figures, at a time when advice from women who have "been there" might be most useful to teenage women.

Indie Girls

Many representations of teenage girls in alternative, female-centered narratives tend to be among independent films. For many educated viewers, the intrigue of "indie films" lies with their seemingly alternative, progressive vision. Created outside Hollywood's image systems, independent films profess a respite from the mindless action scripts and cardboard characterizations of corporate media. Yet independent filmmaking in recent years has become increasingly market-driven. While attention-getting tropes of the independents lean toward quirky, off-beat, downtrodden heroes and heroines, sex-based marketing strategies often prevail. As a rule, independently-produced films are completed without studio funds and geared to an art-house audience. The marketing strategy of these films tends toward an audience older than the depicted protagonists, with teenage girls rarely being the target audience. What does it mean when teenage girls become sexy subjects for the arthouse crowd? How does this differ from the mainstream?

Alison Anders, in her first feature, Gas Food Lodging (1992), broke significant ground by bringing a woman-centered perspective to the story of a single mother, owner of a truck stop in a small Texas town, and her two teenage daughters. The younger daughter, an offbeat romantic who fantasizes about a "normal life" with a live-in father, crosses cultural borders in her friendship with a Mexican boy. The older daughter, craving more direct male contact, ends up ridiculed by her peers as the town slut. She eventually becomes pregnant and goes to Dallas to give the baby up for adoption. In many ways, these characters can be seen as the first in a wave of teenage girl representation in independent filmmaking by giving voice to previously ignored complexities of growing up female. Anders's second feature, Mi Vida Loca (1993), draws its characters from the girl gangs of East LA's Echo Park. The story's focus on Sad Girl and Mousie provides a view into Latina culture through a girlhood friendship that ultimately explodes in jealousy and competition over Ernesto, the Latino drug dealer and gang leader who fathers a child with each girl. Following Ernesto's murder, the two single mothers eventually reconcile and begin to recreate a friendship on the other side of early adulthood. This uncommon resolution of the "she's a bitch" rivalry on screen creates a visual record of the complexities of bonds between young women without romanticizing them. In both of Anders's girl-centric films, teenage pregnancy serves as a dramatic lynchpin to the respective scenarios.

In Jim McKay's Girl's Town, four inner-city teenage girlfriends on the verge of high school graduation spend social time contemplating college, guys, pregnancy, date rape and suicide. The outlook is bleak. Nikki, an African American girl who has been accepted at a prestigious college, commits suicide in the course of the narrative. Reading her diary after her death, her friends learn she was the victim of date rape, which leads Emma, a college-bound white girl, to confess that she had been date raped by a popular football player. Transgressing known codes of "girl behavior," Angela and Patti, a teen mom with a toddler, join Emma in trashing the guys car in the school parking lot and spraypainting "RAPIST" on the hood. They then scratch the body of the car - a stand-in for the rapist's body - making a public spectacle of the adolescent male's pride and joy. As a measure of the taboo being crossed in this scene, a fearful dread that their action might incite an even greater and more dangerous male rage follows the pleasure and thrill of viewing their act. By spraying his car, the girls name the rapist publicly. But because they never publicly admit to the vandalism, the girl who was raped remains silent, an anonymous author of the rage-based retribution. Because the rapist is never seen on screen, in an odd way his anonymity is protected. Nikki's rapist, however, is later identified as a journalist who met Nikki during her summer internship. The three survivors track him down at his workplace and beat him up on a New York City sidewalk. These violent solutions disturb the viewer, but make their mark: can girls achieve the most impact when they act like tough boys in meting out retribution? McKay's camera trails off at the end of the film - he doesn't preach an answer, but leaves the viewer with a sense of hopelessness about the futures of these girls.

Larry Clark's 1995 film KIDS, on the other hand, promoted itself as an ubiquitous filmic eye into the life of "teenagers," a supposed "universalized" portrait of a depraved, aimless, sex-obsessed and violent sector of human culture in the '90s. The "teenagers" depicted in the film are specimens of a disturbed, drugged-out, dropped out "normalcy" underscored by the cinema verite style of the filmmaking. Clark assures the viewer he is telling it like it is," that his film turns its lens on all of teenage life when in fact his film documents a very specific tribe of teenagers living in New York City around Greenwich Village's Washington square Park. The main character, Telly, a simpleminded virgin-hunter infected with HIV, talks incessantly with his friend Casper about girls, tampons, breast-feeding, multiple partners and seduction from a strictly adolescent male perspective steeped in irreverent misogyny.

KIDS includes one scene of a room full of girls discussing their sexual exploits. Many of these 16-year-olds have had multiple partners and have opinions on oral sex, anal sex and orgasms. The raunchy flavor of their discussion is shocking at times. These girls have the sexual experience of many women in their late twenties without the emotional maturity or sexual information base to match. Most of their sexual activities are performed without birth control or condoms. "Girls like sex too" is the message here, not necessarily a bad one, audacious in the rarity of its articulation. But in the very next scene comes the film's punishment: one of the girls, Jenny, finds out she is HIV positive, even though she had sex only once, when she lost her virginity to Telly. Jenny spends the rest of the film wandering from place to place speaking only one line: "Where's Telly?" She has no other language. She follows his trail to a club where a male "friend" shoves a drug in her mouth that makes her even more zombie-like. She finally locates Telly at a party/orgy where his seduction of a 13-year-old virgin is well underway. To the viewer, Jenny is presented as dumb; dumb in that she fell for Telly's doublespeak bed lines, she got HIV and because after searching all day, she still cannot speak when she finds Telly in coitus with another girl. She stands in the doorway, impotent and mute, unable to prevent another infection. Crashing on a nearby couch, she falls into a drugged stupor where she is raped like a limp doll by Casper. She remains mutely receptive to the phallus-script of boys.

Freeway, a 1997 indie feature directed by Matthew Bright, is set in the wasteland of Los Angeles, where an illiterate, illegitimate Vanessa Lutz drives the re-telling of the Red Riding Hood myth. The gratuitous violence and disturbing incest-driven titillation of this film do not balance out with Vanessa's ultimate triumph over the serial killer Bob Wolf. Once again we are presented with an overly-sexualized teenage girl who is considered stupid. Her introduction on screen shows her in a special education class struggling to read the sentence "The cat drinks milk." Again and again Vanessa is humiliated on screen - by her parents, her would-be murderer and the judges in court who bark, "One more word young lady and you're going to be gagged." There's little solace in her ultimate break-out from prison with her self-styled razor-sharp toothbrush and her self-defense killing of the Wolf who previously would not die. The character of Vanessa resonates little of value in this pseudo-feminist sexploitation cop show, where once again a "power girl" is respected only for her ability to shoot and kill.

Lisa Krueger's quirky film Manny and Lo (1997) provides an unusual take on teenage pregnancy, tenaciously loyal sisterhood and the search for absent mothers. The story concerns two vagabond sisters who take off in the family station wagon after their mother dies. Sixteen-year-old Lo protects her 10-year-old sister Manny from the cops and foster care by moving on whenever trouble glances in their car window. Together they shoplift for food and spend their nights fantasizing about a "normal" life by breaking into vacant, furnished homes for sale, sleeping in their dean sheets and using as many personal hygiene products as possible. Yearning for assistance with her unexpected pregnancy, but too tough to ask for help, Lo convinces Manny to kidnap the saleswoman from the local maternity shop. Brandishing an old gun, Manny carries out the plan and the trio hole up in a rustic vacation home in the woods to await the baby's arrival. Though Lo refuses to wax sentimental about the imminent birth, she eventually allows the advice of the saleswoman to influence her prenatal eating and smoking habits. Once again on the run, the baby is born alongside a stream in a "back to nature" storyline twist as Lo admits to her fear and succumbs to the need for help from the saleswoman-cum-midwife. This film navigates issues of the feminine and the changing nature of "motherhood" in the '90s through a trio of unlikely hybrid heroines who ultimately protect and nurture one another as they improvise their own solutions to the problems of survival.

All of these independent features deal with actual difficulties faced by many teenage girls. The lack of lavish budgets brings independent scenarios "down to earth" and the indie films are often accorded a deeper link to "reality." Since few of these films are designed with the teenage girl viewer in mind, the way they impact on real girls' lives involves the manner in which these films influence the adult viewer's perception of teenage lives in the '90s. With so many fetishized, overly-sexualized subjects on the screen, the Made-ins of the indies are forced to become premature adults, with the adult male fantasy of the young temptress dangerously active. Adolescence as a slow bridge to adulthood is not an option. Parents and others concerned about the well being of real girls find these images of indie Made-ins disturbing. Depictions of helpful mentors for the young female protagonists of most '90s independent features have become rare. Left to fend for themselves in the independent universe, these girls must either become victims like Jenny in KIDS or take up weapons and fight like Vanessa in Freeway, with gains for either stance questionable. Several recent documentaries have done the same, with the majority focusing on the sexual lives of their subjects.

Real Girls in Crisis

Girls Like Us, the Independent Television Service (ITVS)-funded film by Tina DeFeliciantano and Jane Wagner that won the Juror's Choice award at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival for Best Documentary, profiles four South Philadelphia teenagers of diverse ethnicities in an intimate, hand-held labor of love that spanned four crucial years of adolescence, ages 14 to 18.6 During the course of the shooting, two of the girls end up pregnant; the other two - "good girls" with good grades, but little in the way of power or access to a vocabulary of their own sexual desire - barely make it to college without contracting STDs or getting pregnant themselves. Girls Like Us attempts to present the story of a girl's life. Yet the universalizing implication of the title - that these girls struggle just "like us," stretches the size and fit of this documentary. Who is "us"? Though broad gestures contribute to the packaging of this film, it is actually a specific portrait of four girls from different ethnic backgrounds but only slightly different educational and economic backgrounds. Their working-class milieu does not speak for all sectors of girlhood in America, nor does it speak for a mythic "middle America" of girlhood. To do so would require a series or a portrait of more than four girls' lives during adolescence.(7)

Economics have played a part in forcing independent producers to select hypeable subjects to attract funding. Framing the subject matter as a"state of emergency," a crisis in need of representation, underscores this. But however well-intentioned the producers may be with regard to the issues of their teenage girl subjects, portraying girls who fail may only serve to reiterate negative themes and undermine their subjects' long-term possibilities for success. While bringing public attention to social problems is one of the service-oriented functions of independent documentary filmmaking, balancing these visions of failure with positive reportage would also help aid the state of the girl-nation.

The title of Carol Cassidy's 1997 film, Baby Love, also funded by ITVS,(8) plays with the permutations of the word "baby" in our culture, a term often used to sexualize women while referring to the 1960s hit by The Supremes. But these teenage babes now have babies they are trying to love. Through her research with 100 single teenage mothers, Cassidy creates a self-styled tapestry of voices - a multicultural sisterhood of the Teen More. The on-screen mothers remain nameless, despite the intimacy of the stories they reveal in the cross-cut snippets of storytelling threaded through the narrative. Because the subjects are culturally diverse, it is easy to overlook the fact that they are not regionally diverse, and thus accept this universalized experience of teenage motherhood as representative of America. Where are the teenage moms from New York City, Los Angeles or Dayton, Ohio? Many of these girl-women, all from Georgia, share an ignorance of their reproductive biology prior to pregnancy and ignorance of birth control and personal finances as well as a lack of love, support and open communication with their parents. This shocking admission in young women growing up in the '90s may cause the viewer to ask, "How could they be so dumb?" Despite the fact that girls in America are menstruating at an increasingly early age, schools and parents have yet to shift the age of these educational efforts. Girls without the proper information often become confused, self-blaming, ashamed and fearful, emotions that are followed by a stage of rebellious sexual activity. In Cassidy's film, several of these girls equated the early onset of their menses with the arrival of a "boy crazy" sex drive, which initiated sexual activity at age 11, 12 or 13. The persistent lack of a coherent language of girls' sexuality or of girls' desire separate from the biology of baby making perpetuates a myth that the ultimate female "orgasm" comes from conception, that teenage pregnancy can fulfill a void in their lives. Through pregnancy, teenage girls become visible, active, warranting attention - until they have the baby. Then they become social outcasts, abandoned by their peers, by their boyfriends and by their families. Orenstein notes that in sex education classes, girls are taught to be aware of the "uncontrollable" phallus-driven desire in the pubescent boys around them. Wet dreams and boys' sex drive are taught as biological fact, while female desire is for the most part unnamed.(9) The notion that boys have an overwhelming, uncontrollable sex drive that must be "controlled" or "held at bay" by girls remains a pernicious myth of Western society that continues to be reinforced by the media, sex education and parenting. Girls are taught to be the police force of adolescence, thus denying any access to their own desire. The idea that boys are "naturally" more animal-like in their sex drive means that the responsibility for any loss of control, pregnancy or date rape lies with the girls who "should have known better." This mythos of the common vernacular finds support in many sex education classes, with such terms as "nocturnal emission" being taught without a parallel terminology for girls' own nighttime orgasm. The female aspect in the sex ed curriculum is the biology of the female reproductive anatomy. The power and mystery of this anatomy is in many ways taught as parallel to the "mystery" of the powerful male sex drive. Fact and fiction blur, especially in light of the sporadic nature of sex education across the country, with some districts influenced by the Christian Right eliminating the subject completely. If conception is the only sanctioned form of female desire, doesn't that explain, in part, the continued occurrence of teenage pregnancy?

Kristy Guevara-Flanagan's short experimental documentary The Ballad of Cecilia Rios (1997), which won a Golden Spire at the 1998 Golden Gate Awards sponsored by the San Francisco Film Festival, is a moving, poetic ballad about the random rape and murder of a promising teenage Latina named Cecilia Rios at a Richmond, California high school. Combining footage of a teenage Mexican singing group, who provide the theme song for the film, with black and white shots of the murder site and close-ups of teenage girls' black dance shoes stomping traditional rhythms under their hand-embroidered Mexican skirts, the film serves as a form of cathartic mourning. The film counterposes image-processed evening news footage with the voices of Rios's many friends. The film brings forward a story of loss and grief that might otherwise have been lost as yesterday's sound bite and makes a cultural document of a community grieving the death of a beloved young woman. What distinguishes this short film from the two aforementioned feature-length documentaries is the way Guevara-Flanagan interacted with the Latino culture of this community high school by involving the teens themselves in a visual collaboration. They are more active subjects than the girls interviewed in Baby Love and Girls Like Us. The filmmaker employs song, graffiti art and dance as languages of grief, mourning and celebration, which can be powerful alternatives to depression or reactive violence. Where Baby Love and Girls Like Us leave the viewer with a negative and anxious perception of teenage girlhood, The Ballad of Cecilia Rios provides a cathartic transcendence, a sense of completion and ultimately hopefulness due to its coherent and artful portrayal of a teenage community responding to crisis.

Virtual Girls

While many adult producers and writers have focused on the "girl crisis" in America, girls themselves have organized many alternative forums for self-expression, including 'zines, bands, clubs and websites. Unknown to the adult viewer or reader, these underground forums provide free speech possibilities for networking, collaboration and the ultimate empowerment of girls. Their existence below the adult radar does not negate their importance. In fact, the underground nature of these communities may well enhance their power for those involved, and may ultimately contribute to trends that will impact on the culture at large.

On the Internet, a proliferation of recent websites created by and for teenage girls demonstrates ways in which girls vocalize more openly and creatively in contexts of anonymity. Driven by language and ideas instead of appearance, the Web represents an open field for girls' self-expression where identities can be masked or altered. Expanded networks of communication with girls from across the country allow them to travel beyond the potentially limited avenues of their local school. For teenage girls the atmosphere of cyberspace has a freedom-from-risk power that is not accessible in many classroom settings. In chat sites with such diverse names as "Ratgrrrls Hideout" and "The Poptart Pages" girls discuss sex, menstruation, gender stereotypes, rape, politics and feminism. While cybergrrrls talk freely and audaciously about all aspects of their lives, a significant number of teenage girls still keep up a quiet, "good girl" profile in the more public arenas of school. Most current educational initiatives lie in correcting girls, enhancing their competitive skills and teaching them "I can do" in math and science and technology, but few scholars are asking how to change the boys. It remains to be seen if documentary media and educational focus groups will begin to address the behaviors of boys as crisis-worthy subjects on par with victim girls, bad girls and failing girls.

In House of Girls (1997), a half-hour ITVS-sponsored video produced by Karen Cooper, Marisa, one of five profiled girls says, "I am interested in sharing power. But boys don't like to share." Boys' hazing of girls marks a hegemonic battle that maintains a gender-based hierarchy of power, of voice and of agency. Although some progress has been made in addressing gender balance in school curricula, girls are still taught to read and interpret predominantly male narratives, to identify with the hero's journey, the male experience. Hollywood features continue to focus their major resources on the male experience, from sci-fi adventures to boys' coming-of-age stories, war movies and sports scenarios. But boys are not taught to identify with the female experience or the heroine's journey to the same degree. For girls to maintain their personal power they have to be taught to fight back and to verbally keep pace with the razzing of boys. This exhausting repartee can be distracting, draining girls of resources that could be put to productive use. This entire arena of "boys will be boys" behavior has yet to come under mass cultural scrutiny as a form of gender-based censorship.

In The Ride, another ITVS production from 1994, this cross-fire genderhazing finds its expression in the seemingly casual segments in which the all-teen traveling film crew interviews each of its members between cities, on the road. The eight-part series set out to document the lives of 20 teenagers - two per visited city - during a marathon cross-country tour. Six teenage ethnographers dig with cameras into the urban/suburban ruins of modern culture. Under the guidance of Executive Producer Shauna Garr, the crew shot and directed all of the segments. An innovative hip-hop driven title sequence sets the rhythm of this intimate, gutsy, streetwise portrait of American teenagers. While gender equality was not a stated goal of the production, many issues emerged that pointed to unmediated disparities in a program that was otherwise quite strong in its multicultural approach. The crew was comprised of four boys - Jose, Derric, Alex and Zachary; two girls - Paula and Ramona; and Garr, who remained in the background during shooting and interviewing. From the outset, a significant male majority led many of the profiles, which were overwhelmingly focused on the male perspectives of teenage life. Of the 20 teenagers, or "guides," interviewed, only six were girls. Of those six, most were depicted in relation to boys, either as sister, girlfriend or former girlfriend. In the towns they visited, girls were often shot and/or interviewed in a group - as cheerleaders, as girl gang adjuncts to a boys' gang or in cliques. Boys, however, frequently appeared solo on screen speaking about "bigger" issues of racial identity, sexual orientation and social perspectives. Leslie, a biracial girl in a wealthy suburb of Philadelphia, struggles with bulimia and dissatisfaction with her appearance; a Latina named Maria toys with joining a gang but finds happiness with a new boyfriend; and Julie, a white Texan who was sexually abused as a child by her stepfather, struggles with her reputation as the town slut and displays a shocking ignorance about AIDS and STDs. Of the six girls interviewed, five are shown looking in the mirror or putting on makeup at some point in their profile - a realistic part of many girls' everyday behavior, perhaps, but the boys are not viewed shaving, pumping iron or otherwise engaged in a parallel form of preening. Despite the fact that two teenage girls are often behind the camera, the profiled girls are linked more often to their appearance and one-on-one relationships than the way they view the world. This reversal of Laura Mulvey's "male gaze" brings up the question: what happens when girls use the camera lens to view girls? In a female-only environment-like the mentorship project undertaken in Cooper's documentary House of Girls - the results are vastly different. Aside from what appeared to be a good working vibe between Paula and Ramona, none of the stories of the "guides" explored bonds between women as friends, while several hinged on the brotherly closeness of male friends. Two of the stories explored gay male sexuality while lesbians were absent from the inquiry. In this sense few of the girls on view existed outside the mainstream narratives of heterosexual desire.

Some of the most revealingly intimate documentation of girl/boy dynamics came from the on-the-road interviews with the crew. While numbers can seem a trivial measure of equality, the result of four guys working as a team with two girls is that the guys will never be singled out or outnumbered. When discussions occurred along gender lines, the guys often won the opinion vote. In one sequence, Derric and Jose (who were almost always shown driving the van, metaphorically driving the narrative) initiate a discussion about abortion after passing a billboard marked: "Abortion: The Choice That Kills." This is the conversation that ensues:

Derric: Alright, so Jose, you believe in abortion?

Jose: For real? Do I believe in abortion?

Derric: Paula, if you got pregnant, would you get an abortion?

Paula: Yes.

Derric: If you're ready to have sex, you should be ready to have a kid.

Paula: If I choose to have sex it's not because I'm ready to have a kid, it might be because you're like, in love with somebody and you wanted . . .

Jose: It's not really love then, it's lust.

Ramona (off screen): It's not really love if you don't want to have a baby with that person?!

Paula: Every time you guys, you know, have sex, whatever, you're thinking about, okay, yes I could take care of a child . . .

Derric: I'm sayin' I'm not the one who's gonna get pregnant so I'm not the one who has to think about it much, you know what I'm sayin'?

Paula: Well you have to have that freedom of choice, just like everyone wants.

Jose: Freedom to go out and get all hot and quick with somebody and then end up having a baby and then sayin', "You know what, I just fucked up my whole life, so I just might as well end up killing somebody and just throw it away because I'm not responsible enough." But you feel you're responsible enough to open your legs and let some guy come in you. I mean, what the hell is that?

(Camera pans back to Paula, who slumps back in her seat and falls silent. Fade to black.)(10)

As in Baby Love, the double standard of procreative responsibility for teenage pregnancy falls solely on the shoulders of girls. How can teenage girls inhabit a social terrain of gender equality when males have access to sexual freedom without consequences?

Reel Grrrls with Cameras

Ramona and Paula in The Ride are good examples of savvy, smart, non-technophobes who duke it out verbally with the guys when necessary. But even much of what they represent in their videos - like the makers of Girls Like Us and Baby Love - are problem girls who fail. The danger in making "movie stars" of those who fail is that the girls who succeed, those would could be the true peer-based role models, rarely make it into the visual purview. based on the bipolar image extremes of beauty-based success and "regular girl" self-hatred, the message then becomes: girls' failure is inevitable unless you look like Kate Moss or can skate like Michelle Kwan. What about the girls who shine in other, non-consumerist ways? What about the black belts, the math whizzes, the volunteers at orphanages, the budding poets, the young political activists? As an alternative to the focus in broadcast news media and public television documentary media on crisis-driven representations of girls, racial stereotypes and class biases, several media education programs across the country are encouraging gifts to talk back to the media and create their own film and video programs.

Despite inroads made in the music industry with events such as the all-female Lilith Fair, in the realms of mainstream advertising and movie-making the white, waif Made-in continues to proliferate in the face of a global economy of supposed diversity. Girls can, however, be empowered to talk back, stare back and write their own unique scripts for "doing girl." One way teenage girls can break free of this stranglehold on the limited beauty/power codes offered is to create their own images, to model their own languages of representation. In this way, through a combination of media literacy and media creativity, they can learn to speak a language of the body and desire that is not muted by comparisons to unattainable name-brand standards.

For the past three years Chicago's Women in the Director's Chair Film and Video Festival has hosted a "Media Gifts" segment that provides a showcase of teenage girls' work from around the country, including videos created at a local organization called Street Level Youth Media. One collaborative group of girl producers, Sync Sisters w/Style, combines street poetics with experimental strobing and colorization motifs to question gender roles, dangerous stereotypes and sexuality and identity issues. The intelligence of the teens involved radiates through their programming as they take to the hood to interview their peers on these critical subjects. Street Level Youth Media was recently given a Coming Up Taller Award for service to inner-city teens by the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities.(11)

The 1998 Madcat Women's Film Festival of San Francisco featured "Teen Scream," a program of teenage girls' works in film and video, which showed at the Roxie Cinema in San Francisco. Madcat's Director, Ariella Ben-Dov, sees this showcase of girls' work as an opportunity to encourage girls who are combating gender-based technophobia by picking up cameras to express themselves. While making work is an important part of girls' empowerment, showing the work publicly provides the exposure that can create career drives of possibility. The mentoring efforts of these educational media organizations and festivals provide an important support to girls who are speaking out, speaking for themselves and fighting against the tide of "power loss" with electric creative expression and personal drive.

The San Francisco School of the Arts is a competitive public high school with a media arts department where teenagers write, shoot, produce and edit their own films and videos. Media artists from the Bay Area are invited to SOTA to speak and show their work, to engage in dialogue with students on alternatives to mainstream representations. Valerie Soe, media artist and instructor at SoTA, suggests that it's "important for girls to understand how television and advertising shape self-image, since they're so often the targets of commercials and ad campaigns. Learning to make videos demystifies the process and gives them insights into how they might be manipulated by image makers." Soe has found that the gifts drawn to media in her program tend to be natural leaders, self-motivated and self-confident - "they aren't easily intimidated by mixed-gender settings." A girl's ability to hold her own in difficult situations such as this can be part of the training toward success in adult life. But girls who aren't easily intimidated are rarely those who fall through the cracks. Mixed-gender media programs often fail to address those girls who are silenced by the presence of boys. For some, the answer may lie in girls-only workshops where they can learn core technology skills before joining a mixed-gender production team, if they so choose. It may be to the advantage of these girls to work exclusively with female mentors and other girls until they become more confident. Some young women create their most risky and interesting work under such circumstances, where the stress of adolescent sex banter can be eliminated.

"The Mirror Project," a five-year-old media arts organization founded by Roberto Arevalo for inner-city teens and operating out of Somerville, MA, has shown the benefits of supporting budding female filmmakers. "The Mirror Project" also maintains a website with news of current projects, screening histories and highlights of their history.(13) The organization, which has been recognized by the National Association of Local Art Agencies as "one of the most successful art programs for at-risk youth in the nation," selects eight teenagers - four boys and four girls - every four months to train on video production equipment and produce videos derived from the stories of their lives. Arevalo encourages girls to work in groups or pairs and to use video cameras to document their friendships, reveal political views, critique the fashion industry, discuss racism and explore their own desire to be seen and heard. Three multicultural teenage girls from the project, Patricia Valadres, Louise Bernard and Zakia Dottin-Carter, have produced personal documentaries that have been screened in festivals, museums and galleries across the country. All three won Bronze Apple Awards in 1996 at the National Educational Media Network Festival. One of the goals of the project is to "redefine and demystify the documentary production process" by encouraging participants to turn the camera lens on their own lives. Arevalo believes that "technology is power" and that providing at-risk youth with the means to tell their own stories helps to challenge racial and economic stereotypes about inner-city teens.

In the early '90s, Sadie Benning proved that a 16-year-old girl with a Pixelvision camera could say a lot about growing up, the emergence of sexual desire and getting crushes on girls. Her video pieces, including Me and Rubyfruit (1989), Jollies (1990), If Every Girl Had a Diary (1990) and A Place Called Lovely (1991), became cult favorites at lesbian and gay film festivals across the country and abroad. These Pixelvision films, shot mostly in the private universe of Benning's bedroom, employed Barbie dolls, toy cars, candy wrappers and pop tunes to describe the experiences of a teenage lesbian falling in love. Transforming these heterosexual pop symbols into tools for the expression of her own emergent gay desire, Benning demonstrates that you don't always have to stray far from home to rebel in a coherent and powerful manner. While the private universe of the teenage girl's bedroom may seem an unlikely site for nurturing outside world rebellion, the bedroom milieu of solitary art practice can actually be a nexus of a girl's creative strength. Benning used her bedroom as a site for creative production, which ultimately catapulted her into the outside world. Her work has screened at the Whitney Biennial and New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in 1992, at the age of 19, Benning was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. While Benning remains a potentially powerful role model for teenage girls, her work is shown mostly in the rarefied universe of film festivals and museums, which are less often inhabited by teenage girls. Growing up in a creative environment, Benning was certainly encouraged and most likely assisted by adults in the distribution of her work. Even though her videos may not be seen by many teenage gifts, the sheer existence of her artistic production proves that girls with cameras can explore issues of sexual preference, desire and gender roles with close-ups on the familiar landscape of their childhood toys, teen idols and their own bodies. The continued efforts of independent curators and film festival directors to find innovative curatorial solutions can help bring the work of teenage artists to teenage viewers.(13)

Mentorship collaborations between women filmmakers, curators and teenage girls help to provide young women with the tools of self-representation and models of success in technology fields still dominated by men. House of Girls addresses the struggles girls face in finding a voice by giving the tools of image production to the girls themselves. Five girls from diverse backgrounds were invited to spend the weekend at a cabin in upstate New York with an all-female adult production crew to brainstorm their own video segments. Given that girls have historically been handed scripts of codified behavior, this project provides a breakthrough in girls' self-expression with strong peer-based role models for teenage viewership. These girls don't pretend to have all the answers, but use their intelligence, creativity and sense of humor to question a status quo that often erases the diversity of girls' self-expression.

In House of Girls the girls speak very little about boys, boyfriends or hetero-centrist terms of desire. While two of the girls touch directly on the hazing that girls experience in their interactions with boys - the taunting, the beauty judgments - this was auxiliary to their creative goals. Through segments showcasing their love of literature, girl bands and 'zines and their personal struggles in navigating the messages of a consumerist culture, a portrait of an alternative girl culture emerges. The articulation of their desires, which span artistic, cultural, political, social and sexual goals, remains open to further creative discussion and representation in the context of narrative and documentary filmmaking. House of Girls leaves the viewer with a newly-whetted appetite to see more of these power girls, more windows into the culture of girl voices, music and images.

As girls continue to express themselves through video and film, the language of girls' desire can begin to be decoded and more fully understood. While girls are bilingual inhabitants of the culture, learning to talk and achieve in masculine terms, boys remain largely illiterate regarding the language of female desire. In most public settings girls cannot express their desires without fear of ridicule or retribution. Girls who are vocal, intelligent, opinionated and goal-oriented on their own terms without a link to male approval ratings are not a frequent part of the Maiden USA landscape as seen through the lens of Hollywood films and even that of most independently-produced feature narratives or documentaries. The evidence at recent festivals and on the Web demonstrates there can be no stopping girls from talking back, snapping shots, running chat sites and shooting film and video. Young women need adult mentors to provide tools and motivational structures for writing and producing their own scripts for "doing girl" by exposing the representations of Made-ins put before them, and expanding the gender codes for "female" and "the feminine." By rewriting the lines given to them by mainstream culture and adult assumptions, they can help redefine what it means to be a Maiden in the USA.

This article is dedicated to the memory of Christine Tamblyn.

NOTES

1. Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (New York: Random House, 1994), p. 44.

2. Peggy Orenstein, SchoolGirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem and the Confidence Gap (New York: Doubleday, 1994), pp. xv-xvii.

3. Ibid., p. 37.

4. For more information on this situation see Susan J. Douglas, Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (New York: Times Books, 1994), p. 71.

5. Karon Sherarts and Suzanne Stenson Harmon, Baby Love Study Guide, ITVS, 1997.

6. For more information about Girls Like Us contact Women Make Movies, 462 Broadway, Suite 500R, New York, NY 10012; [phone].

7. ITVS recently funded Carol Cassidy to produce a cross-country series about teens entitled "American Girls," which may redress some of these issues. The series will be completed in 1999.

8. For more information about Baby Love contact Direct Cinema Ltd., P.O. Box 10003, Santa Monica, CA 90410.

9. Orenstein, pp. 56-60.

10. The Ride was produced by Shauna Garr for the Independent Television Service (ITVS), 1994. To find out more about House of Girls contact the ITVS, 51 Federal St., San Francisco, CA 94107.

11. To submit work or obtain more information about teenage programming at Women in the Directors Chair, contact Sabrina Craig, Director, WIDC, 3435 N. Sheffield Ave., #202, Chicago, IL 60657; [phone]; www.WIDC.org. Street Level Youth Media can be reached at 1856 W. Chicago Ave., 1st floor, Chicago, IL 60622; [phone]; www.streetlevel.iit.edu.

12. For more information about "The Mirror Project" visit www.somerville-eye.com/scat/mirror

13. For more information about the work of Sadie Benning, contact Women Make Movies. (See note 8).

KATHLEEN SWEENEY, a videomaker, writer and curator, is currently working on a documentary video about teenage girls. Her traveling exhibition of films and videos by teenage girls, "Reel Girls/Real Girls" premiered at the San Francisco Cinematheque in December 1998.