Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media.

Susan Douglas, "Pundit Watch" columnist for The Progressive, has written a witty, perceptive account of the conflicting images the media have displayed about women from the 1950s to the present. Rather than taking a reductionist view of the media, Douglas points out that the media conveyed both feminist and antifeminist messages. "The common wisdom about the unremitting sexism of popular culture, and our lemming-like acquiescence to it, can't be quite right," she says, since girls who devoured the media's offerings soon became feminists. "The truth is that growing up female with the mass media helped make me a feminist, and it helped make millions of other women feminists, too." The media have been schizophrenic about women, providing a vast array of mixed messages, thus explaining the love-hate relationship that many women have toward the media.

Showing an appallingly encyclopedic grasp of popular culture, Douglas takes the reader on a breezy tour through the sitcoms, the nightly news shows, the fashion magazines, the popular music scene. "In my tour through the images of the past four decades, my goal is to expose, review, and, at times, make fun of the media-induced schizophrenia so may of us feel." She succeeds admirably. She has a lovely section on what she calls the "girl group music" of the 1960s ("Will You Love Me Tomorrow?" and "He's So Fine" and "Sweet Talking Guy"), seeing them as catalysts for women to get together, as precursors of the consciousness-raising groups of the 1970s. Her nuanced reading of I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, Bewitched, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Maude, and myriad other sitcoms and movies act as a counterbalance to those who would render a hasty, totalitarian judgment on the sexist messages of the culture.

Douglas is less kind to the nightly newscasts. She presents ample evidence of the primitive sexism with which newscasters greeted the onset of the feminist movement (Harry Reasoner, Eric Severaid, Walter Cronkite), and the tendency of the media to put down feminism and pit feminist women against antifeminist women in "cat fights."

But Douglas does not write off the news and entertainment media: "They are still our worst enemy and our best ally in our ongoing struggle for equality, respect, power, and love."