The average teenage girl consumes between eight and 10 hours of media each day, according to the MEDIAGIRLS website. Numerous studies have linked greater media consumption with increased body dissatisfaction and disordered eating, and girls ages five to 18 are the most likely victims.
MEDIAGIRLS aims to change the way young girls relate to the media they consume. By equipping them with the knowledge and skills to critically analyze how women are portrayed in the advertisements, television shows and music videos they see every day, this Brookline-based nonprofit is helping girls reclaim their sense of self-worth by learning to view media in a new light.
The organization offers a 10-week program for middle school girls in the Greater Boston area, comprised of weekly after-school workshops. Over the course of the program, the girls participate in discussions, write essays and letters and complete art projects geared toward improving their understanding of media literacy.
Michelle Cove, founder and executive director of MEDIAGIRLS, said the idea for the program occurred to her on International Women’s Day in March 2014, as the culmination of 20 years worth of work in media and experience working with young women and girls. After starting in the fall of 2015, what began as a one-woman experiment has since grown to include nine volunteer teachers, all of whom are Boston University students.
The instructors, who work in groups of three, open the first workshop of the semester by addressing the image of the “perfect girl” portrayed in the media, Cove said. It comes as no surprise that the girls all know exactly who she is. Right away, they can name her and rattle off a list of descriptors for her: skinny, white, blond, tanned, perfect. The list rarely varies.
“The question is, why do we know this girl?” Cove said. “Who’s telling us this story? Is it true? And for the first time, the girls are getting asked that. Maybe this is just a story, and this perfect girl doesn’t exist, and we don’t have to strive to look like her.”
Failure to live up to such narrow standards of beauty can take its toll on young girls. The MEDIAGIRLS website lists some dismaying figures that catalogue the damage: six out of 10 teenaged girls drop out of activities they enjoy doing due to body insecurities. Up to 78 percent of girls are unhappy with their bodies by age 17.
More concerning is the slyness with which media messages creep into young girls’ consciousness. Even Cove’s 11-year-old daughter has started to show insecurity about the way she looks, Cove said.
“And that’s with a mom who understands the culture, who understands media literacy, who does empowerment workshops,” Cove said. “But she still was not spared.”
Cove saw in all of this an opportunity to help girls push back against the onslaught, and to address the problem in a way that she said sets MEDIAGIRLS apart from similar projects.
“There are a lot of media literacy programs, and there are a lot of programs that teach girls how to critique media,” Cove said. “But MEDIAGIRLS is unique in that they’re learning to change the landscape. The skills these girls are learning all go toward being part of the solution.”
In the future, Cove said she hopes to expand MEDIAGIRLS to the national level. Until then, however, she continues to work on bringing the program to all of the Greater Boston area and is working on bringing a three-part pilot media literacy workshop for both girls and boys to middle schools.
Michelle Santiago, a sophomore in the College of Communication, was one of the girls selected as a MEDIAGIRLS instructor last May. Santiago, who is personally interested in media education and academia, said she sees the program as an opportunity to teach girls to be more critical of the media they’re presented with.
“Women aren’t always a big part of creating media, so they’re vulnerable to it,” Santiago said. “But if you can’t be active in making media, you should at least be active in consuming it.”
Zoe Enscoe, a junior in COM and a MEDIAGIRLS volunteer, said she was astonished to see how quickly the girls in her workshops shed their insecurities about speaking their minds.
“There were days when you could tell they were really liking what we were teaching and they were participating,” Enscoe said. “They had so many ideas, and they were clearly so comfortable in voicing their opinions, which is something the world tells girls they’re not allowed to be. It was just amazing, seeing them become confident in their own voices.”
