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Views > January 22, 2008

The Jamie Lynn Effect

By Susan J. Douglas

In a culture that is prudish and pornographic, girls are supposed to turn themselves into enticing little pop tarts who then 'just say no.'
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The story was so big it made front page of the New York Times: Jamie Lynn Spears, Britney’s 16-year-old kid sister, and star of Nickelodeon’s squeaky-clean “Zoey 101,” was pregnant by her 19-year-old boyfriend. And everyone was shocked—shocked!

There was plenty of derision for Spears’ mother, who was surprised because Jamie Lynn was “never late for curfew”—as if sex happens only after 11 p.m. Jamie Lynn herself said, “I was in complete and total shock,” apparently not aware of one of the more significant outcomes of having sex.

But few noted that this story is emblematic of the highly hypocritical and often hostile media environment surrounding girls in American society. With media panics about girls outperforming boys and attending college at higher rates, it can seem as if 21st century girls don’t face many struggles. And with the white, upper-middle-class bias in TV shows, films and magazines geared toward young people, it would appear that girls’ biggest challenges are planning their latest over-the-top party, à la MTV’s “Laguna Beach” or “My Super Sweet Sixteen.”

But the advocacy group Girls Inc. has found that many girls are stressed out navigating the contradictory expectations that surround them. Teen girls, especially, live in a culture that is simultaneously prudish and pornographic. They are supposed to turn themselves into enticing little pop tarts who then “just say no.” They are constantly told, in images more so than words, that their main value comes from their sex appeal and being regarded as “hot” by guys.

The hyper-sexualized media environment that surrounds them—to which Jamie Lynn’s older sister has certainly contributed—targets girls at ever-younger ages. Midriff-baring tops and thongs can be found in girls’ clothing departments; the Bratz dolls, in their Sunset Strip hooker outfits, make Barbie look like a priss (although a very stacked priss).

Television exaggerates the centrality of sex to everyday life, even for adolescents. In 1998, 67 percent of primetime shows contained sexual content, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. By 2005, 77 percent of primetime shows did. Among the top 20 most-watched shows by teens in 2005, 70 percent included some kind of sexual content and 45 percent included sexual behavior. Per hour, the number of sex scenes in top teen shows is 6.7. That’s higher than overall primetime, which showed 5.9 sex scenes an hour. (In any given hour, the scenes in my home concern things like who fed the dog and whether the electric bill got paid.)

As University of North Carolina researcher Jane Brown has noted, the media have become a “sexual super peer” for young girls, that approves of teens having sex while providing them little information about the consequences.

A study released a year ago by the American Psychological Association reported that the hyper-sexualization of girls is harmful to their emotional and physical health, encouraging them to objectify themselves and promoting eating disorders, low self-esteem and depression.

Meanwhile, the same kids who watch random hook-ups through the infrared cameras on MTV’s “The Real World” get little or no reliable information about sex. The Guttmacher Institute reported that in 2002, “one-third of teens had not received any formal instruction about contraception,” and the figure was even lower for black teens. For girls, there was actually a decline in how many had gotten such instruction since 1995. In 1995, only 8 percent to 9 percent of teens got abstinence-only instruction (without any mention of contraception). By 2002, thanks to the Bush-Religious Right approach to sex education, the figure was 21 percent for girls and 24 percent for boys. Recent studies have shown that abstinence-only sex-ed programs fail. So, as sexual content in the media has increased, exposure to thorough, reliable sex education has decreased.

One result of all this? The trend that Jamie Lynn Spears represents: The United States continues to have one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the developed world, twice as high as Great Britain and eight times as high as the Netherlands. (U.S. teens also have one of the highest rates of sexually transmitted infections in the industrialized world.) To top it off, while many girls are told they can do or be anything, our hyper-natalist celebrity culture insists that the most important thing they will ever do is have children. Forget other achievements; only by having children will they be truly sanctified as “real” women.

The Jamie Lynn Spears story, as banal as it is, offers not just an opportunity to talk to teens about responsible sex. It also provides an opportunity to point out how girls can still be trapped in no-win situations, rank with hypocrisy, that benefit, primarily, white male conservative politicians and white male libertine corporate honchos. Welcome to a powerful new patriarchal reformulation that is the latest post-feminist Catch-22.

Susan J. Douglas is a professor of communications at the University of Michigan and author of The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How it Has Undermined Women.

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  • Reader Comments

    I’m glad that at least one writer ‘gets it’ AND has the guts to put it into print.
    The whole Hollywood system is rotten to the core. I believe Jamie Lynn has enough sense to see that it has destroyed her sister, and has gotten out before the same thing happens to her. Maybe now she’ll get a chance at that ‘normal life’ she talks about - living in Kentwood where people apparently don’t go insane because they see someone ‘famous’, going to LSU to learn something actually useful. Good for her.

    Posted by irvm on Jan 22, 2008 at 8:02 AM

    The destruction of Brittney is due in large part to the massive wealth she has earned. Give any 20 year old (or almost anyone of any age) $100 million+ and they will become nuts. Excess wealth is a curse!

    Posted by wolf on Jan 22, 2008 at 9:45 AM

    Notwithstanding that any writer worth publishing ought to be the first to admit that explaining the opposite sex is whimsical and anecdotal at best, there remains the question of what women gain by (I’ll defer to the author’s evident mindset) going along with the enticements of their objectification. In other words, women control men with male-baiting sexuality as much as they posture that such behaviour is beneath them and that they are victimized by it.  White slavery is one thing. Women behaving badly is another. In the largest context of above-and-beyond all cutures and all times lies a fundamental truth: without sexual enticement, arousal and consummation, I’d not be here to write this in response to what annoyed me about Ms. Douglas’ point of view. Western women telling Muslim women that they’d be happier in bikinis and, were it not for the men who ostensibly loved them, they’d be wearing them, somehow strikes me as disengenuous. The impression that Ms. Douglas makes with this piece, to my mind, leads me to suspect that she would reason that my reasoning thusly is yet more evidence of males’ responsibility for females’ subjugation.  Sexual activity among teenagers in a society as puriently charged as ours isn’t men’s fault. It’s all our faults and we gain nothing in advancing to its resolution by he-said-she-said nuances of psuedo-intellectualism. Thinks outside the box, children, there’s much more to life than getting wet or stiff, regardless of what marketing minds have learned about us since prehistoriy gave way to pornographic etchings on cave walls. Can there be any intelligent conversation when the topic is signified by references to the Spears’ sisters? Sounds more like talk-show haberdashery than ITT dialetic. Then again, as my grownup daughters like to tell me, I’m an Old Hippie whose mind, some conclude, was addled by sex, drugs and rock-n-roll when being teenaged was termed a subculture. Most of us know, Ms. Douglas, what’s going on when the TV commercial is a slinky lass in a skimpy dress standing next to an over-powered muscle car. Those that don’t are victims of ignorance, not maleness. Teach the children well. Scolding daddy is impertinent. Paternalism and maternalism can be dangerous to your health. Sex is the mother of all human incentives. No kidding.

    Posted by Bud Wizer on Jan 24, 2008 at 11:57 AM

    I think it’s you, Bud Wizer, who is being disingenuous.  I’m not certain if we read the same piece, but I didn’t find one instance in Ms. Douglas’s article in which she blames “maleness” for anything.  And while I think it’s true that the patriarchal society we live in often is dangerous for women to navigate, I do believe the point Ms. Douglas makes is regarding GIRLS.  That is, young female children who can’t help being ignorant because they are too young to know any better.  These are the people who are getting mixed messages and are increasingly being left without the proper tools to sort through it all.  These are children, not “[w]omen behaving badly.”

    I am also unsure as to how either the concepts of the availability of sex education and contraception, or the discussion of the ever-increasing reliance on sex for entertainment could ever be construed as “he-said-she-said nuances of psuedo-intellectualism.” And as for whether there can be “any intelligent conversation when the topic is signified by references to the Spears’ [sic] sisters,” well, in a society in which Paris Hilton has actual “fans,” we’d better start paying attention (and talking about) what our teen and tween girls are paying attention to and talking about.  If I had a young daughter, I KNOW I’d be having more than one conversation with her about Jamie Lynn Spears.

    Posted by margymae13 on Jan 28, 2008 at 10:17 PM

    You may be correct, margymae13. I’m far from perfect, which is the point I’m trying to make: imperfect beings in an imperfect world trivializing the challenges of doing the best we can with what we’ve got. My two daughters, one a Beverly Hills operative and performance artist, the other a Boston graduate student for nurse-anesthetist, have long been sexually active single women. When they were girls, I never failed to warn them of the dangers posed by testosteronic excesses coupled with the flirtatious nature of their, well, natures. I consistently, constantly and, to their adolescent mindset, crucifyingly informed them that it takes two to tango and there was more peril to dancing than breaking off a heel. Perhaps I am reading more into it that was intended by Ms. Douglas, for which I apologize. However, as a writer, activist, journalist and layman, I am, and have been for most of my four decades of adult life, appalled by the notion of female victimization by peckerheads. I’d prefer that feminist or female-supportive writers, especially those fortunate enough to be selected by ITT as contributing writers, would demonstrate more intellect and relevance than the article in question herein, to me, connotes. I very much paid attention to my daughters growing up, and their brother as well. They know better than to discuss with me Britney, Paris, Madonna, etc. I usually, to their chagrin, cut them short by reminding them of the vanity displayed by western women holding hands regarding the anguish of post-industrial Western society while women and girls in other parts of the world dwell in caves of depravity unimaginably horrific because of the very lifestyle we enjoy at their expense. Please excuse my off-the-top-of-my-senior-head reaction to Ms. Douglas’ piece. I’m sure she’s an intelligent, competent, sensitive, insightful, and concerned woman. And I have no doubt that the topic she addresses needs be. By “he said, she said” I mean something on the order of Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus. The differences are obvious and widely known. I’m hopeful that writers and publications like ITT, which I have long respected as a socialist voice in the wilderness of capitalism’s wasteland, might at least remember that, as Kurt Vonnegut urged us, we need to worry that we don’t demonstrate that the problem might be that our brains are too big. In that case, no pun intended, size does matter, as every man and woman should know.  Had no byline been atop her article, would you have known it was written by a woman? I think I would have. Perhaps that’s because I’m getting too old to know when to be reticent. It gets that way when you’re sensing time’s running out instead of it being never-ending, as in fairy tales. Then again, “a powerful new patriarchal reformulation that is the latest post-feminist Catch-22,” is not something that I get, being white, male, but neither libertine nor conservative. Someone whom I can’t recall once said or wrote that women aren’t hard to please, they want everything. Men are hard to please, I’d say, they expect women to make sense. There. I’ve revealed myself, a conflicted exhibitionist. No offense intended.

    Posted by Bud Wizer on Jan 29, 2008 at 12:12 PM

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