University at Buffalo - The State University of New York

Published: May 4, 2006

By MARY COCHRANE
Contributing Editor

Who is the "ideal girl"?

BAY-CHENG

Is she someone who strives for independence? What if she is defiant to adults around her? Is she a feminist if she dresses to make herself appear desirable? Do "ideal girls" talk about sex?

These are a few of the questions that arose when researchers from UB and the University of Illinois at Chicago examined the outcomes of a program in which social workers intended to act as feminist mentors to a group of middle-school girls.

They report in the current issue of Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work (Vol. 21, No. 1) that despite their feminist leanings, the mentors wound up falling back on "moralistic, age-based standards of appropriate sexual interest and behavior" and "the suppression of sexuality."

Laina Y. Bay-Cheng, assistant professor in the UB School of Social Work, said "the discursive intersection of sexuality, adolescence, gender and race" is a place of mixed signals when it comes to mentoring adolescent girls. Bay-Cheng co-authored the paper, "Our 'Ideal Girl': Prescriptions of Female Adolescent Sexuality in a Feminist Mentorship Program," with Amanda E. Lewis, associate professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Bay-Cheng and Lewis wrote the paper after analyzing data gathered during an evaluation of a program intended to provide feminist mentorship to early adolescent girls.

The University of Michigan Institute for Research on Women and Gender evaluated the program, which was held in a small Midwestern city at a middle school where 60 percent of the 535 students are African-American. Its directors—two social workers, both white women—intended it as a forum where the participants—22 sixth-grade girls—could "interrupt the processes of traditional gender socialization," according to the study.

Bay-Cheng said recently that because sexuality "wasn't part of the program's explicit plan or curriculum," she and Lewis were surprised when it emerged as a major theme.

"We knew up front that the program was explicitly trying to affect young girls' ideas about gender and their identities as young women, so although we didn't posit any specific hypotheses, we did read the data knowing that there would be content on gender," she said.

"Similarly, we knew that the program was primarily comprised of African-American adolescent participants and white adult mentors, so I think all of us involved in the project, including the program directors, were interested in how the racial demography would affect the program's content and relationships."

But once she and Lewis began analyzing the data, they began to see "a sort of tension between the youth participants and the adult mentors about how sex and sexuality were going to be talked about—if at all—in the program," Bay-Cheng said.

The girls heard mixed messages about which characteristics an "ideal" girl possesses; while striving for independence is acceptable, for example, defiance is not. Likewise, their attempts to discuss sex in any form were ignored or redirected by the program directors and the female college students who served as assistants. Instead, the adults delivered "moralistic stereotypes" about sex, particularly the one that stresses sex is not something "good girls" discuss, according to Bay-Cheng.

"What we detected was an interest on the part of the adults in the program to carefully control the sexual discourse in the program," Bay-Cheng said.

In the paper, Bay-Cheng and Lewis describe how the directors and college students "defined sexuality as an adult concern and therefore off limits to the program's young participants."

They give one example, in which a participant creating a collage on "what it means to be a girl" remarked that it means not only friendship, sports and school work, but also "being pregnant." One of the mentors contradicted her, saying "Women get pregnant, not girls."

In other instances, the adults explicitly labeled some behaviors, such as which clothes a girl wears, as inappropriate.

"The point is that the adults in the program were delivering messages—again, subtly and not so subtly—about sexuality: what is appropriate, what is normal, what is good. In this way, we felt that they were trying to regulate or discipline the girls' sexuality, or at the very least how the girls talked about sexuality," Bay-Cheng said.

Bay-Cheng doesn't fault the program directors directly, saying she and Lewis believe the program reflects a larger problem about how adults tend to socialize youth on issues of gender and sexuality.

"I think it's important to make clear that the social workers who designed the program and the young women who served as mentors in the program had very noble intentions and accomplished very good and important work," she said.

And she thinks that parents can be an important part of the solution to this problem.

"It is important to remember that the majority of parents in the United States support sex education beyond the abstinence-only model that is currently promoted. There are community-based programs that are trying to counteract the narrowness of school-based 'sex ed,'" Bay-Cheng said. "I am not opposed in any way to adults providing and being involved in adolescents' sex education. Indeed, research has shown that many adolescents would prefer to get information about sexuality from their parents.

But they, too, should use a two-way approach when talking with their children, she added.

"I do question practices that approach educating and guiding younger generations as a one-way process of enforcing adult authority, sort of an 'adult-knows-best' position, even when done with the best of intentions, as it was in the case of this program," Bay-Cheng said. "I envision adults and youth optimally engaging in mutual partnerships that honor both the experience and knowledge of adults, but also the integrity and capability of young people."