The Harmful Effect of Misrepresentation of Female Teenagers in TV

            I’ve always been a sucker for dramatic television shows. In middle school, I watched Laguna Beach, the MTV reality show that followed around high school students and showed what really goes on at Laguna Beach High School. As I grew older, I was drawn to Gossip Girl, the CW series based of a set of books that followed a raunchy crew of Upper East Side high schoolers. These fictional characters were like the Laguna Beach cast on steroids; they had hoards of money, no parental supervision, and New York City at their fingertips. The combination of these things in the show leads to drugs, partying, sex, and everything else parents do not want their vulnerable teens watching. As I watched these shows, I could not help but think to myself that this is not what “normal American” teenagers are like. Shows like Laguna Beach and Gossip Girl, though entertaining, misrepresent American teenagers, especially females. This misrepresentation is problematic because it glamorizes harmful behavior, portrays an unrealistic beauty ideal, and sexualizes young girls, and in turn potentially influences the young teen audience.

            Representation is the way meaning is given to what is depicted via the images on television, which is supposed to stand for the audience (Zimdars, personal communication, September 19, 2013). In this case, the teenagers on the screen are supposed to be representing the teenage audience. There is a misrepresentation, though, since the representation of teenagers in Laguna Beach and Gossip Girl is not reflective of the majority of the teenagers watching the shows.

Laguna Beach featured a group of high school juniors and seniors gallivanting around their beach town on their parents’ money. The teens were shown shopping, partying, hooking up, and causing and handling drama within their friend groups. Parents were hardly ever shown on the show, and when they were, they were often presenting their kids with gifts, like a new car or expensive jewelry. The gifts and the teens’ frivolous shopping created a harmful consumer culture around the show.

 One tradition that stands out to me now as I reflect on the show was the students’ annual spring break trip to Cabo. These students were between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, and they spent their spring breaks at a beach resort in Mexico, with no parental supervision, blatantly drunk while dancing on bars in Mexican nightclubs. Clearly, this is not the average American upbringing, yet it is being portrayed as normal and glamorized to young teens through the media.

When I watched these episodes, I thought how cool it would have been to go on a trip like this. Then again, my parents attempted to ban me from watching Laguna Beach in the first place, so a trip like this was absolutely out of the question. According to a New York Times article regarding Laguna Beach’s negative influence, my parents were not the only ones who did not agree with the activities taking place on the show; one parent said, “the under-age drinking and smoking on the program were negatively influencing her fifth and seventh graders” (Steinhauer, “Real O.C. Starts Objecting to Its MTV Portrayal,”). The activities portrayed in Laguna Beach, though they are risky activities, are made to look like the normal teenager experience, and impressionable teens watching may think this is what their life is supposed to be like and try to change the fact that they are not living this exciting and consequence-less life.

            A few years after Laguna Beach came Gossip Girl, an equally as addictive-yet-problematic show that misrepresented the majority of teenagers. The fictional high school students on Gossip Girl had even less parental supervision than the Laguna Beach students and even more money, which was spent on designer clothes, extravagant parties, and other unrealistic amenities.

The characters in Gossip Girl always had some sort of event or party they were going to, where there was no supervision, drugs and alcohol were present and in-use, and the characters often found themselves in some sort of trouble. These parties were glamorous and lavish; the characters would arrive in limos and were shown spending time and money making sure their appearance was flawless. Similar to Laguna Beach, this demonstrated the consumer culture of the show as well as the sexualization of young girls, an issue that is becoming common in media.

Sex is used as a reward in Gossip Girl, for example, “Blair organizes a scavenger hunt at the prom for her boyfriend Nate: if he finds Blair before midnight, he can claim his prize. Chuck adds a bet to the hunt: if Nate does not find her in time, Chuck himself will collect the prize,” (Van Damme, p. 86). This glamorizes sex, showing it as a game and a way for teenage girls to manipulate boys. Additionally, sex is treated very casually in Gossip Girl, and is often used as part of someone’s scheme or plan.

The Gossip Girl characters are supposedly in high school, so they are minors. Yet, they are regularly shown casually engaging in sexual activities and dressed provocatively. Their appearance also displays unrealistic beauty ideals, which is very harmful to vulnerable teenage viewers. The female characters are thin, have long hair, and represent society’s ideals of “conventional beauty.” For teenage viewers, especially females, the image of beautiful and overly sexualized characters can be quite harmful, as it often leads to the viewers having body image problems, since most viewers do not look like the characters on screen, who are of course portraying what teenage girls are “supposed” to look like. This in turn can lead to the teen audience trying to make themselves look and act like the “normal” characters on screen.

            The misrepresentations and portrayals of teenagers in Laguna Beach and Gossip Girl is problematic not only because it glamorizes potentially dangerous activities and behavior, sexualizes young females and portrays an unrealistic, idealist form of beauty, but also because it depicts to audiences that this is what American teenagers are, or should be, doing. Thinking back to my life as a teenager and most American teenagers that I know, this is not what their lives were like. However, when susceptible teens are watching these shows, no matter how ridiculous they may think they are, there is still potential that teens will think, “maybe this really is how people my age act and I am the one doing it wrong.” The young characters in the show are shown with exciting lives with no consequences for their negative actions, and this could encourage viewers to want to live this lifestyle. One author claims, “… Television functions ‘[...] as a symbolic resource which young people use in making sense of their experiences in relating to others and in organizing their daily lives’,” (Van Damme, p. 80). Teenage audiences may try to associate the on-screen teenagers with their own lives, and since the on-screen teens are portrayed so inaccurately and engaging in dangerous behavior, there is potential harm to the audience that may start to engage in said behaviors.