Where the Girls Are

Where the Girls Are

Throughout history, music played an important role in everybody life. Specially in America, music has been there through thick and thin during war times. Every body is able to relate to music some way. However, during the 1950s and 1960s, young teenage girls were the most dependent. In the novel Where the Girls Are by Susan Douglas, covers the major times in what was really going on through a perspective of a women. Whether the topic was music, fairy tails, mothers and public media,film and sex and many others, she talked the truth about it. The novel analysis how far women have come and how mass media assembled and projected the image of women.

Douglas wrote this book about women's history but including personal anecdotes that made the reading fun. Her main thesis was that women were stuck between their feminine desires and their feminist side. She based her argument around the history of hate and love relationship of women to the mass media. She clearly also outlines the feminist and sexist image that the media was portraying these women during the 1950s and 1960s. Mass media plays a central role in our socialization and it continuously bombards women with unclear message regarding what women should and should not, what they can be and what they can not. One of Douglas's key points is that one cannot assume that "the media is all powerful, or that the audiences are just helpless masses of inarticulate protoplasm" (page 16). She argued that audiences resist media images and messages all the time by turning off the television, by ignoring the magazine advertising.

Where the Girls Are is an extremely enjoyable book to read. Her way of telling the female mass media experience and using her own lived experiences is what makes the book unique. At the end of the 1950s and 1960s, the book shows how far women have came along in being more dominant than before.