Consider, also, that merely two generations ago, women were portrayed to genetically designed to make babies, raise babies and keep the house clean. Here’s the evidence of that: http://dangerousintersection.org/2008/07/14/lawyer-demographics-in-1966/

I’m not suggesting that being sexy necessarily lead to loss of interest in schooling for girls. We all know of many girls who are into girlie/sexy clothing and make-up yet are excellent students. The concern is that these are exceptions to the rule.

To summarize: This is a generalization but frankly, a lot of teenage girls mask their feelings about this subject. So any kind of “conclusions” are really hard to tack down.

So yes, as Erich points out, both boys and girls face unfair, restricting social expectations. And the culture does deserve our harsh criticism for it. But we still need to hold girls at least partially accountable if they fail to exercise their brains, because we would do the same thing to airheaded boys.

I was about to write that teenage boys don’t have the same kind of dumb rolemodel as girls do, but Puff Daddy and Co wouldn’t be able to make money with their share of male fans.

I guess, girls who try to be cool and sexy end as school drop outs and pregnant, while guys end up in jail.

We should all become feminists and overthrow the patriarchic system that oppresses both women and men.

Although there is a lot of lip service being paid to the new age of the “sensitive male,” stereotypic images of masculinity are still with us. Whereas boys used to emulate John Wayne or James Dean (who now seem quaint by comparison), today’s boys seemed even more exaggerated images of stoic, violent, impossibly powerful supermen on a movie, television, computer, and video screens. The media serves up as role models Neanderthal professional wrestlers; hockey goons, ready at the slightest provocation to drop their sticks and pummel an opponent; multimillionaire professional athletes in trouble with the law, demanding “respect” from fans and the press; and angry, drug using misogynist rock stars. Even boys who are not allowed to watch violent movies or play violent video games but who watch television sports, will nevertheless consume a steady diet of commercials in which a man is not a man unless he is tough, drives a tough truck, and drinks lots of beer. …

Our culture co-opts some of the most impressive qualities of boy can possess–their physical energy, boldness, curiosity, and action orientation–and distorts them into a punishing, dangerous definition of masculinity.

(Page 15).

Men, in particular, are rarely celebrated for moral or emotional courage. Men in the news are almost always there because they represent power, skill, or wealth; men in entertainment programming are either dominators like Arnold Schwarzenegger, who is fearless, or good-natured nitwits like Tim Allen on Home Improvement, where the context of sitcom life simply doesn’t include emotional courage. Most important, boys need models of emotional courage in their own lives, not just in the media. We need to recognize and identify for them emotional courage in the lives of women and men, and our families and in the lives of children and others around us. In life and art, we need to provide boys models of male heroism that go beyond the muscular, the self-absorbed, and they simplistically heroic. Many adults display emotional courage in their work or personal lives, but rarely do we allow our children to witness our private moments of conscience or bravery. We need to speak of it, and we need to recognize how loud the emotional courage of those people around us and who, in small ways daily, exhibit personal courage…

Mark Twain’s description of courage bears repeating: “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear-not absence of fear.”

(Page 250)

My point was (a) this is nothing new.

and (b) you can’t understand this phenomenon without looking at the same thing happening (albeit in somewhat different form) with boys.

The dumb blonde gig can only work longterm if both blonds are dumb, male and female.

And it also ignores a common factor (well, that may be too strong, I don’t know if this book ignores this or not) that people generally WANT to be attractive, which, pushed a little bit, becomes wanting to be sexy. And adolescence is when the hormones are perfectly simmered to make that ambition central.

Women get the lion’s share of the problems from this, that I will not argue, but we can’t “solve” it without stepping back and seeing it as not so much a girl issue as a people issue.

BTW, I don’t recall many instances where the nerds get the girl without the make-over. For some reason, the only one that comes to mind right now is Weird Science—and Kelly LeBrock turns both those geeks into Cool Dudes so they can get the girl. The thing to remember about nerdy boy stories is that, central to it, the boys don’t want to be nerds—they want to be cool. They just don’t know how.