Girlfights

If I had the ability to track my pictures from Myspace into the Facebook times, I think the trajectory of the photos would be a fitting study for Dobson. For the last eight years I have probably had over a thousand pictures taken with the same group of ten girls. The Representation of Female Friendships on Young Women’s MySpace Profiles, a research study written by Amy Dobson, hit entirely too close to home for me, so I had to write about it.

To start, I’m not admitting to being one of the “Girls Gone Wild”, EVER, but, my group of best friends from middle school up until now has definitely had our moments of getting wrapped up in the ‘gloating’ publicly about our strong friendship. So, Dobson’s article was eerily familiar. Dobson focuses on 45 females, ages 18-21, using their Myspace profiles in Australia. She spends time examining the images and text filling the page and comes up with two key constructions of female friendships on Myspace: 1) That “friendships are presented as idealistically party-oriented and rowdy” and 2) that friendships are “also presented as idealistically close, loyal, and intimate- comparable in the depth of feeling and connection expressed to romantic partnerships or family ties” (127). This, according to Dobson, leads the viewers of the profiles to imagine these women in an idealistic female-centered universe, which is all encompassing and almost completely satisfying to their own social and emotional needs. Throughout the article, Dobson’s main concern is with the way that female friendships are represented as part of a single female’s overall identity performance within the online frontier.

            Approaching the subject from a feminist perspective, Dobson is able to see these presentations for what they really are: “romanticized” and “pleasure-seeking” and maybe even “typically ‘masculine’ in the type of hedonistic and rowdy behaviour” that the young women in the profiles are taking part in (127). Dobson’s research examples are gnarly, for lack of a better term. There are lots of tongues, breasts, tight clothing and offensive words (such as: cunt, bitch, whore, slut) that are, of course, used endearingly (when not being used for the voyeur ‘other’). While young women may believe (maybe a stretch) that they are being post-gender and strong by using such, previously offensive terms, Dobson points out that these aggressive actions towards both the ‘other’ woman as well as men inherently keep previous stereotypes of femininity intact. By degrading the ‘other’ for what they don’t want to be, the women are not doing anything but reconstructing the pre-existing gender binaries.

            It’s a complicated situation though, because as a young woman, you are constantly trying to ‘define’ yourself against something that you are not. If you are not a slut, why not publicize that to the world? If you’ve got ‘it’, why not flaunt ‘it’? You don’t know any better. That’s the naïve way to look at it, but a large amount of young women think this. Dobson says that the young women present themselves as “active, pleasure-seeking subjects, rather than inert, passive objects of other’s pleasure” and this is accomplished through pictures of ‘girl time’ in the form of slumber parties, alcohol consumption (girlz only!!), making out with your friends and trying with all your might to look like you are having as much fun as possible in the pictures (130). This is because no longer do men represent drinking and leisure culture. Now women can sit on the couch with a few beers and watch the game, or something slightly more ‘feminine’, all the while, documenting it! If men can do it, why can’t we? A significant point made by Dobson is that the Internet, specifically MySpace and Facebook, are new spaces of new-media self-representation. Now that we have a forum to post our every moments and Friday and Saturday nights, why not share it with people who act like they care? I mean, I find lots of problems with this mentality, and now as I am older I can really see my earlier faults.

            My friends and I were the type of girl group that was considered ‘weird’ by all people not included. We were constantly called ‘cliquey’ (probably were) and ‘lesbians’ (we didn’t really hang out with anyone but ourselves) to the ‘others’ of our high school. We didn’t go to parties until late Sophomore year, so up until then, we just took lots of pictures together. Not really sexy nor suggestive, but just for shits and giggles. For ex: we’d raid my friend ‘s mom’s closet and put on her weirdest clothing and parade (10 of us) to the grocery store and document it. Our favorites would go up on Myspace and captains entirely devoted to our own inside jokes would accompany them. Why were we so annoying? I wish I could say we didn’t know any better but apparently you still have to figure out your own performance of sexuality the hard way. We even got into squabbles with other girl groups, ON MYSPACE. I remember a ‘popular ‘girl Thea’s Myspace profile interests included “ragging on the Willard Girls” (my group), and thus began a full on Internet war between her group of girls, Crimes of Couture (I am not joking), and my group. After a long exchange of young high school girls trying to prove to each other that they had large vocabularies, it finally ended, leaving me with a bad taste in my mouth. Did we have to be that mean? Did we have to play along with Crimes of Couture’s antics? No, not really, but I think Facebook and Myspace really encourage behavior like this. I don’t think it is healthy; the ability to look at all these images. The judgments then turn into pride that we don’t look like that or have those friends, and it all just becomes a cycle of immaturity. Although Dobson’s age range is older than when I encountered these female friendships, I think it still stands true. I love my friends, but after seeing too many profiles like the ones described in this article, I do not want to broadcast it over the Internet.

This article brought to light many gender issues that are still very prevalent in our culture today. We need to stop with the us vs. them theory; we need to stop acting like we are better than the rest, whether it be males or other females, because that will just continue the cycle of performing our own ‘correct’ sexuality versus the supposed ‘incorrect’. 



-Sophie G.