YOLO

The way girls are represented in the media often show them doing stereotypical things that girls do during their teenage years to rebel and ‘have fun’, when in reality, the things they’re doing is an extremity but it still puts pressure on girls seeing this representation to do these things as well in order to experience what is often shown to be ‘rites of passages’  during these short years as a teenager.

This type of representation occurs in the film “ Thirteen” , which follows two young girls of thirteen who are just entering their teenage years and beginning to experiment different things and go through what is often reffered to as “ typical teenage rebellion” .

The two main girls in the film, Tracy and Evie, experiment with petty crime such as shop-lifting, alcohol and drug use, sex and getting piercings and their mothers barely react to it because its seen to be just a ‘ girls will be girls’ situation and that they should just be ‘ allowed freedom to grow up’.

Along with these rebellious actions, the director has also shown the girls and their friends to be dressed in low cut tops baring cleavage and midriff to accentuate the fact that they are expressing themselves to be rebellious and a bit slutty, but the fact that so many girls in the movie are dressing in this way sends the message that this is the norm for girls of this age when they are experiencing this rebellious rite of passage.

The message that this representation sends us is that teenage girls should be allowed to rebel, to go through a stage of ‘ experiencing’ different aspects of life and discovering their persona, no matter how dangerous or harmful these experiences could be even if they’re just doing them once. This fits in with the typical saying in teenage society today “ yolo”  - “ you only live once”. It refers to the idea that young people should experience everything they want to because they only have one life to live.

The affect that making this idea and representation a ‘ typical’ one through media such as the movie “ Thirteen”, is that teenage girls think it is ok to do all of those rebellious things like shoplift and underage drink etc, because if its being represented in the media like that, to them it seems like the norm. This is a negative thing because real life is not a movie, there is no rewind buttons, and sometimes doing something rebellious just to have a supposedly ‘ rite of passage’  experience may not be worth the consequences that come with it.