Tweens as consumers were, until recently, a relatively untapped market. Teenaged girls are extremely easy to market to and have been since the dawn of consumer culture, but manufacturing an "aspirational identity" for the in between stage of adolescent development is basically more the product of my generation and beyond, rather than a well-established, historical cultural paradigm. Girls have been reframed through their desire to be women, to develop into more evolved versions of themselves, so there is never full presence in their actions, but rather, a desire for something that will prove largely unattainable as time goes on, since it is modeled by celebrities, rather than peers. The creation of the celebrity is, in fact, contingent on what marketing conglomerations think girls will read as "cool." This is evidenced in Alloy's section on "Daily Gossip" and the pervasiveness of young Hollywood (Mazzarella and Atkins 272). However, what strikes me here is that the identity constructed by websites like Alloy is hardly what I deemed "cool" as a tween. Even when I read texts that were marketed to me, there was always an edge of corniness to them (the abbreviations for words, the entire culture of it), and there's a very complicated relationship between how sexualized young girls are expected to be, within reason, while they're conversely insultingly infantilized. I did actually read those
Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants books, and they weren't awful, but that was never the product of being marketed to, as much as my complete, unabashed love of bookstores. I forced my parents to take me to Borders nearly every weekend because I could not read enough, and certainly not only from the Young Adult Fiction section. This conceptual, idealized image of the 11-13 year old girl is, in my experience, a myth, or when it isn't, it directly corresponds with social constructionism. The question becomes this: what came first, tween yearning or the image of the yearning tween?
One possible panacea that I see to the overabundance of forced consumerism vis-Ã -vis product placement is that the parental guides to morally objectionable material on television or in movies that are readily available on the Internet now sometimes include reviews of the amount of product placement or nudges towards consumer ideals, as this is considered very obtrusive or even offensive.
This poll, conducted by The Guardian, even seems to suggest that this brand of brash marketing is uniquely American in its scheme, which honestly, I find quite sad. I'm aware that parents cannot shield their children from all brands of lifestyle construction, which can often be very damaging to their ways of forming their own personalities without the influence of culturally imposed heteronormativity and gender constructs, but efforts can be made. This perspective on girls is too cynical to me, that the only way to accrue social capital is through consumption of goods and services that make one more desirable to boys, and eventually, men. Resistance to it may prove unrealistically idealistic, but working in that direction can't possibly be anything but positive.
