Gurl, get on my level with that sex talk

In Chapter 3 “Get On My Level”, Mazzarella analyzes the African American girls and the web. I found this chapter to be most interesting. In this chapter Mazzarella discusses the results that are obtained when the key words “black girl” is entered in a search engine such as Google. “ Big Booty Black Girls” was the first link to show up. Many of the other links that appeared were sexually explicit and showed “black girls” in a very sexual manner. This has a lot to do with the way black women are perceived in the media and the hip-hop culture. In most rap lyrics black women are depicted as sexual objects and this is reflected on what we see for young black girls on the internet. This is also interesting to me because in most cultures the media influences girls to be “thin” and to look like a size 1 model. However in the African American race it is different because they embrace larger figure women.

Online communities and social networks have an enormous impact on girl’s sexual identity development because of many reasons. In online communities, when we communicate we don’t do it face to face; It creates sort of a safe haven for people who are shy or who are experimenting with their identities. It also becomes easier for them to say how they really feel and they become very comfortable with this situation.

Gurl.com seems to be putting forward and effort in helping younger girls who have trouble with self esteem and body image. They also have very informative and motivational tools to help your girls. However, I personally find the website to be somewhat contradictory. They say “ love yourself for who you are” but then a commercial on their page reads “ get younger looking skin.” Another issues that is very dear to my heart is the issues of education, I feel as though in today’s society the media and the interment are all concerned with fashion and dating instead of on education. This website is a prime example of this sort of thing. They have a huge ad of a very popular reality star talking about dating but when I tried to look for something about education there was a very small tab at the bottom. This website seems to be about “ girl power” but what really is girl power? Learning dating tips from Lauren Conrad? Or leaning hoe to empowered yourself through education.