Straight Talk (7)

I found it very interesting that gURL.com existed for girls and found myself asking what other classmates have wondered: Where was this site when I was a teenage girl? I checked out the site and was surprised by how straight-forward it was. Many sites made by adults for girls or just young people in general seem to have an agenda. I thought the information would be censored except in the forums but there were many explanatory articles and quizzes right in your face and they are a lot of things you want to know about at that age (and even at this one), things that are ambiguous, especially now adays.

I think this week's readings made me realize how much the instant contact that being online provides is connected to things like identity and hyper-sexuality. I could actually look back and relate to the girls on NevaEvaLand. I was on similar sites, including MySpace,when I was younger. Actually I was in the age range of the girls in the study and a lot of the memes of song lyrics being incorperated into the online displays were true. I hadn't really thought of these things as performances of sexuality, although that's what they were. It just made sense at the time. Glitter graphics are appealing and so were dollz because they were pretty things other girls were playing with. And you wanted an attractive profile picture or tagline so you could flirt with boys. I think a lot of the natural inclinations that teens have when they are exploring their sexuality are just put into hyperspeed. Things like rap music help because adults don't censor much anymore, whether they believe they should or not. By the time they do, kids who know how to navigate and communicate instantly, have already been there and done that. It's the same way that you can manipulate voice over IM or just feel that you can say things that you can't say in person. There's this "air time" feel to the internet that makes you present something, to perform or you literally almost don't exist and when it comes to sexuality, the absolute last thing you want is to not exist. Any sex is better than asexual to people, especially people exploring their sexuality and identity at the same time in a way that is interlocked.

I was pretty disappointed though at how easily someone could be a slut or be completely oblivious. It seems like in a realm where there are so many ways to express yourself and your true, unsaid desires without consequence, it would be easier to allow yourself creativity or deviation from hegemonic norms in your sexuality, but no. In fact, online with the dollz and with the gURL forums, girls seemed to hold on to a very very romanticized ideal of love or sex or both. The text on gURL did mention that the feminine performance didn't seem to see love and sex as fulfilling things, but rather, something that was good or bad. I was really surprised to see how patriarchal binaries of sexuality still held up online. I could understand how an adolescent girl would see sex as behavior she wasn't old enough for or something you do with a significant other, but I thought deviations (maybe not the more graphic, nonchalant ones, but some) wouldn't be seen as "slutty". I wasn't expecting it to be seen as freedom either, but maybe as having the say to do what you want, however good or bad that decision might be. When I was that age, though, I did think early teens was too young to be having sex. It wasn't so much that girls who did were slutty, but that they were taking too many risks, I guess. In the respect of sex, though, reputation is still a big deal just like in Arab culture.