E-Mentors?

In my last blog I talked about peer pressure girls undergo physically in junior highs and high schools across the nation and compared them to the peer pressure girls now undergo though the “Virtual High School” in social networking online. In one of the comments, someone talked about mentor programs that had older girls mentor the younger girls. For example, high school girls are paired up with junior high girls or girls in college are mentoring high school girls. I agree that this is an effective way to give girls someone to look up to and talk about things that they feel they cannot talk about with older adults like parents or teachers. There are places online that do just that. There is a website called gURL.com that serves as an online chat room for girls with questions they feel more comfortable asking in a more anonymous setting and with girls they feel they can relate to. In one of our books required for class, Instant Identity, it says “girls need safe spaces…outside of the traditional spaces where girls interact with the larger culture…They need spaces where they can know what they know and try new identities without self-censoring. Without safe spaces, girls will not be fully able to discover who they are and who they would like to become.”

This is a very good site for girls to express themselves, and they can do it anonymously if they would like. However, unlike the mentoring programs that are monitored by faculty in actual school settings, gURL.com and others like it are not monitored for things that are posted in reply to girls’ questions. I have visited gURL.com and I found some disturbing posts. While people were willing to give advice and try to help the other girls, a lot of the comments in the sexuality blog were very provocative and more sexual than helpful. I am not the person who believes girls shouldn’t have sex because it is unfeminine, but I am not sure how I feel about girls in the 7th grade reading about different sex positions or telling the girl to be proud about giving an hour long blow job. So while I commend such a place online for girls to be able to talk freely, I question whether this gURL.com is such a “safe place.”

As you can see, there are many pros and cons to “mentor” chat sites.

Peer Pressure

One of the most prevalent issues in high school was peer pressue, the pressure to fit in and look and act a certain way. Even though a lot of social interaction is now done online instead of in person, this idea of peer pressure and "fitting in" is still an issue with the girls of the younger generation. When you go on many of the different social network sites, like Facebook, you see ads all over the screen of models being perfectly thin and fitting into the media generated idea o "pretty." These girls are seeing these models and reading about new diets and exercises that all allude to this idea that to be "pretty" you must be thin with blonde hair and big breasts. So now its not just in high school that these girls are told to look this way, but it is all over their online socialization tools as well.

There is also the pressure of sex. It has been a concern for generations over the pressure a girl gets to be sexually active from being in high schools across the nation. Now, that pressure has moved into the digital world. Wen girls are IMing, there are icons they can choose from to identify themselves. The majority of these, sometimes referred to as avatars, that are gender specific have a sexual inuendo to them. A girl in my class explained her experience with these. "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." These avatars are cartoon images of females with te typical "Barbie" body type and revealing clothing.

Tis peer pressure is but one example of today's social networking acting as a modern day high school.

VIrtual High School

Today is a new age of technology. Social neworks, blogs, chat rooms, twitters, IMing, all of these new ways of communicstion are creating a different world for today's young generation. The girls in this young generation use these mediums as ways to communicate and gossip with friends, express their sexuality, express their identity and some even use it as a means of bullying as well as a research tool. The new age of technology has created a "virtual hhigh school" with all the typical characteristics of a girls experiences in high school, only in digital form. This blog will discuss all of these ideas of a girl being in high school online. Please feel free to comment and post different ideas on this subject throughout this blog.