Girl Power

Monday, Jun. 29, 1998 By NADYA LABI

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But there is a lyric in the film that gives the lie to the bravado of the entire girl-power movement. "Look at me," Mulan sings, "I will never pass for/ a perfect bride/ or a perfect daughter/ Can it be/ I'm not meant to play this part?" In the end, however, she substitutes one part for another. And that's one of the limitations of girl power. Its lure is the image of girls kicking ass, being boylike. But how well does it prepare them to be adults in a complex world? "We're struggling to find alternative models for heroism," says Kathleen Karlyn, an assistant professor of English at the University of Oregon, who is co-writing a book about girl culture. "In order to even imagine female heroism, we're placing it in the realm of fantasy."

Mulan's producer, Pam Coats, hoped to create a character that transcends the conventions of gender. "You see Mulan get physically stronger, but she also uses her brain," says Coats. "We tried really hard to balance her feminine and masculine side." Mulan is more complex than your average action figure. For example, she isn't afraid to hug the Emperor in a burst of emotion. Still, it's noteworthy that one of Disney's most vigorous heroines literally has to disguise herself as a boy. Says Karlyn: "We're beginning to think about heroism in a female way. But we don't have narratives or genres in which we can comfortably fit strong female protagonists."

Girls have nevertheless proved to be a powerful market force by helping generate an estimated 30% to 40% of the movie Titanic's $580 million U.S. gross. All told, young women ages 12 to 19 spent $60 billion last year, according to Teen Research Unlimited. But many of them believe that when it comes to cultural content, they are being sold a bill of used and impractical goods. A 1997 study commissioned by the advocacy organization Children Now and the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 71% of girls ages 16 and 17 said the female characters on TV were unrealistically thin; in fact, the girls chose males predominantly as the TV characters they most admired. Recognizing gender stereotyping is one thing, but successfully resisting it is quite another. "All the attractive women on TV and in the movies are skinny," says Rona Luo, a 14-year-old student at New York City's Stuyvesant High School. "It's not so easy to hold out and think, 'I'm going to be who I am.'" She's not alone. A New York Times poll of 1,048 teenagers ages 13 through 17 found that when asked what they would most like to change, 36% of the girls responded "my looks" or "my body," a percentage that was higher than in the 1994 survey. In an age in which image is often mistaken for both message and directive, can girls truly tell if they're making up their own minds, even as they sing about telling people what they want?