Age article: Girl Power Eroded

The following article was published in The Age today.

In the series Arrested Development, there is a parody of the Girls Gone Wild series of DVDs called Girls with Low Self-Esteem. In the original videos, which have been produced since 1997, American college girls are filmed flashing their breasts and kissing each other at parties or during drunken festivities on spring break.

The joke suggests that, despite all the postfeminist claims about girls exposing their bodies being ''empowering'', striving for approval from men through these kinds of performances is more likely to lower their confidence.

As another group of students concludes year 12, a series of Victorian nightclub events has begun to target graduating schoolgirls as prime candidates for raunchy display. A muck-up day event that was to be held at Universal on McCrae nightclub in Bendigo was set to include jelly wrestling matches between girls from two local schools, including a Catholic college, until media attention forced its cancellation.

The most recent nightclub event to attract controversy is the Pens Down event that was hosted at CBD nightclub Roxanne Parlour before the VCE exams began. Several girls posed for photographs in their school uniforms, with their dresses pulled open and bra-clad breasts, sometimes squished together provocatively for the camera, on display.

When these photos were uploaded to the event's Facebook page, several girls requested that the images be removed. Some were reportedly embarrassed about their sexy poses being circulated online, while others were worried because they were underage and should not have been drinking in a licensed premises.

Unbelievably, the event promoter became disgruntled with these requests by concerned girls and did not spare a thought for the potential repercussions in their personal lives or future careers. Christian Serrao responded to the girls' pleas by posting the following message on Facebook: ''I just love how these year 12s are happy to get their tits out for photos, then send threatening messages if they're not deleted off our Facebook page. Kill yourself.''

While Serrao maintains that the ''kill yourself'' line is simply an internet meme with no ill-intentioned sentiment behind it, his comments are especially ignorant in light of the suicide of 15-year-old Canadian Amanda Todd on 10 October. When Todd was an insecure 12-year-old, she flashed her breasts to a man in an internet chat room. The man captured a topless photograph of Todd and then threatened to circulate it to her friends if she did not perform a sexual show for him.

He did distribute the photo online and even went to the extreme of creating Facebook profiles displaying the topless shot as Todd enrolled in new schools to try to escape being continually shamed and bullied by her classmates. The malicious distribution of this image was integral to fuelling Todd's depression, anxiety and panic disorder and is thought to have contributed to her death.

Some people argue that girls should be free to express themselves sexually, yet it is important to remember the ramifications of topless images in the digital age, especially when girls have posed for them when they are underage. While boys and men may be eager to view such images of teenage girls and the girls may feel valued when they receive compliments in response, the photos can have detrimental consequences when distributed widely.

Twenty-six-year-old American Lindsey Boyd is suing the producers of Girls Gone Wild. She flashed her chest as a 14-year-old to two men with a camera with no knowledge that the footage would be used in the series. Her image was even used on the cover of one of its releases, College Girls Exposed, and her high school years were marred by embarrassment.

Vanessa Williams was crowned the first African-American Miss America in 1983, but was pressured to resign in 1984 when nude photos surfaced and were published in Penthouse. She had posed for the photographs as a 19-year-old photographer's assistant, but believed that the images were private and did not sign a release consenting to their use. Though Williams was awarded the title because she had a beautiful face and body, the naked images were still considered to tarnish her ability to represent the pageant.

As the Amanda Todd case shows, once an image is placed on the internet, it is infinitely reproducible.

While a jilted individual can also post sexual images of their ex-partner online without consent, there are penalties for doing so. Earlier this year, Sydney man Ravshan Usmanov was jailed for six months for posting six sexually explicit images of his ex-girlfriend to Facebook.

When photos are willingly taken in a public location like a nightclub, notions of consent and privacy may be confused. Venues that seek to capture the school-leaver market, however, should show responsibility.

Such responsibility means not only being lawful in their service of alcohol, but also in how they conduct and promote their events with respect to girls who are underage, or who have only just turned 18 and may be subject to peer pressure while under the influence of alcohol.

As girls are increasingly willing to participate in their own objectification, adults should not exploit them, especially when they are underage.

'Home and Away: Girls of the British Empire' Exhibition

Screenshot of the Girl Museum exhibition home page

Phew! I survived the 'Colonial Girlhood/ Colonial Girls' conference  and the Australasian Children's Literature Association for Research (ACLAR) conference in Canberra last week. It was a bustling two weeks and was exciting to meet so many historians and literary scholars working on girlhood in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. We had not one, but two papers on Girl Guiding! Not one, but two, papers on Irish girls' literature! Regular conferences don't often provide for such girlhood riches.

As part of the conference, Associate Professor Cecily Devereux from the University of Alberta delivered a public lecture, 'Fashioning the Colonial Girl: 'Made in Britain' Femininity in the Imperial Archive'. You can listen to the lecture recording and view the slides here. (It's also not every day that a conference keynote speaker discusses Bessie Marchant's adventure fiction in detail.) Our other special event was the launch of the online exhibition 'Home and Away: Girls of the British Empire', which was curated by Ashley Remer, Head Girl at the Girl Museum, with a team of helpers, including Bronwyn Lowe (a PhD candidate in History who assisted us with the conference organisation).

I am indebted to Ashley for being so willing to prepare an exhibition that related to our conference theme and was so pleased to see such a beautiful looking virtual exhibition. One idea that resonated throughout the conference was the lack of archival material documenting the experiences of actual colonial girls: their voices and writings are most often missing from what we can reconstruct. Kristine Alexander's paper on Girl Guide photography unveiled the untapped resource of photographs taken by Guides, who were encouraged to document their activities with specially manufactured Kodak cameras. She also showed how Guiding captured Indigenous girls in photographs, often topless, in ways that reinforced the civilising mission that underwrote the British Empire. The Girl Museum also uses photographs or, more specifically, photographic postcards, to create a global picture of colonial girlhood. While the girls have been posed and framed by  adult photographers, the collective impact of these images imparts a powerful sense of the lives of girls in a diverse range of colonial sites.

Our conference endeavoured to enable comparison of the differing manifestations of colonialism around the Empire, and so we were pleased to have papers about girls in Australia, Canada, South Africa, Ireland, New Zealand, Malaya and Zimbabwe. 'Home and Away' exhibits postcards of girls from all of these areas (with the exception of Ireland), as well as drawing in regions we were unable to cover, such as the Caribbean and South Pacific.

There are several striking elements that become visible as you travel across the map of the Empire "on which the sun never set" during your virtual tour. The stories of Indigenous girls, whose lives were irrevocably transformed by colonialism, whether in white settler colonies or colonies of occupation, intertwine with those of the British daughters of the families who performed the work of Empire. In the instance of India, for example, a photograph of young girls from Madras in the 1870s (one of whom appears to be wearing wedding jewellery) shares a page with ringlet-haired, British girl Marjory, who poses in front of a distinctly non-European Christmas tree in the Andaman Islands in around 1908. On the exhibition page about Africa, a young Tanzanian woman, Salima, is charged with brushing the hair of "Gwenneth at seven months" as her ayah. Below this image, six-year-old British girl Elspeth Grant (author of Flame Trees of Thika, a book about her African childhood) feeds her pet antelope calf, while wearing what looks like a pith helmet, in Kenya.

As the stories that accompany the photographs explain, colonialism brought with it both oppressive changes for native girls and, within these enforced cultural shifts, some opportunities new to girls and women, like formal education. For British girls, colonialism could enable and excuse modes of behaviour that would not have been acceptable "at home", but images such as that of a girl of perhaps no more than three-years-old wearing her father's Canadian mounted police uniform reinforce the limits of the gendered work of Empire.

The reverse of Ah Moy's postcard

When you click on the photographs themselves, the reverse of a postcard is displayed, on which is printed further information about each image, or speculation about its context where no details have survived. The culture of photographing native peoples for circulation via postcards to the metropolis, as well as the photographing of Indigenous servant girls, is explained throughout these descriptions. While a number of these images are disturbing for their framing according to the anthropological theories of the time, the most upsetting image is perhaps that of Ah Moy, an eight-year-old girl who was reportedly the last slave sold in Hong Kong in 1929. For all of the reasons offered for imperial intervention in India because of child brides and condemned practices such as suttee, the continuation of female slavery in Hong Kong throughout British "ownership" from 1842 to 1922- at which point Winston Churchill announced that the practice would be abolished- showed the varying degrees of concern for colonial girls and their use as justifications for expanding British territory ever further across the globe.