Photo: Google Books
This story first appeared on flare.com
Bad girls, mean girls, girls gone wild?there?s no shortage of stereotypes associated with young women in mainstream culture, clichés that are rarely ever applied to boys. (Ever heard of a ?boy gone wild?" Me either.)
Montreal-based authors and activists Tatiana Fraser and Caia Hagel attempt to correct that state of affairs in their new book, Girl Positive: Supporting Girls to Shape a New World . Together, Fraser, a co-founder of Girls Action Foundation, and Hagel, a journalist and co-founder of the entrepreneurial collective HungryForFortune, were determined to challenge prevailing notions about girlhood, ideas that, ?just didn?t line up with the realities that we saw in girls? lives,? says Fraser. The book opens the girlhood franchise to all young women, breaking out of the white, middle-class status quo that dominates popular culture. Girl Positive?which, BTW, is blurbed by none other than Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, who calls it a ?call to action??also serves as something of a contemporary handbook on how to encourage girls to develop a clear sense of autonomy and individuality.
We talked to Fraser and Hagel about why girls bear the weight of our cultural stereotypes, why adult women need to be mentors and why it?s so important to involve boys in conversations about sex and gender equality.
Girls are often presented as a problem or a subject of concern in pop culture. We?re fascinated by girls gone wi...