Girls, Worms, and Body Images: How Representation Impacts Developing Minds

 The chapter opens with a teacher, Kate Lyman, who overhears the conversations of 2nd & third grade girls, all expressing a desperation to lose weight. Upon hearing this conversation, Lyman decides that she will change direction with the unit she was teaching and instead "move on to the gender issues they faced as girls and women today" (140). She began by learning about "the students' knowledge and perceptions about gender" (140) and had the girls create a list of facts about men, and the boys create a list of facts about women. Both lists consisted of opinions and stereotypes such as "men are picky eaters and like their dinners when they get home" and girls "always complain" and "are sensitive". Lyman decided she needed to ensure that students understood the difference between facts versus stereotypes, which she realized would be a much more challenging task than she had thought when she began this unit.

In the next section of this chapter, Lyman describes what happens when it rains, and worms emerge from the soil and onto the playground. Initially, the boys decide to pick up the worms, and chase the girls around during recess. Despite their teacher telling them worms can do no harm, the girls still react with screams. After lunch, upon two of the girls returning with gloves, Lyman suggest that they collect worms for the classroom, and puts the girls in charge. By the end of the day, "the girls had conquered their fear of worms" (142), which was the first step in examining gender stereotypes. 

In the next section, "Toys and Media", Lyman decides to "lead a critique on two sources of stereotypical images of women: toys and media". Lyman's students discuss Barbie, and the girls point out observations relating to Barbie's skin color, hair color, body, and the size of various parts (small feet, big boobs, skinny neck, etc). Lyman's hopes were that her students would start to look at advertisements more critically. After discussing several ads in groups, the students are sent to analyze an ad on their own and consider questions like "how the woman was shown, what product the advertiser was trying to sell, and what the advertiser was telling women about what would happen if they bought the product" (144). The end result was that her 7 and 8 year old students were able to recognize how media was manipulating woman.

The next task Lyman gave her students, was to have them go home and question their parents about how they were treated in school, and how boys and girls were treated differently. Then, Lyman set up an experiment, where her students would be treated the same way parents described the treatments of girls versus boys in their question responses. After participating in this all morning, the girls discussed how they noticed the gender bias. One student was able to name that the reason behind this experiment was because Lyman "wanted us to know what prejudice feels like" (146).  This unit helped the girls in Lyman's class to recognize gender bias, and stand up to it. 

Many girls have based their self-image off of how media portrays girls and women, which is something that still rings true today. While this story was written in 1982, there is still significant evidence regarding how girls are impacted by media. This article discusses the many damages the media can have on girls using data from the last five years.