Researching Media Sexualization: Girls Gone Skank: The Sexualization of Girls in American Culture. By Patrice A. Oppliger, McFarland & Company, Inc., Jefferson, North Carolina & London, 2008. 258 pp. ISBN: 978-0-7864-3522-7. www.mcfarlandpub.com
Abstract
Mass communications professor Patrice Oppliger attempts to construct a landmark text on the accelerated and systemic oversexualization of young women and girls in Girls Gone Skank: The Sexualization of Girls in Pop Culture. Oppliger has written about pop culture's undeserved authority on prevailing standards of gender normativity in her other book, Wrestling and Hypermasculinity, as well. In this newest work, she keenly documents offenses in an array of mediums, from alarming beauty trends to pseudo-pornographic television and shock jock radio shows. She leaves no emblematic stone unturned, headlining each chapter with a distinctive cultural phenomenon, including strippers, plastic surgery and beauty pageants.