What Loving The Jonas Brothers Says About Gen Y Girls
Posted by meredith on 05-22-2009Today's Ypulse Youth Advisory Board Post is from Liz Funk who takes a closer look at the phenomenon of older teens and twentysomethings embracing tween culture. Remember, you can communicate directly with any member of the Ypulse Youth Advisory Board by emailing them at youthadvisoryboard at ypulse.com…or just leave a comment!
What Loving The Jonas Brothers Says About Gen Y Girls
Many of my peers — women well in their twenties with degrees and jobs — love the Jonas Brothers (truthfully, myself included. “Lovebug” might be my favorite song of all time). While that could be attributed to the boys’ buttery voices and their taboo sex appeal, it goes further. Miley Cyrus is on the cover of this month’s Glamour, a magazine that has a distinctly older feel compared to competitors like Self, Cosmopolitan, and Marie Claire. For women in their early twenties, many of our “style icons” and “girl crushes” are younger than us—like Taylor Momsen, Blake Lively, Hayden Panettiere, and Dakota Fanning.
Anastasia took on this topic of overlapping tween and teen brands in a post last fall, and I agree with her feeling that while tweens interest in celebrities geared towards an older demographic can be problematic in terms of encountering profanity and sexual innuendo, there is really nothing wrong with someone putting on a Jonas Brothers CD at an informal party in the dorms or at a sorority house (this phenomenon feels decidedly female).
Part of the popularity of younger music and movies among older fans could also be due to the fact that there seems to be less media geared towards older teens, college students, and new twentysomethings. There is an entertainment gap: the quality television shows and movies seem to focus on the early teen years and the late twenties. Older Gen Y-ers may find that they relate better to "High School Musical" than "How I Met Your Mother."
Part of the popularity of Disney talent amongst teens and twentysomethings outside of their intended fan base could be the ironic factor. Anecdotally, I’ll watch "Hannah Montana" at night sometimes and channel a secret, taboo enjoyment that I feel when I wear my Crocs out in public. It’s brain candy, but it’s innocent and not sexist (like the brain candy one might find on VH1 or MTV). As far as initial exposure, given that girls have the monopoly on babysitting, many older teens might develop a liking to the TV shows and music that they endure while babysitting and start to watch "Drake and Josh" on their own time.
However, this generation of teens and twentysomethings is also under more pressure and stress than ever before, and this phenomenon of girls enjoying entertainment geared towards girls much younger could also raise a few red flags. Books like the "Overachievers," "Doing School," and the "Price of Privilege" have argued that today’s young people are under pressure from school, from parents, and from themselves and feel more inauthentic and burdened then ever. This month’s college graduates are finding themselves looking at a discouraging job market with many of their previous options eliminated. Girls specifically are under a host of pressures to be prettier, thinner, and simultaneously more accomplished than is really possible. Bouncing around to Miranda Cosgrove can infuse some cheer into your day, but it can also help you forget that you’re 22, in debt, and stressed out! My concern is that when young women are lamenting the pressures to be both beautiful and capable, it’s much easier to turn on the Disney Channel and pretend to be 13 and unironically watch "High School Musical" than face the myriad of pressures on women in our society.
Still, it isn’t as if adult women are shelling out big money for concert tickets; in fact, I perceive that some grown Hannah Montana fans would even be hesitant to pay to go see the movie or rent it off iTunes in a few months. The trend used to be that teens and twentysomethings enjoyed media intended for people older than them, like high school students reading Cosmopolitan in the back rows of biology classes and college girls wearing stilettos to the "Sex and the City" movie. The reversing of trends and change can frequently feel problematic, and this phenomenon may be totally innocuous. But I just can’t shake this feeling that maybe it’s a little infantilizing for teens and college students to enjoy media intended for girls ten years younger than themselves.
About Liz
Liz Funk is a freelance writer and college student. She has written for USA Today, Newsday, the Christian Science Monitor, the Huffington Post, Girls' Life, and CosmoGIRL!, among other publications. Her first book, Supergirls Speak Out, about the pressure on girls to be perfect, will be published by Simon and Schuster in March of 2009. She writes a blog for the Albany, NY newspaper the Times Union and she edits the teen culture and politics blog GirlHeadQuarters.org. She is a senior at Pace University and lives in Manhattan. Her web-site is www.lizfunk.com.
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Categorized under: Collegians, Youth Advisory Board
May 22nd, 2009 at 7:31 am
I think this is an interesting theory and is probably true. After babysitting so many kids that watch Disney Channel all day, somewhere along the line I found myself watching it on my own at times. I'm 24 and I love the Jonas Brothers as do a few of my friends. So much so that we're actually going to one of their concerts. I actually went to one of their concerts last year and noticed quite a few fans at the show that were around my age and even older so there are a number of fans that enjoy them enough to even buy concert tickets.
May 22nd, 2009 at 10:12 am
I think the real issue is a lack of shows created for 20-somethings that showcase family values or "clean fun." They just don't exist. If a show is for people who are old enough to have sex, sex MUST be integrated into it, those are basic media rules. Because of this, 20-somethings yearn for something that's just about goofy physical comedy – traditional sitcom territory, and the only place to find that nowadays is on the Disney channel/Nickelodeon. The shows aren't amazing, and the production quality is fairly low, but there it is.
May 22nd, 2009 at 2:42 pm
I grew up with the Beatles. Literally I was in 9th grade when Meet the Beatles hit the U.S. These guys were really, really young when you look at them as were the Bad Boys, the Rolling Stones. So regarding the Jonas Brothers, they may be young but so were the Beatles to many young American women. Girls of all ages, not just tweens, teens and college girls LOVED and I mean LOVED the Beatles-everyone had a favorite Beatle. The only women I ever met who did not care for them-ever and usually ever-were our mothers who are now 80 to 90 years old.
So i don't see the case for the Jonas Brothers-in fact one of them is "older"-
Regarding this year's graduates with the job market-when I graduated from college I was one of the few graduates who had a job-the 70′s were not an easy time for people graduating from college between 1970 and actually 1979. We were in Viet Nam and many of our male friends immediately went to the service after graduation from college. Granted many of my friends got married-they did not have to look for a job then. Myself-I decided to move to a ski resort as did many other college graduates that year and the next. We had jobs and were introduced to more than alcohol or multiple partners.
As females we were to be "thin" and beautiful. This idea that the generation now is plagued with weight issues and beauty. Believe me, seldom did you ever see a girl between the age of 15 and 25 on a beach that did not have a hot body in the 70′s. There was no such thing as an overweight girl and definitely nothing like I see today on the beaches.
We dressed in very high heels, very short skirts and our mothers were beyond themselves as were our fathers. We stopped wearing bras after Glamour came out with the pencil test. We wore make-up and looked just like models out of Glamour along with carrying Chanel bags. Many of us looked like we stepped right out of Glamour, Mademoiselle or "17″. There were tons of "diet" pills and we learned from our male friends who were wrestlers how to "lose weight-" By the way-this was in the mid-West in Oklahoma. Consider what it was like in S.CA., N.CA and the East Coast.
What I am getting to is this-life changes but not as much as you think. What has changed and is a real problem, a higher percentage of students using drugs and not realizing "drugs kill"-we did not know that 'Drugs kill"-we even had doctors giving us scripts for painkillers and did not realize booze and pills don't mix until someone passed out from it. Girls getting pregnant-nothing's really changed. It's just more public now and many girls want to get pregnant. What has changed is that Nancy Drew is no longer a book girls want to read and a sense of adventure is lost. I'm going to throw out a bit of trivia. Did you know that many of today's women leaders in business and academics read Nancy Drew and loved the adventures? In closing, in the U.S. and in many European countries, women have been expected to be perfect for years-from Donna Reed to today's teen girl idol. It has not changed and in some respects there is less pressure to be perfect and less pressure to be beautiful, thin, and have money. At least today girls are making their own money and not being pressured to marry into money or learn to be the perfect hostess so the husband gets to be a partner. By the way, I knew executive women in the mid-80′s who refused to learn how to use a computer. They did not want to give up their secretaries.
May 23rd, 2009 at 10:54 am
I think what you are seeing is a delaying of adulthood among Gen Y twentysomethings. I don't see it as a bad thing, but because of our longer life spans, marrying later, and thus starting a family later, a twentysomethings' life is much closer to a teen's than an adult with a family. As a result it is very easy for 20 year olds to associate more with a TV show geared for a younger audience because in many ways they still see and identify themselves as kids.
I'm sure you have probably heard of it, but if not you should check out the book series Quarterlife Crisis.
May 26th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Great stuff. Yes, there is something there with a medium that has blown up huge and it's audience has outgrown them and have nowhere to go (so naturally they gravitate back).