The Plight of the Mooks and the Midriffs (Post 7)

When we don't know who we are, we are willing to cling to and embrace the most readily available identity that we may hide our self-doubt and shame behind. As teenagers, writhing in our awkwardness and discontent, we are dangerously susceptible to this. As much as we may laugh at the Mooks and Midriffs, the exaggerated male and female archetypes as they are displayed on television, the tendency we have to submit to them is an actual threat to our self-image.

As a woman, I grew up watching television shows where pretty girls prance around and giggle and hide their intelligence for the sake of seeming nonthreatening. And if they dared to be intelligent, they were "ugly" and wore turtlenecks and didn't know how to behave around men. Dora was the only badass woman I ever saw on screen. In my teenage years, I see girls who exemplify what happens after years of suppression and emotional neglect, and I am shown that in order to be accepted, I must be thin and self-loathing and wear minimal clothing. And we as a society can all believe that the version of women and girls portrayed on screen is wrong, but that doesn't seem to be changing anything. The expectation is still that all girls will be Midriffs.

My younger brother watches television shows, and all he sees are boys that are "tough," and only do "guy things," and stomp around and shoot guns. So when he is asked to "dress nicely," or help my mom bake or read a book with a female protagonist, he giggles uncomfortably and recedes into his cave of undefined masculinity. If his friends come over, he is excessively loud and obnoxious as if to prove that he is, in fact, a male. He is growing up believing that the only way for him to behave is like a Mook.

Through the need to generate revenue and the desperate scramble to hook the attention of as many people as possible, the advertising world has created an ersatz reality in which girls are either sex objects or socially-awkward nerds and boys are wither rambunctious and sex-obsessed or "weird." And that's wrong. Because that's not the way people are. Either fortunately or unfortunately, we are all incredibly complex. Trying to shove each of us into a box leaves everyone paralyzed by claustrophobia and suffering from an identity crisis.

It is fine to have stereotypes as long as you also paint a full picture. Instead of the extremes, the Mooks and the Midriffs, there should be some variety and a more balanced picture of who and what an individual can be. And we as people have to stop buying into the Mook/Midriff narrative.

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Unsolicited Commentary From the Youth Perspective

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