Lingering Sexism: Teenage Girls and Contemporary Female Portrayal in Gossip Girl

Blair plans a huge party in hopes of impressing her new boyfriend – who just so happens to be a duke. She goes about this by giving orders, gathering the support of the community, and doesn’t fail to be the center of attention at the actual event. But is Blair’s intention to seek power and dominance, or to be loved and protected? As Gossip Girl narrates, “On the Upper East Side, all the world’s a stage and the men and women merely players.”

In the most recently completed season of the CW’s teen drama Gossip Girl, we witness socialite teenagers from the Upper East Side of Manhattan take on outsized roles – consequently developing into models for adolescent girls. The female protagonists Blair and Serena portray a range of gendered behavior: feminine conventions and stereotypes, divergences and scandals. Gossip Girl is put under a controversial spotlight for its explicit sexuality, but a more insidious aspect of the show is its ability to tear apart gender stereotypes, but subtly put them back in place. Presentations of gender by the media, as we will see, cultivate adolescents’ attitudes about how they should behave as females. Even though television shows allow female characters to take on less traditional roles – breaking the girl stereotype by being agentic, assertive, and authoritative – they trap them in residual conventions of femininity, as seen through Gossip Girl.

Learning how to behave as an adolescent in society can be tricky. How are we to act? Who do we emulate? What is our role? Albert Bandura’s social learning theory in psychology argues that we learn behavior from models in our surroundings – actors on the metaphorical stage of life. Models can be real or fictional, old or young, male or female, have a positive or negative impact, or no impact at all. Most often, we model after those within close proximity such as a family member or friend; yet a noteworthy, often forgotten, and incredibly influential part of our environment is our media. Television provides characters as models which attract teenagers and help scaffold their attitude towards gender, giving them a sense of what is customary in society. With adolescents in the United States watching a daily average of three-hours of television (qtd in Walsh and Ward 134), teen dramas are sly vehicles that provide teenage girls with female models of behavior that they are consciously – or unconsciously – aware of.