Thank you, Grey's Anatomy!

My favorite part of writing this paper so far has been being able to analyze the characters of one of my favorite TV shows, Grey's Anatomy. Girl Culture: An Encyclopedia is a contemporary book that, in one of its chapters, analyzes popular television characters and their impact on young females. As I have learned through my research process, female roles have developed significantly in recent times. Instead of idolizing depictions of pure girly-ness, we seem to place greater value on women that possess masculine assertiveness on top of their femininity. In Grey's Anatomy, Dr. Christina Yang serves as the most "powerful" female role because she encapsulates that balance between manly power and sexiness. The other stars of the show seem to be less powerful because they lack assertiveness and always seem to succumb to their romances, which lead them to perform poorly at work. A balance of assertiveness, power, and sex-appeal seems desirable to a young woman because that role “becomes a marker granting the girl/woman a form of sexualized power without which she is in danger of slipping into dangerous forms of androgeny and masculinity”: how can teens resist that role?! So thanks to this book source, I've made my hours of watching Grey's Anatomy all the more enriching - enriching to personal entertainment as well as to my research!