Signe Whitson

In honor of September 22’s Day of the Girl, New Moon Girls is launching its Girl-Caught campaign, designed to give each of us an empowering way to comment on media messages about girls and women.

You’ve heard about baby beauty pageants, lingerie marketed to pre-schoolers, and JC Penney’s, “I”m too pretty to do my homework” T-shirt.  The Girl-Caught campaign aims to raise awareness about these ubiquitous and degrading media messages because, as I write in Friendship & Other Weapons, “When girls are aware of how entertainment and advertising images are altered, they are better able to resist the pressures of “measuring up” to the images.”

Get involved in Girl-Caught with your own daughter.  Log in to the New Moon Girls site to download or print out your own Girl-Caught stickers.  Paste them to the negative or positive Girl-Catches you find, then upload them to Girl-Caught!  This is a great, interactive campaign that parents and kids can enjoy–and learn through–together. 

Most of all, Girl-Caught “encourages girls to think critically about media images and to become informed consumers rather
than passive recipients of the media.” (Whitson, 2011).