Turn on a children's channel and try to find the difference between the characters portrayed in cartoons for girls and boys. While the main characters in boyish superhero shows can be turtles, big monsters, mustachioed uncles, or fat, clumsy people, for girls, it's different. The media designed for them depicts only slender princesses with skinny waists, tiny feet, and always wearing lipstick. There's even a joke that while a male wolf in a cartoon will look like a normal wolf, a female wolf will have a narrow waist, “feminine facial features,” and slightly pinkish fur.

According to Peggy Orenstein, girls are pressured from a young age to meet unrealistic standards of sexual attractiveness. A little girl watching a cartoon sees half-naked women and begins to believe that this is what she should be. However, if you delve into the personal characteristics of these characters, you will see that they are stereotypical and just dull. Beyond that, there’s nothing going on beneath the surface.

What happens to a girl when she grows up in these conditions and goes to school? There, she faces the opposite extreme—teachers who ban even mildly revealing clothes, makeup, or wearing her hair loose. Girls who grew up watching “beautiful women” on TV have to realize that they cannot be “beautiful” because doing so might provoke men.

For them, their own body becomes an object that is supposed to please men's eyes, but “not too much, because they might rape you for it.” For example, Orenstein surveyed sexual experience among young women. In the course of the study, she met an interesting girl, Kamila, who was outraged by her high school's dress code policy. The school dean addressed the girls, urging them to dress more modestly out of respect for themselves and their families.

The system denies women the right to make choices about their own bodies. It defines sexiness as nudity. However, Peggy Orenstein believes that this could change if we give girls more space for reflection. We could build a healthier system by supporting respectful, mutually enjoyable sexual experiences in which a girl is recognized as a person, not merely a source of pleasure for a man. That would help girls learn to value how their bodies feel, not just how they appear.