How long does it take to read Where the Girls Are?
Susan J. Douglas
Where the Girls Are by Susan J. Douglas takes about 6 hours 14 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 6 hours 14 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1994. 340 pages, about 93,500 words. Written for young adults.
13 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 10 hours 23 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 6 hours 14 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 54 minutes |
The page count is the median across 3 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Where the Girls Are is a romp through the confusing and contradictory images of women in American pop culture, as media critic Susan J. Douglas looks back at the television programs, popular music, advertising, and nightly news reports of the past four decades to reveal the decidedly mixed messages conveyed to girls and women coming of age in America. In a humorous and provocative analysis of our postwar cultural heritage (never losing sight of the essential ludicrousness of flying nuns or identical cousins), Douglas deconstructs these ambiguous messages and fathoms their influence on her own life and the lives of her contemporaries. Douglas tells the story of young women growing up on a steady diet of images that implicitly acknowledged their concerns without directly saying so. It is no accident, she argues, that "girl groups" like the Shirelles emerged in the early 1960s, singing sexually charged songs like "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?"; or that cultural anxiety over female assertiveness showed up in sitcoms like Bewitched whose heroines had magical powers; or that the news coverage of the Equal Rights Amendment degenerated into a spat among women, absolving men of any responsibility - a pattern mirrored in shows like Dallas and Dynasty, where male amorality was overshadowed by the cat-fights between Joan Collins and Linda Evans.
Subjects: Popular culture, Mass media and women, Identity, Women, Sex role in mass media, Women in mass media
