Hinrichs: Media Analysis

A Feminist Critique of Thirteen

Thirteen, a film directed by Catherine Hardwicke, provides a raw look at female adolescence. The film’s protagonist, Tracy, is initially portrayed as a “normal,” well-adjusted seventh grader at her California middle school. Evie Zamora is one of Tracy’s peers as well as “the hottest girl at school” (Thirteen). In an effort to befriend Evie and become a member of the popular clique, Tracy changes both her appearance and behavior. Specifically, she stops eating, engages in risky sexual behavior and theft, and begins cutting her wrists with razor blades. The result is a downward spiral into poor health, bad grades, and domestic disputes. Among popular media outlets, Tracy’s behavior is linked to peer pressure, her home environment, and her own irresponsibility. In contrast to the assumptions of popular media, this paper argues that a feminist lens, particularly that provided by Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, is helpful in complicating and linking Tracy’s destructive behavior to cultural ideals of beauty and society’s oppression of women.

Again, a common theme among popular media reviews of the film is to blame Tracy’s behavior on problems that are specific to her life. The Charleston Daily Mail, for instance, suggests that the role of Tracy’s mother, Mel, in Thirteen serves as a “how-not-to manual in child rearing” (Burnside). The assumption at work is that Mel’s status as a recovering alcoholic and her failure “to set boundaries” (Burnside) is largely to blame for her daughter’s downfall. Peer pressure is another reason for Tracy’s actions commonly offered by the media. In fact, the campus publication of Swarthmore College goes so far as to say that Tracy “barely ever thinks” after “Evie offers her the chance to be her friend” (Bloom). The indication here is that Evie’s persuasiveness and power over Tracy are strong enough to render Tracy incapable (or at least unwilling) of ration. A final explanation of Tracy’s behavior, and perhaps the harshest, is that Tracy has only her own poor choices to blame for her destruction. In his article for the Winston-Salem Journal, Mark Burger claims that when “it all comes crashing down in devastating fashion…she realizes exactly who brought her down: Herself” (Burger). Burger’s review is thus another example of the media’s specific focus on home life, irresponsibility, and peer pressure rather than cultural pressures in general.

Contrastingly, I argue that these three assumptions are inadequate because they ignore the film’s own portrayal of society’s beauty ideal. In a short yet significant scene, Tracy observes numerous billboards in a taxi on her way to Melrose Avenue to meet Evie. In a montage of advertisements by Skyy vodka, Armani, and Calvin Klein, the movie portrays countless images of attractive, thin, hyper-sexualized women. In addition, posters are shown which promote a brand of cosmetics with the tagline “Beauty is Truth.” The effect is a dramatic visualization of the images of beauty which accost Tracy and her adolescent peers. Certainly, these images help shape Tracy’s ideas about female appearance and behavior. Hayley Dohnt and Marika Tiggemann support this argument in their study entitled “Body Image Concerns in Young Girls: The Role of Peers and Media Prior to Adolescence.” Specifically, the study found that “media exposure was related to aspects of both body image and dieting awareness” in girls ages five to eight (Dohnt and Tiggemann 149). Also, Jeanette Hsu offers a similar argument in her assessment that “exposure to particular gender-role attitudes, stereotypes, and behavior in the media are related to and likely contribute to shaping girls' own views about themselves, their satisfaction with their bodies, and their gender-role–related eating and sexual behaviors” (Hsu 328). Given this insight into the role of popular images of beauty, it is necessary to discuss Tracy’s physical destructiveness within the context of cultural ideals.

The feminist writer Susan Bordo provides an effective framework for doing so in her book entitled Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. According to Bordo, “The body,--what we eat, how we dress, the daily rituals through which we attend to the body—is a medium of culture” as well as “a practical, direct locus of social control” (Bordo 2362). Bordo’s theories apply to Thirteen in that Tracy’s anorexic, sexualized, and mutilated body attests to the cultural “norms” and oppression she has accepted as a result of mass media’s beauty images and ideals of femininity.

First of all, Tracy’s desire to be thin and subsequent failure to eat is a sign of our cultural obsession with female thinness and Tracy’s exposure to these obsessions through media. Near the beginning of the movie, there are early signs that Tracy is afflicted with anorexia. Her brother, for instance, warns Tracy to eat because “you get mean when you don’t eat” (Thirteen). The extent of Tracy’s anorexia is highlighted later in the film when her mother asks worriedly, “Have you eaten anything today, Trace?” (Thirteen). Susan Bordo offers an explanation for and complication of Tracy’s anorexia:

"Through her anorexia, by contrast, she has unexpectedly discovered an entry into the privileged male world, a way to become what is valued in our culture, a way to become safe, to rise above it all--for her, they are the same thing. She has discovered this, paradoxically, by pursuing conventional female behavior--in this case, the discipline of perfecting the body as an object--to excess" (2372)

As Bordo points out, then, Tracy is caught in a double-bind: While she craves empowerment and privilege in a male-dominated and media constructed society, the medium through which she reaches it is both traditionally feminine and destructive to her own body. Thus, obtaining her anorexic ideal is neither empowering nor safe.

The same irony is seen in Tracy’s risky and one-sided sexual behavior. Specifically, Tracy performs oral sex on Javi in order to embody what she perceives to be the sexual ideal of a woman. Again, this ideal is socially constructed and no doubt influenced by advertisements such as those which Tracy previously observes on Melrose Avenue. It is clear, however, that she does not enjoy the oral sex because she tells Evie, “It tasted kind of nasty” (Thirteen). Moreover, Tracy’s actions expose her to any number of sexually transmitted diseases and psychological trauma. Thus, through her sexual behavior, Tracy embraces a traditionally masculine openness to sexuality, but, ironically, she is doing so only for the pleasure of men and at the risk of her own health and safety.

An additional element of Tracy’s destructive behavior is her self-mutilation by cutting. Traditionally, adolescent cutting is equated with physical and emotional traumas. As Kathleen Rowe Karlyn points out, for example, the movie connects trauma and cutting by “editing in a flashback of Brady (Mel’s boyfriend) overdosing in the family bathroom the first time it shows Tracy cutting herself” (Karlyn 4, parentheses me). I argue, however, that Tracy’s self-mutilation is not solely a result of emotional trauma. Instead, the problem is compounded by the fact that Tracy is striving to reach a constricting cultural ideal about femininity appearance and behavior. Her quest is no doubt oppressive, and we must interrogate the culture and media that oppress adolescent girls to the extent that they feel a need for escape through physical pain.

In conclusion, it is inadequate to link Tracy’s destructive behavior solely to peer pressure, domestic flaws, and poor choices. While these forces obviously played a role in Tracy’s life and decisions, they must also be troubled. Specifically, it is important to question why Evie Zamora holds such rigid beauty standards for herself and for her friends. Also, we must question why Tracy’s mother feels constrained by substance abuse, inappropriate sexual partners, and an inability to discipline her own children. Finally, we must question why Tracy is so dedicated to her pursuit of beauty that she starves and abuses her own body. Feminist insight offers an explanation to all of these questions: Tracy’s body, as well as the bodies of all the women in the film, are constructed and constrained by society’s elusive ideals of beauty and femininity. Instead of placing judgment on Tracy, her mother, or Evie, feminist criticism of Thirteen instructs us to recognize and deconstruct the oppressive cultural forces driving their behavior.