The representation of teenage girls in Home and Away

Home and away is a television series that attracts a young audience of teen boys and girls. Its set at a beachy small town called "Summer Bay" in Australia. The weather is always perfect and sunny and the men and women on Home and away are tanned, fit and sporty, attractive and well.. simply perfect in general.

For example, April Scott is a young woman in her first year of university; she is beautiful with a perfect physique, dark hair and very tanned skin. April is also very intelligent and studying to be a doctor. This gives the message to viewers that its possible for a girl to "have it all," brains and beauty. This creates an extreme pressure on teen girl viewers to feel like they should be as smart as April and as fit and tanned as April also. She has a lot of male attention on the television series, however when her boyfriend breaks up with her April is portrayed as very lost and confused and shows OCD signs. This tells the audience that women need men to stay stable and feel complete, even April who replicates a stong girl who has everything a girl could want is left dazed and unable to function without her boyfriend. Mise en scene is often used to portray the idea of the girls in Home and away to appear perfect and a mans dream girl, such as the costume use, mostly bikinis, the lighting is always strategically used to light up the girls faces in the right way to give them a captivating look in their eyes. Dialogue is also used to portray this idea, for example, we often hear the girls talking constantly about their boyfriends or current love interest. Which shows the audience that thats really the only concern to the girls.

This is a negative portrayal of teen girls, its saying teen girls as a group do not have the confidence to be a strong single person, its saying girls need males and are only focussed on boys. Another example is of a character in Home and away, Sasha, she again is very attractived and has perfect a complexion, she has a great body but when things between her and her boyfriend do not work out she too fell apart and was portrayed as a "lost puppy" who wept at any reminder of her boyfriend. This is a very negative portrayal of teen girls as it is blatently implying that teen girls need males in their lives and the one thing that a girls life revolves around is the male species.; and viewers are watching this and seeing the portrayal of teen girls and relating it to real life.

The females on Home and away are mainly high school girls who are typically blonde, tanned, perfect skin. They wear their uniform often on the show, a short schoolgirl dress. To me this is creating an ideal that all high school are like this in real life and in reailty the actresses who play these 17 year old girl characters are at least a year or two older than the actual characters age. This makes the girls on Home and away look older than they are and therefore reflect to the audience (the teen girls who are watching) that they should look and act older than they are which means wearing make up all the time, having a developed body; breasts and long legs, and to simply grow up to fast for their own good.

The school girl connotation also is a negative portrayal as it implies school girls have young, perfect skin and this puts pressure on real girls and women to have perfect, flawless skin. Home and away is promoting young girls to look and act older than they are, they are brainwashed into thinking they need to be a mans idea of perfection and distorts a teen girls indiviuality and aspiration to have her own goals and distorts also who and what a teen girl idolises. For example from watching Home and away a teen girl would idolise April and Indie who are two gorgeous, tanned young woman who work in a gym and are surrouned by men.. this is hardly a great inspiration.

The selection of material reinforces the stereotype that teen girls are dumb and don't care for school for education, only boys and men and their next boyfriend. This is terrible as it is showing to viewers that teen girls are one dimensional creatures with no substance to their character. This is an unfair and innaccurate representation of teen girls as this may be a true fact that girls are concerned about boys and boyfriends but its not the only thing they care for and a lot of girls feel pressured to have a boyfriend or a love interest because its so popular on these tv shows and it becomes a aspect of society that you need to have to be a perfect girl. This is effecting teen girls by making them less independent and rely on men to make them a complete person.

In comparison we have tv shows like Shortland Street and although it is quite similar to Home and away in some ways we see a differing point when the character Jasmin is not like the typical teenage girl that is usually portrayed in the media. She is nerdy and introverted and has her friends always trying to get her to put herself out there. This is different as we are used to seeing perfect girls who all pretty much look and act the same. However Jasmin does end up conforming to the pressures of society and gets a 'make over' to attract male attention, of course. Another differing point is that a lot of the women in Shortland Street are doctors or CEO's and hold powerful positions in society. This is a slightly better influence on teen girls than seeing a bunch of blonde barbies running around on the beach.