Pretty Little Liars

Representation of teenage girls on Pretty Little Liars

Pretty Little liars is a TV series that represents four specific teenage girls. In Pretty Little Liars teenage girls are represented as mischievous  backstabbing but always having to look perfect in every way possible with layers of make up on. Features used to convey the representation include costume and dialogue. The girls are always seen in this TV series dressed in new fashionable clothing that can sometimes be revealing showing off their figures. All four girls have flawless skin even though they cake their faces with natural looking make up giving us a false sense of what is perfect. This makes teenage girls in real life feel as though they need to wear a lot of makeup in order to look pretty like the girls on Pretty Little Liars. Teenagers look to the girls on the TV series as role models as they are what they believe 'perfect'. They are then willing to change to look like them and become perfect which we all know doesn't happen. The opening scene of is related to making yourself perfect looking because one of the girls that has luscious blonde hair is seen putting mascara on and hair curlers in her hair making her look flawless in teenage girls eyes. 
I think that teenage girls are represented in both a positive and negative way. We see a positive representation of teenage girls when the four girls stay loyal to their friend group and accept their lesbian friend for who she is not what she is. Teenage girls who watch this look unto these girls and aspire to be like them. However there is a negative representation of teenage girls on this series. We see this when they are snooping around, backstabbing and lying to people around them just to cover up their secret. They are shown having to deal with the loss of their friend and blackmail form an anonymous unidentified person "A" making them look vulnerable and powerless. The negative representation is seen through the girls still requiring to look perfect even when they are going through hard times. We never see them without make up on and their hair perfectly done or in other words looking natural. Because of this the idea that to be seen as perfect you have to wear make up and nothing can be a spec out of place is portrayed. Dialogue is used quite often in a backstabbing way. For example, Hanna talks about Kate behind her back saying,"It looks like something laid eggs on her face and then exploded." Representing teenage girls as bullies which not all teenage girls are.

In this photo all of the girls are wearing figure hugging formal but fashionable dresses, the ends of the dresses are rugged and of a short length shoeing off their bodies. The girls complete the look with slight grins on their faces but looking otherwise "too cool" for anyone else. The slight grin on their faces suggests  that they are hiding something like a secret. The fact that they are perfectly dressed and have their make up and hair done gives the impression that they want nothing but their presence left behind. This gives teenager girls a mischievous feeling but hey use their beauty to their advantage. 
I think the director has used the good mischievous, suspicious, pretty girl look in this series because that is what the viewers are interested in. The stereotype of a of a good looking girl is what sells the programme. Pretty Little liars can be compared with Gossip girls. In one of the episodes of Gossip Girl we see one of the main characters Serena going into the bar with her older boyfriend which gives the representation and impression that it is okay for teenage girls to go into a bar and consume alcohol until they don't know what they are doing. This gives us a negative representation but also an unrealistic representation of most teenage girls. Gossip Girls gives a negative representation of teenage girls. 
Both TV series represent teenage girls in a bad way. They are shown to society as mischievous liars. They use their bodies to their advantage and they exaggerate the fact that you have to wear make up.  

I think that Pretty Little Liars could be a reasonably fair representation of some teenage girls but certainly not all. Int he series the girls always stay loyal to each other being a positive reflection of teenage girls unlike in the series Gossip girl where the girls are constantly back stabbing each other and trying to make each others lives a misery. 
In Pretty Little liars the normal way of life is that you have a group of friends and nothing changes with them, you have perfect body, skin wearing lots of makeup and fashionable clothes. Teenage girls are represented as very secretive and cunning which i think is because people are more interested in the bad girl image in programmes. More than half of white adolescent girls who are normal weight view themselves as fat and are more afraid of gaining weight than getting cancer, losing their parents or nuclear war.
Pretty Little liars could affect societies perception of teenage girls making them think less of teenage girls because the girls on pretty little liars often use their bodies to get what they want. 
Teenage girls could be majorly affected by the representation on pretty little liars because not everyone has a perfect body, skin and hair so teenagers may go to extreme lengths to make themselves look like the actors on pretty little liars do. In fact 90% of people with eating disorders are female. From an early age we are bombarded with images and message reinforcing  the idea that in order to be happy and successful in life we must be thin. When teenagers feel that their bodies don't match up to those of supermodels or actors they feel fatally flawed when it really doesn't matter. 
The miss representation of teenage girls in the media is already affecting the world wound us as a study from the University of Central Florida showed that nearly 50% of girls aged three to six were already concerned about their weight.