Googling Girls

Google,while always useful for answering queries can be quite alarming in the way it is capable of showing us some of the most common interests internet users seem to have.  After searching "girls" in google I came up with links to sites about the HBO show "Girls", two links to a band called "Girls", a link to the magazine FHM (which looks like a cross between Maxim and Playboy from the brief look at their homepage), a link to Maxim, a link to gogirlsgames.com (which advertises make-up games and dress up games specifically), a link to "sexy videos of hot women, hot lesbians, and celebrity girls" on spike.com, and (the last link on the first page) a link to girlsinc.org which (finally) aims to "inspire all girls to be strong, smart, and bold."

In my mind, only having one out of ten links on the first page of search results be a page of empowerment and support for girls is a pretty pathetic showing. To me it shows that our society doesn't tend to see "girls" or "girlhood" as something that is important enough to provide legitimate information on. These results also show a tendency to mis-name women as girls. The show "Girls" is about 20-something year old women, and the women who appear in FHM, Maxim, and Spike are all women, most definitely not girls. It shows that for some reason society has a strange relationship with being a woman/being womanly. Those words seem to bring forth thought of age or matronly-ness that is undesirable in our society. It might also show a kind of fear of the power and strength that is held in being a woman that is absent in being a girl. Girls are much more easily trivialized I think than women, and this too helps to keep women subordinate, even in language. Another important point is that apart from the one pro-girl link at the end and the game site, non of these results are actually aimed at girls or women specifically, and indeed some of them are aimed specifically at men. Even the game site is providing entertainment based on stereotypically girly activities such as make-up, dress-up, cooking, makeovers, etc.