“Of course I want to be a model. I want to paint my eyelids gold. I saw on a magazine cover and it looked amazing- turned the model into a sexy alien that everyone looked at, but no one dared to touch. ”
-Laurie Halse Anderson, Speak
In Laurie Halse Anderson’s YA novel Speak, Melinda Sordino, a freshman who struggled throughout her freshmen year of school, was sexually assaulted at a party prior to the beginning of the school year. She was later bullied during school because she called the cops to report the rape, yet nobody knows exactly what happened because she hung up before she clarified what had happened to her. She prefers being alone because of how many people bully and pressure her. She turns self
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What do these all have in common? All these people pressure you in some way. They pressure you to desire to be perfect, to be skinny, pretty, good at singing, to have lots of money. Peer Pressure is when your friends/group influences you to do good or bad. Peer pressure is involved everywhere in songs, movies, poems, novels, etc. Peer pressure negatively affects a lot of teens today because of how social media supports us causing depression and bad decisions. In the movie Mean Girls, directed by Mark Waters, shows an example of how peer pressure affects teens in high school. The movie Mean Girls is about the stereotypical high school with cliques. The “plastics” (“perfect girls”), pressure everyone to be like them and to scare them into doing unreasonable things. The main character, Cady Heron soon learns that it’s not about being popular and “plastic”, but it’s about being unique and real. Mean girls showed many teens across the globe to not let their high school bully pressure you into to not speaking, drugs, alcohol, popularity, etc. This scenario is not wrong when it comes to high school. Many teenagers like Melinda Sordino are struggling to speak up because of how peer pressure influences