Bikini and Beach Girls: Euro Bikini Girls 056

Popular culture

European fairy tales include some memorable stories about girls, including Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Rapunzel, Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Match Girl, The Little Mermaid, and The Princess and the Pea, the Brothers Grimm's Little Red Riding Hood, and others.

Children's books about girls include Little House on the Prairie, Alice in Wonderland, Pippi Longstocking, Dragonsong, and A Wrinkle in Time. Books which have both boy and girl protagonists tend to focus on the boys, but important girl characters appear in Knight's Castle, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Book of Three, and the Harry Potter series.

There have been many American comic books and comic strips featuring a girl as the main character, such as Little Lulu, Little Orphan Annie, Girl Genius, and Amelia Rules. In superhero comic books, an early girl character was Etta Candy, one of Wonder Woman's sidekicks. In the Peanuts series (by Charles Schulz), girl characters include Peppermint Patty, Lucy van Pelt, and Sally Brown.

In Japanese animated cartoons and comic books, girls are often protagonists. Most of the animated films of Hayao Miyazaki feature a young girl as the hero, as in Majo no takkyūbin (Kiki's Delivery Service). There are many other stories with girls as protagonists in the Shōjo style of manga, which is targeted to girls as an audience. Examples include The Wallflower, Ceres, Celestial Legend, Tokyo Mew Mew and Full Moon o Sagashite. Other genres of Japanese cartoons often feature sexualized and objectified portrayals of girls.

Sexualization of young girls in art and entertainment is a common theme across all eras and mediums. However it is especially prominent, or at least more explicitly visible, in modern cinema and television. Some famous examples of this include Taxi Driver, The Blue Lagoon, Léon: The Professional, and Pretty Baby - films dealing with young girls in adult situations, typically under extraordinary circumstances. An older, and perhaps most notorious example is a book by Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955) , that centers around a complex romantic relationship between a scholar and a young girl as they travel across the United States.