The star of last year’s “Camp Gyno,” the popular video about the first girl at camp to get her period and feel empowered by it, returns to the Internet now as a middle-schooler who makes some bad decisions and must deal with the consequences.
As CNN reports, Macy McGrail, the 11-year-old star of “Camp Gyno,” plays her character from tween stage into adulthood in her father, Dave McGrail’s, video trailer of his new book Surviving Middle School: An Interactive Story for Girls. In the opening scene of the trailer, Macy appears as a 38-year-old woman and, later, as a pregnant, smoking 24-year-old.
“I guess there’s no way to pinpoint that one moment where it all started to fall apart, but if I had to do it all over again, you bet your sweet ass I’d make some different choices,” she says, reflecting on her first day of middle school when she made the choice of joining the bad crowd.
McGrail’s book was modeled after the Choose Your Own Adventure books he himself enjoyed as a child. Surviving Middle School has the reader making decisions in the face of issues today’s tweens and teens confront in a digital world.
“The idea was give them a decision that, at least, I think there’s a right or wrong answer … and then couch it in a way so it looks really tantalizing to them to do the wrong thing and then see what they do,” said McGrail.
CNN gives one example of a choice centering on signing up for an Instagram account and befriending a sixth grader from Ohio who is later revealed to be a grown man. The reader must choose either to continue the friendship or break it off when the friend’s true identity is learned.
“I think that something parents have to acknowledge these days is that with technology and earlier puberty and a whole host of other factors, girls are forced to make really tough choices that have serious consequences at a much earlier age than when we were kids and I’m seeing that on a day to day basis with my daughter,” McGrail said.
“In my ideal world, kids are standing around the playground discussing how they chose or bringing it up with their parents or disagreeing with one of the outcomes in the book,” he added. “The discourse that was created and generated by ‘Camp Gyno’ is the same sort of thing that I would love to happen and be generated from the book.”