My voice, your voice and Teen Voices matter!

Gill does a great job discussing the very controversial topics of how gender in magazines is defined. She introduces the topic of contradiction versus coherence where she pulls out the illogical messages mainstream magazines send to their targeted audiences. These assorted messages are in magazines targeting teenagers, children, heterosexual women and men. She studies the magazine discourse with emphasizing on the political economy perspective in understanding magazines. She highlights the ideologies of romance, consumption, celebrity and boy watching, that teenage girls have consumed in the different magazines. One of the main contradicting messages teenage girls had to receive was to correctly display themselves as attractive, with keeping up with the hottest trends and knowing how to attract a boy while also receiving the message that being themselves was essential. The question in play is then, how can a girl be themselves when society has already defined who she should be?

Another controversial topic is sex. There are structuring discourses where magazines like Cosmo emphasize on how women must please their man and how women should get out of their comfort zone.

There is a perception that there is a feminist or post feminist discussion on sex relating to women needing to take charge of their sexually and being comfortable with their partner. With the example Gill mentions, Macdonald (1995) discusses an article in 19 and advises how women should give a perfect blow job although women do not enjoy giving oral sex, they should still perform because men enjoy it. And later states that sexual acts should be mutually enjoyable and women should not feel under pressure. All of these “juggling acts” lead targeted audiences on a wild goose hunt in attempt of defining their sex lives, interest and who they are as individuals.

There are great magazine companies that do not bring such contradiction to this genre. One of my favorites is Teen Voices. 

“Teen Voices supports and educates teen girls to amplify their voices and create social change through media.” The magazine is based in Boston and I remember as a teenager reading Teen Voices with confidence. I felt empowered, inspired and excited to take on the world with my voice. Discussion of appearance, consumption and attracting boys were irrelevant. Teen Voices is great and should be in every teenager’s possession but reality is that it is not a mainstream magazine like Cosmo. How do feminist change this? Why is the media shaping our society? My voice, your voice and Teen Voices matter!

Seventeen Magazine: Virtue or Vice?

This Gill reading was really interesting, but more so than that, it really put into light the "natural" acceptance a lot of readers have come to find with these women's magazines. Many of the points Gill mentions are all factual, such as contradictory stories in magazines as well as the unquestioning embrace of heterosexuality, but many viewers are so accustomed to them it isn't seen as abnormal. Most striking is the section on teen magazines. Growing up, I had subscriptions to Teen People and Seventeen, and nothing was better than getting that monthly magazine in the mail. As an avid reader of these magazines, they offered a relationship, created a trust as well as a bonding element with other readers spanning across America. It was especially helpful that these magazines targeted teens, girls just like me. Which is why as I was reading Gill's facts, supported by other scholars and historical evidence, I was shocked to find how true it was. It's always been obvious that these magazines are biased, focusing on very "girlie" material without much variation, and on stories about guys and how to perfect your appearance. What wasn't as obvious before was how these magazines twisted material into seeming it as though the girls wanted to wear this makeup for "fun." That they simultaneously were doing this for themselves as well as to achieve the ultimate goal, scoring a guy. Also, whenever magazines mention guys it is surrounded in the context of what girls can do to make their guys happen, never vice versa. As much as I enjoyed these magazines when I was younger, I felt a little dubbed when reading this section of Gill's. Although Gill points out not to feel guilty for guilty pleasures, I felt like I had played right into advertisers' and editors' hands.
Regardless though to whatever Gill says, I still find many positives to teen magazines. Not only do they create a common bond between readers, it also has a good mixture of stories, and had that much needed element, of "you're not alone" in your thinking, emotions, etc. They are especially needed in those awkward stages of early teen years. They can also help in immersing yourself in outside culture and news, especially when a lot of young girls aren't flipping through the New York Times or Time magazine. All in all, even though there is much merit in Gill's section on teen mags, it still doesn't account for the many positives there can be for young girls that need these teen magazines.

Is beauty really in the eye of the beholder?

In a May, 2000 edition of Newsweek  a 16-year-old girl was quoted as saying, "I took this picture [out of the magazine] because it shows the stick-thin and perfect bodies in the magazines that teens read. I think this is part of where the pressure to have the perfect body comes from. I was thinking about a girl I knew that had an eating disorder. I think they should put a few more 'realistic' bodies in the magazines to show teens that not everyone is skinny." Adolescence is an extremely hard time for anyone as uncertainty and self-doubt arise from many physical, emotional, and psychological changes. As these feelings fester, one’s sense of confidence drops at a constant rate. With that being said, strategies for fitting in and improving physical attractiveness become even more important to adolescents.

White adolescent girls are the most avid consumers of magazines, with three fourths of those between the ages of 12 and 14 reading at least one magazine on a regular basis (Klein, 1993). Remembering my days spent reading magazines such as Seventeen and Teen People, the content is highly based off of appearance and beauty. Although there were always the articles dealing with conquering anorexia or bulimia, maintaining a positive body image, and a stressing independence and uniqueness, it was very clear that most of the models in the advertisements were thin and beautiful. Based on this, one must conclude that the main message of the advertisements is that in today's society, acceptance depends upon fitting into this narrow conception of pretty. The content of advertisements in magazines targeted to young women send an array of implicit and explicit messages concerning physical appearances.

In both van Zoonen and Gill, the idea of content analysis is under much discussion. Content analysis counts the frequency of various occurrences and this raw data is translated into percentages and various other statistics. While it can be argued content analysis suggests that sexism resides in single images that can be counted instead of seeing sexism as a culture wide issue, there are still benefits of this research. I found an article that performs a content analysis on the top five selling teen magazines. Of those were Seventeen, Teen Vogue, Girl's Life, American Cheerleader, and M Magazine. 

As expected, those represented in the magazines represent girls that are flirty, carefree, tan, and beautiful. With so much content pushing such similar images, girls will inevitably internalize the idea that beauty means echoing and replicating what they see in the media. If this continues, what will this mean for the future of individuality and confidence?