Celebrities and models give off an inaccessible image of self-assuredness, beauty and having perfect lives, unfairly giving the average reader an unobtainable icon to aim to make themselves duplicates of. Readers are attracted to a ludicrous parody of perfection, and are even encouraged to model themselves upon.
School, careers and politics are only spoken of with scorn, or misguided efforts to make them seem acceptable, but mostly are seen as taboo subjects, ridiculed and forgotten, when these are really very important issues on today’s world, and this omission only adds to the façade of a faultless world.
Parents are seen as objects rather than people, inhuman units who freely deal out money, work as their daughter’s slaves, and are the very limit of ‘un-coolness’. It is however, their money which pays for copies of magazines to be brought, and for the seemingly endless fashion pages to be brought for. When in reality, some girls scrape together two pounds each month, the ideals shown by magazines present a certainly well-off if not rich teenager.
Love, and boys, are also seen as objects. Obtainable, but only on your terms. Love is as, or even more important than life, shown by the size of its allocation in the monthly horoscopes. Boys are stereotyped just as much as girls, and are seen as items to drape over the fashionable young female’s arm, to be bent to their will, and then dumped once they cease to amaze one, or perform one the sexual side of things. However, if this where true, surely there wouldn’t be so many problem pages and letters titled such as “He says he’ll hit me if I don’t do as he says”, or “He says he will dump me if I don’t sleep with him”, where exclusively for a few scant pages in this girl power propaganda, boys are dominating scumbags.
Sex, support of, and caution against, conflict across the glossy pages. Some serious reports are posted on the subject, but most subtle messages reek from the pages, all directing towards sex being acceptable, accept the tiny print across the bottom of the page, scrawled on to keep legal, of “Be sure, be safe, sex under 16 is illegal”
These contradictory messages are enforced by the adverts, which make up 27% of an average magazine, which show Wonderbra adverts, which suggest that females better equipped in the chest area are more probable to get a taxi on New Years Eve, a naked man and woman hugging with bottles of perfume, and images of insect thin big chested women everywhere, which all conclude in a teens uniqueness and individuality being suppressed or smothered by advice from people who aren’t even teenagers themselves.
The language used in teenage magazines consists mostly of made up words and slang.
In an eternally optimistic tone, glazing over any descriptions of anything less than forever cheerful and optimistic voices and messages. Alliterations litter the pages, along with similes and metaphors. Slang is used liberally, and several words such as ‘totty’, ‘slap-happy‘ and ‘vampish’, spring up amongst “Smug sistas’, ‘cleavage queens’ and ‘needy chicks’
Magazines are giving teenagers what they have been trained by previous issues to want and think they need. They are manipulating and hindering teenagers, in their beliefs and lives,. They assume, wrongly, that all of ‘girl kind’ want to be the same., and do not even address alternatives lifestyles, except to ridicule and ostracize them. Magazines are becoming more and more risqué, indulging in speculation and addressing less and less of the real problems of the world teenagers are having to grow up in. They are suited more to what adults think teenagers are like, and what they desire, and a stereotype of typicality, than to those who pay their pocket money out each month, to see behind the glossy front covers, read and gasp in adoration and wonder, feel for the “real-life stories” and laugh at mishaps. All they are really doing is limiting, destroying and suppressing their true selves.