"Do magazines aimed at teenagers present a stereotypical view of young women? If so, how is this achieved?"

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“Do magazines aimed at teenagers present a stereotypical view of young women? If so, how is this achieved?”

  I personally don’t buy teenage magazines, but I do buy a special interest music magazine every month in place of them. I stopped buying teenage magazines about 3 or 4 years ago, when I ceased being interested in the topics covered, and when I realised that I usually didn’t agree with the opinions I was told I should agree with. I first used to buy “Smash Hits”, “Top Of The Pops” and/or “Shout” when I was about 10. I bought the first two because I liked reading about the music I was listening to at the time, and I bought the last one mainly for the shallow reason of it usually had free gifts. I then started buying “Mizz” and “Sugar” after I thought I’d ‘grown out’ of the previous 3.   For this essay, I will be focusing on “Cosmo Girl” and “Sugar”. They are both monthly magazines, and cost £1.49 and £2.00. I hope to use these magazines to prove that teenage magazines do indeed present a stereotypical view of young women.

  In both magazines, there are several pages dedicated to feedback about the magazine from the readers. I noticed that although they all have different names attributed to them, they’re all written in the same tone, style and structure, each one praising a different section about the “mag”. This could mean one of two things. The magazine is praising itself under the personas of 15 year olds from Manchester in a bid to convince 15 year olds from elsewhere to follow suit, or that these Manchurian teenagers in question have joined thousands of adolescents in the fashion industry’s successful ploy to brainwash the said generation into becoming the boy-crazed stereotypical dumb blonde that the magazines assume they are already. It is hard to think of a reason, though, that any one would feel the need to write a letter in to a magazine with the sole purpose to praise it, with nothing to gain from it.

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 Most of the letters are so vague there hardly seems a point printing them at all, fake or not.

Despite my views on the subject, I understand fully why a magazine may not want to print negative letters, assuming it’s the 2nd scenario, because it might put ideas into their impressionable audience’s minds. They fail to notice, that the magazine may even benefit from doing this though, because it would give them a seemingly valuable opportunity to defend themselves, or to admit they were wrong in order to show the readers that they actually care bout their ...

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