The Crossroads of Pubescence - An Examination of Three Teen Magazines Steven Meece - ad522@freenet.carleton.ca This essay is excerpted from an e-zine created by Steven Meece and Christopher Woodill, a new form electronic publication (see C. Woodill's article on the electronic environment). Cropduster is published annually at the moment, and has received recognition from various people around the world who have read electronically, and from a front page article devoted to it in the Ottawa Citizen (Dec. 26, 1993). ====================== Young & Modern / Missy ====================== YM is supposed to stand for "Young and Modern." Until a few years ago it stood for "Young Miss," but the editors decided that the title was too prissy and waif-like for the gritty reality experienced by young girls today. It is theorized that girls would rather be modern than a miss, which seems to be like two coins with the same side. The pages are quite glossy, and the magazine has a particular smell to it. The pages don't feel like paper. The second thing we noticed about this issue and possibly this magazine is that its sole purpose seems to be the promotion of make-up. The magazine is bulked up by advertisements for various-makeup products, many of the reader inquiries include queries about the proper kind of blush to use, and they themselves find that makeup is the central core of any young and modern girl's existence. Other things are delved into, but they are never treated with the same amount of respect. We tallied 32 of 104 pages consisting of full page singles advertisements, and four doubles (Cover Girl, Maybelline, "Caboodles" and Paul Mitchell Hair Products). BELIEVE IT: When your make-up looks this natural, you know it's Clean. One look says it all. Natural. Believable. Beautiful. That look is Cover Girl Clean Make-up (tm). So good to your skin. So clean. With pure Noxzema (r) ingredients. For healthy colour. Honest coverage. The look of great skin. That's the believable look of Clean Make-up. We found an oxymoron in the term "clean make-up". To be changed from the natural (which is to say, clean) you need to be made up into something different, and therefore you need something called "make-up" to do that. The girls in these advertisements had the particular quality of not resembling human beings at all. There is some heavy airbrushing going on here. They don't even look human anymore, of particular note is the girl squinting eyes, crunching paper and sticking out her tongue in the Maybelline double-ad. The girl for the Tampax one on page four looks like a real person, with a black turtleneck sweater and blue leggings with numbers on them: Doing anything for the first time can be tricky. But trust the makers of Tampax to come up with a tampon that's a total cinch for girls like you to... The curious thing about this girl is that she appears to be falling over backward for no discernible reason. "Say Anything" is a collection of reader-submitted embarrassing experiences and Freudian slips. The staff then rates these harrowing exploits with one to four stars, the four-star ranking being "Ultimate supremo humiliation". This section is in actuality the most titillating thing you'll see in YM. Hold onto your hats, this is heavy chick-talk: The reason you bought the mag, right? The next best thing to Peeping Tom-ing a slumber party. This month yielded three four-stars, the first being about a girl exposing her breasts during a school play, the second about a girl who had her clothes ripped off by a ski-lift, and the third involved a girlie having a tooth fall out during heavy petting and having Prince Charming swallow the thing. There were a few experiences at being ignored by a "guy" despite all intentions, and one about a girl's dad sitting on the toilet. Our favourite, although it was only given three stars, was about a girl who 'accidentally' bought a dildo. She thought it was a curling iron. Dr Freud would love these magazines almost as much as we do. The letter section found Jetha Marek from the Bronx questioning the real value of makeup, which went unanswered by Bonnie and crew. Crosstalk asked, "Should you stay with a boyfriend who pressures you for sex?" and no specific answer was given. Neither of the sides advocated that the victim "do it" with her boyfriend, but Kim Kaan of Tempe Arizona said that you should ignore him. The eponymous Jennifer Wise of Stockton, Kansas "will only have sex when I am ready for it," when-ever that may be. She inevitably had bought into the Puritan ethic of "The Cosby Show" by getting steamed over the inevitable results of sex before the wedding night: "a damaged reputation, an unplanned pregnancy, or a sexually transmitted disease like AIDS". Kaan is in her second year at Arizona State University, but her arguments remain thinly veiled rants lacking in intelligence. The "Body Q&A" is not as erotic as one might hope. They discuss different types of soap (superfatted or emollient, transparent or glycerin, deodorant, french milled, synthetic, acne and cleansing lotion) and publish photographs of the tatoos of Julia Roberts, Jody Watley, Roseanne Barr, Cher, Stephanie Seymour and "Roshumba". The crew hit the beach, photographed nine surfpeople and asked them "If your surfboard were a girl, who would she be?" These questions were answered honestly. Three of the seven dudes picked one of several fashion models. One guy said his mom. Bud Struck wanted his surfboard to be a porno star. This article was a veiled excuse for publishing pictures of surf gods, with little erect boy-nipples. The guy thing continued without another survey, "What's the worst thing you've ever done to a girl?" Answers: three dumpings on prom night, physical assault, yelling derogatory comments from a car window, cheating, raping a drunkard, crank calls, and one guy who vomitted on his date. YM also contains the now-obligatory ad for "Teen Spirit" which remains "the Only Anti-perspirant For Teens". This one pictures three happy-go-lucky girls whooping it up at a carnival and presumably stinking up the joint in the process. The horoscopes were uniformly false. I told Chris that he would meet "a cool guy with killer looks" on the fourteenth. He did not seem to be too anxious. It appears that being young and modern is not a very good condition for the soul. YM implicitly believes that the acquisition and sustaining of a boyfriend must be the central focus in the goals of a girl, yet YM itself showcases that most boyfriends are albatrosses at best, and eventually only cause trouble. YM does not see the contradiction of instructing its readers to pursue the romantic ideal while admitting that Prince Charming is most likely a goof. Someone who is young and modern must be a clothes horse, willing to apply massive amounts of varying kinds of makeup, able to spend extravagantly on clothes, diet, use the right kind of soap, wear a two-piece bikini and kowtow to a jerk boyfriend who may or may not be stolen by your best friend. If you cannot reach those levels, you are done like a dinner. This magazine portrays female adolescence correctly, as a series of banalities adding up to a tremendous omnipresent burden. They recognize the faults of this value system, but lack the conviction to attempt to bring about changes. Espousing of deviant philosophies (to burn your bra or your rouge) could cause what Jennifer Wise fears more than AIDS, which is "a damaged reputation". Young Modern readers cannot liberate themselves because they are too busy trying to condition themselves for social acceptance. ===== Sassy ===== If you have a ring through your nose and believe that The Butthole Surfers speak directly to you, Sassy will be your bag. Witness this from the letters section: Dear Jane: I was going to send you this comic strip way before your "staff hate mail awards" ["Diary," April]. I swear! My purpose was to show you that a way cool cartoonist like Lynda Barry has her comic strip character reading a way cool magazine like Sassy [only one panel shown below]. So I am glad that you're "spreading like the plague"! Complete with spelling errors, this is the handbook of the hippest home slices this side of Seattle. Hip though it may appear to be, the Kurt Cobain-meets-Frankie Avalon article on "Surf Punks" features the grunge lady wearing $154 worth of clothes (not even counting those big clunky boots) as she looks nihilistic. Anarchy in the USA? Not if you are shopping at the Gap to achieve it. However, Sassy may be a victim of its demographic. In the hopes of hitting the mark, they constantly engage in overkill, as if their audience could never accept anything but affirmations of what they already are. Instead of giving the message that information on the cover photograph is on page fourteen, Sassy has to say For a veritable hoedown of info about our cover, fee fi fiddly-i oh-ver to page 14. This gets very boring very fast. Almost every other sentence has to have a few words of teen-lingo inside of it to keep the readers awake. Do the editors of Sassy wish to keep these people sassy forever? Honestly, this stuff sounds as if it is being spoken in the next Wayne's World sequel. Because of this constant gee-whiz overtone, Sassy is unable to sound sincere when it deals with serious issues. Scorpio (Oct 23 - Nov 21) Partnerships are key to success this mo' (except for hassle-causing bratty sibs on the 10th). Break with routine on the 12th - you need a change. On the 16th you get what you ask for. Hang near water on the 21st for serenity and Esther Williams-y exercise. Day to Savor [sic]: 11th. Scratch Off Your Calendar [sic]: 29th. The "Cute Band Alert" further restricts Sassy readers into this teenage pigeonhole. The Cute Band Alert is just that -- "Alert! Here is a new band with a cute bass player!" and they publish a picture. This kind of narcissism is taken to a further extreme with the "Sassiest Boy in America" contest held every winter, in which readers can nominate their boyfriend or brother as the epitome of sass. Who is the idol figure of Sassy readers? Anyone who has sideburns, Lollapalooza tickets, a backward-turned baseball cap, and calls himself "a feminist". Sassy takes a different slant than the other three mags: It supposedly includes the reader in the personal lives of the editors. Editors and staff contributors refer to themselves in the first person, and the reader is supposed to feel chummy with Jane, Lew, Christina, Margie, Jacinta, Mary, Kim, Mary Kaye, Anne V, Andrea T, Janet, Mary Ann, and a whole slew of others. They're supposed to be as familiar to the readers as their cafeteria mates. Positively, Sassy does contain the most record and book reviews of any of the three mags, but these are limited. The books are always the latest released kid books, the music the latest six-month shelf life stuff, and the "movies" are always what's playing down at the mall. "Stuff You Wrote" is a poetry-and-quip feature that is passable but is slowly shrinking month by month. Most of the poetry is kinda the same, and an attempt at therapy - the desire to get something out of one's system and not so much to create work that transcend the medium and develop relevance on several different planes. Still, the concept is commendable and the neglect of this feature is not so good. Sassy is still the only magazine that mention the words "vagina" and "penis" as if they are related to each other but they are very careful when they do it. Sassy does set itself apart from the other two, but this difference is shrinking. The ads in Sassy are largely those of YM, primarily disposable haircare products, and disposable music products. May of the exact same ads appear in all three magazines. Again - the ads, like the magazine itself, never leave the realm of the day to day distractions of a fifteen and a half year old. A further slide happened late in 1991 when Sassy changed the physical size -- from an oversized square to a regular notebook size. Soon after, the magazine underwent yet another layout overhaul and now is as active as an MTV commercial with mixed-font headlines and text, and dingbats by the dozen. Whether or not it loses in editorial quality is irrelevant, as long as it can keep a number of girls interested enough to read it. For magazines are essentially trojan horses for getting the reader to look at advertisements, just as the only purpose of commercial television is use the guise of entertainment to round up an audience to sit through the commercials. Why do magazine articles break up after two pages, to be "continued on page 132"? To get the reader to turn through the next sixty pages, all while looking at the ads. The Sass-meisters seem to be caught in a delicate circle. Sassy was forced away from its old positions that made it quirky, interesting, daring, and worth looking forward to each month. However, there is no demand for a Young & Modern clone, which is the direction that Sassy may have to drift. Sassy is an entity at sea in search of a demographic, which is a very perilous thing to be. ========= Seventeen ========= Seventeen is the oldest of the group here, and in both the literal and figurative senses it remains the mother of all teenage mags. It is still the most professional, most entertaining, and most professionally produced of the magazines. But this is a small market, and "The New Yorker" it aint. The fashion features of Seventeen are the best photographed, and the ads go beyond the norm a few times. But even Seventeen has seen better days. The June 1992 was weighing in at a rather svelte 120 pages, while as recently as April 1986 it was 216 pages. A perusal of that issue finds several ads for General Motors, Rice-a-roni, "Chadwicks of Boston," and a feature film. This is an indication that Seventeen, at that time, was almost a "general interest" magazine, the two biggest of this genre being Time and People. Certainly that is not the case any longer. There are only a few ads in this category. The remainder of the magazine is bulked up with YM-style ads for Clearsil, Cover Girl, and Caboodles (a neon-coloured makeup lunchbox). One thing hasn't changed, though, and that is the last pages are ripe with postage-size black and white ads for mail-order firms specializing in bust growing schemes, photo enlargement operations, Groucho Marx glasses & moustache ("fool your friends"), and fat camps. It would be premature to jump the gun and label Seventeen as YM trash. The editorial slant does not suffer from the laugh-track style happiness that infects Sassy. The issue reviews carried a very good fiction piece, actually worthy of reading. It wasn't promoted very much, and appears in the contents page as "FICTION: Leftovers by Cathi Hanauer". You can't have too much, and this is a passing barb at best. She also wrote the "Relating" column, which is an advice column to the lovelorn. The cover girl was Samantha Mathis, which would be reason enough to buy the whole thing. Yet, you don't get what you pay for, because the cover feature translated to two decent-sized pictures and 1/3rd of a page of text. Page 24 finds a page on specialized swimsuits, and how to use them to accentuate your body features. Also included is a group of exercises you can use to trim unsightly soft bits. Batter down the hatches for the "Sex & Your Body" column. It's hot stuff. The sub-title is "Are You Experienced?": There's generally a sort of hierarchy of experiences, with hand-holding and kissing at the bottom and intercourse at the top. But in between the list gets pretty blurry. When everyone you know talks about everything they do and grill you about everything you do, you may be able to avoid having your sexual experience (or lack of it) be public knowledge... the trick is too respect your body and your beliefs enough to always protect yourself, first and foremost, and to do what's truly right for you. Then they pick four letters dealing with this topic. The first two are of average level, but after that it gets pretty hairy. The final two letters, printed verbatim: I am a virgin and I intend to stay a virgin until I get married. Instead of having sex, my boyfriend and I do everything else. The other night he used his fingers. I know it sounds gross, but I don't know how else to put it. Well, afterward, I started to bleed. Does this mean I'm not a virgin anymore? Did he pop my cherry? and: My best friend Stacy lied to her boyfriend and told him that she wasn't a virgin. Now she's afraid that if she has sex with him he'll know she's a virgin because she'll be tight or it'll hurt. She's afraid to tell him the truth because she thinks he'll hate her for lying. If a guy's experienced, can he tell if a girl is a virgin? Pretty crazy stuff, better not let Mom see it. Seventeen is coming perilously close to reality. The former letter affords an opportunity for moralizing: The Young Lady should take Debra Kent's advice and do some thinking for herself, and maybe then she will shed some of her hypocrisy. She is trapped between two conflicting desires: To "just do it," and to preserve the sanctitude of what she calls "my cherry". The unpoppable cherry has nothing to do with it, because virginity is not a biological label, but a state of mind. This girl is running the gamut of "his fingers" and many Latin terms and what-have-you, and certainly it is stretching it a bit to call her an untouched virgin bride, which is the way she would prefer to exist. She owes honesty to the mythical husband-to-be. If she wants to be a virgin bride, more power to her, but she should see to it that she is untouched. Obviously this appears to be beyond her means. If she wants to do these deeds with the boyfriend, more power to her. This girl has to learn that she has to take responsibility for her actions, and that she cannot deliver the goods and still claim her virginity. But again, Seventeen usually redeems itself enough to make it worth the $2.50 cover price. This issue, too. It was found in the article by Ann Patchett with the title "How to Survive a Breakup": If this guy is still the centre of every conversation you're having six months after the big B, you've got to ask yourself if you're really trying to get over him. Maybe you think that you'll be closer to him if you live in the past or that he'll see your love as true if you refuse to let go. Calling his house and hanging up, waiting around in the school parking lot to catch a glimpse of him, hounding his friends for information, -- none of this is going to help you get better. Nobody knows the answers to all the questions, but one thing is clear: He would be with you if he wanted to be with you, and he's not. So Seventeen comes through in the end. Ninety-five percent of it is bad, but the other five percent gives the reader a glimpse into what matters in the lives of these girls, beyond the day-to-day distractions. It is also the only magazine that can hold the attention of someone outside of the target group. Unlike the other magazines, Seventeen is worthwhile, and it would be a loss to see it cease to exist.