Monthly media and arts column

20 years ago I was 14 and an addict. I couldn’t get enough of Just Seventeen magazine. Every week it would arrive with the newspaper through our letterbox and I couldn’t do anything else until I’d read it all. When I went to camp one summer, I even insisted to my parents that they had to send it to me through the post and by the time my obsession was at an end, I had amassed hundreds of copies in my chest of drawers.

What is the attraction of the girlie magazine? Every month a new collection of glossy magazines hits the shelves of your local newsagent, aimed squarely at teenagers between the ages of 12-16. This month I bought the pink and yellow Bliss magazine, which was offering me three free nail polishes, a nail file and a set of false stick-on nails to use it all on. All of which would suggest that this is a magazine aimed at young girls wanting a fun activity for their next sleepover. However, the front cover follows design conventions that are used for fashion magazines aimed at older female readers, such as Red and Instyle. There is a glamorous cover girl, in this case Britney Spears, pictured behind provocative and sensational cover lines. ‘I went to the loo and had a baby!’, ‘Six steps to a thong-tastic bum!’, ‘My classmates don’t know I’m a prostitute!’. Tantalising stuff, particularly when the largest cover line on the page screams ‘Get Sexy Now!’. All of which begs the question, what are these magazines coming to?

Before you get too hot under the collar, let me urge you to take a closer look at the inside of this magazine to see what ‘incessant messages about sex’ the excited teenager parting with her £2.10 is actually going to get from this apparently incendiary item.

Breakdown

First of all, let’s break it down. Of the 194 pages, 34 are adverts, 47 are run-of-the-mill fashion shoots and beauty tips and 36 are photos of celebrities, including features on Britney Spears and the boy band McFly (they’re the ones doing the comic relief single this year). None of these really contains much reference to sex. The big values and concerns are about looking presentable and getting through life without making too many embarrassing public blunders. Then there are 30 pages of real-life stories including anecdotes sent in by readers. Most of these are along the lines of ‘A giant croc got me by the head’ and readers’ ‘Catastrophe’ stories about over-crimping their hair. However, there are relationship-focused ones too. Do they promote under-age sex? The subjects of ‘I slept with my best mate’s fella’ and ‘I sleep with two men every day’ are roundly criticised for their actions and the ‘high school hooker’ is on closer inspection not a teenager but a student studying law at university. Moreover, the consequences of both stories are pretty unpleasant for the individuals involved and the moral of the tales is that ‘thoughtless sex messes you and your relationships up’.

Cult of the problem page

The focus of most of the criticism levelled at girlie magazines is the cult of the problem page. Although the remaining 47 pages are not all problem pages, there are a good 20 devoted to sorting out readers’ issues. Bliss (and most others) now have a range of different agony aunts giving advice, although sexual relationships only feature in one of the six sections in Bliss. There is only one letter from a reader talking about having had sex and she is 16. She counts on the morning-after pill as a solution to getting pregnant and is concerned that the clinic would tell her parents. She is told: ‘If you’re not mature enough to protect yourself and your partner from pregnancy and STIs, you’re not ready for sex’. Elsewhere in the magazine, readers are told: ‘Remember that having sex is illegal under the age of 16’ and are encouraged to hold onto virginity: ‘rushing into sex is not romantic — and it won’t make you feel better’.

While these writers are not holding out biblical values about the right place for sex being in monogamous, heterosexual marital relationships, the substance of their writing is ‘don’t just do it’. They, and the writers of Sugar magazine, are trying to be responsible in presenting the full picture to their readers. This is in comparison with less responsible magazines such as More (which carries a ‘position of the week’ regular feature) which I would discourage young teenagers from reading.

Learning to be discerning

If you are witnessing magazine obsession in teenage girls you know, then remember that most print media publications are actually unable to satisfy their readers. Headlines are never as interesting as they promise, articles never as scandalous or revealing. By the time they see it in a paper or a magazine, they’ve probably heard it a hundred times on the TV, radio or internet. The idols of self, celebrity, wealth and experience are worshipped around them whether they pick up one of these magazines or not. It is much more important that they have a biblical framework to interpret what they read in order to discern wisely for themselves. They can only develop this framework if they are being exposed to the truth of God’s Word through their parents, church leaders and youth workers. They need Christian adults to take them seriously enough to look at the media texts that they consume and to discuss the issues that are being raised.

I think that the reason I had such a voracious appetite for the next issue of Just Seventeen when I was a teenager was because the last one never filled me up and always left me hungry. Bliss similarly leaves teenage girls today in need of a good meal somewhere else.

Eleanor Margesson

© Evangelicals Now - April 2005
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