Magazines and the Teenage Girl

Every woman or girl at some time in their life has picked up one of the various celebrity gossip or beauty magazines. In turn, these magazines have exhibited the hegemonic ideals of beauty: thin, toned, blond haired women, that the average woman works to desperately become. Teenage girls are most vulnerable to these idealistic images of women, and their perceptions of the world and their futures are based on what they read in such magazines such as Us, Seventeen, People, Cosmo, etc. According to Kelley Massoni, teenage girls are increasingly believing that modeling is a realistic and prestigious career that they can aspire to. In reality, few people become models because it is such a hard profession to break into due to the limited number of jobs, specific bodily attributes, and various checklists each advertising campaign or modeling agency looks for in a certain model. Yet, teenage girls fail to look in the real world, believing that modeling is the best career for a woman, especially since males are assumed to be the only ones capable of holding power or truly working. Consequently, many young girls are beginning to associate females as the inferior sex who always has to listen to their male bosses. Women are not merely figures of beauty or sexual objects as magazines exemplify, they can have positions of power and influence the world. In order to change this problem in American society, these magazines need to promote better role models than Heidi Klum or today's most recent icon/ model, that are doing something meaningful as a profession, and are not employed in the entertainment industry.

However, as Massoni later points out African American women are less likely to be influenced by these "controlling images" in such magazines, since the models or individuals are primarily white and these women have developed strategies to resist such images. If only white teenage girls could develop such strategies then they would not have to constantly fight the battle to be thin, buy the latest fashion accessory, or learn new strategies in relationships. Above are a conglomeration of magazine covers depicting the common themes of women as sexual objects in the nearly naked magazine covers of a few celebrities leaving little to the imagination, or specifically through plastic surgery patient Ashlee Simpson-Wentz who like many teens altered her image to fit in with the ideal beauty standards. The countless covers of Us magazine exemplify the superficiality of many stories they cover, highlighting to the American public a false sense of what is important. Additionally, all the individuals, particularly the females again, look flawless despite the crises or problems or joy they are experiencing. Definitely, the many magazines available to the American public, particularly to teenage girls are altering their perceptions of the world as they believe they can become a model or actress or as beautiful as Jennifer Aniston, or Ashlee Simpson-Wentz, in simply reading these magazines. The relationship between magazines and youth female culture is definitely strongly linked, and hopefully this can be countered in the future if more favorable, realistic, and plain women are featured on the covers or in stories in these fickle magazines.