Teenage Girls, the Media and Self-Image Essay -- Television Females Se

Teenage Girls, the Media and Self-Image The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder. -Virginia Woolf Youth is beauty, money is beauty, hell, beauty is beauty sometimes. It's the luck of the draw, it's the natural law; it's a joke, it's a crime. -Ani Difranco The teen magazines began appearing in the fifth grade. They seemed to show up overnight, out of nowhere. At lunch or between classes, groups of girls would cluster around the desk of the mature eleven-year-old who brought in the latest issue of Seventeen. Page by page, they explored the intricacies of how to unlock the secrets of boys, makeup tips to accentuate a girl's natural beauty, and quizzes to help one find her celebrity dream date. In the span of a few weeks, every girl had a subscription to her very own teen magazine; teachers were forced to establish rules limiting the times and places that such magazines could be read. When the magazines first showed up on the scene, I was as curious as any other girl-what did these barometers of pop culture decree concerning this month's new trends? For just twenty dollars a year, we could be told how to dress and act. It was as if we were suddenly given an invitation to join the mysterious world of our older peers, full of the excitement and glamour of teenage experiences. Originally, the content of these magazines had no direct bearing on our lives; I spent my free time playing dolls or G.I. Joe with my little brother. The boys still believed we were infected with a rare strain of cooties; they had a way to go before maturing into the young men the magazines displayed, the objects of affection who would one day take us to the movies in convertibles or st... ...: NYU P, 1996. Early, Gerald. "Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant." Encounters: Essays for Exploration and Inquiry. Ed. Pat C. Hoy II and Robert DiYanni. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2000. 224-38. Geller, Jaclyn. "The Celebrity Bride as Cultural Icon."Encounters: Essays for Exploration and Inquiry. Ed. Pat C. Hoy II and Robert DiYanni. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2000. 277-281. Griffiths, Vivienne. Adolescent Girls and Their Friends: A Feminist Ethnography. Aldershot: Avebury, 1995. LeCroy, Craig Winston and Janice Daley. Empowering Adolescent Girls: Examining the Present and Building Skills for the Future with the Go Grrrls Program. New York: Norton, 2001. Mann, Judy. The Difference: Growing Up Female in America. New York: Warner, 1994. Miss America Organization, The. The Miss America Organization. 27 Oct. 2001. <http://www.missamerica.org>.