Journal #17

Pro/Con essay on Risky Business

I like magazines. It’s another portal to the “celebrity world”. It keeps me updated with all the latest fashion trends and gossip. But how many times have you flipped through a magazine and could proudly say that you are happy of who you are and what you look like? You see, most magazines have the same layout. There’s always a beautiful celebrity and short phrases on the cover that usually say things like “Get her body in 30 minutes” of “Celebrity Shares secret to perfect body!”. What do all those pictures and ads really mean? What are we suppose to feel when look at models in perfect bodies strutting down the runway? Are we supposed to feel inspired? In my opinion, because media plays such a big role in the lives of teenage girls, magazines can sometimes be hypocritical and deceiving to adolescent mind.
Imagine, flipping through a magazine and coming across an article that’s entitled “My World: Breaking the Mold”. A story, that talks about the importance of loving yourself for who you are. “…for the media to tell women there's only one size to be and one way to look is ridiculous”. Reading such an inspiring story feels great doesn’t it? Now, you flip the page again and there you see a picture of a girl who looks like she weighs 90 pounds walking down a runway. So you keep turning the pages and you see more and more pictures of these “perfect” people. How do you feel now? It’s hard to decipher what magazines are really tying to tell us. What we see around is the image that our mind retains. If all we see are images of beautiful and skinny models our eyes tell our body that, that’s what the society wants. Because we rarely see plus sized models or average teenagers on the covers of “Seventeen” or “J-14” it doesn’t seem normal. It’s not something that seems natural to us. Like they say, “monkey see, monkey do”.
What harm can a magazine with 100 pages do? A lot. You see, magazines are pretty important to a lot of people growing up, especially to young teenage girls. I will admit, that I am a victim of having a magazine fetish around the age of 13. We’re young and naïve and we probably don’t have though enough skin to not be affected by some of the stuff we see and hear. It’s not our faults. Magazines target the souls of vulnerable teens. Some of them don’t do it on purpose nor do they know how much of an affect they have on us. “Sometimes, I look in magazines and see pictures of girls that are my age and look 20 pounds skinner than me. It makes me hate my body and myself. I resent my parents for the genes that passed down to me. I feel like I’m the bad person” claims an anonymous teenager. Magazine editors were once teenagers. Why do they spend so much time enhancing the looks of their models? Magazines would be more appreciated if they would show pictures of averaged weight girl or what does it matter if she has a zit? It wouldn’t hurt to start seeing “normal” faces in a magazine.
It’s hard being a teen. Balancing school, boys, parents, hobbies, or whatever else there might be. Teen image shouldn’t be added to the list of things to worry about.