Teen Girl Magazine Tips — And a Girl Who Is Living By Them

Posted on June 27, 2010 at 3:58 pm

Eight years ago, I wrote an article for the Chicago Tribune about magazines for teen girls.

Like Cosmo Girl, Twist, Teen and other magazines aimed at teenage girls, Seventeen strikes an uneasy balance between being empowering and being trashy. This is the result of another uneasy balance between their two constituencies, readers and advertisers. Girls want to attract boys. Advertisers want to avoid controversy.

The magazines are filled with tips on dating, fashion, makeup, managing stress, decorating and hair. After all, those of us with two X chromosomes love tips. Women secretly believe that all problems can be solved, usually with the female equivalent of duct tape: twist-ties, scrunchies, nail polish remover and cucumber slices. We love tips that make us feel like we are improving anything.

The magazines have tips on more than good grooming and accessorizing. Cosmo Girl’s internship survival guide has first-class information and lots of good advice about finding a job, acing the interview and demonstrating professionalism and commitment in the office.

An eighteen-year-old named Jamie Keiles has undertaken something she calls The Seventeen Project. She is living her life by the magazine’s tips for one month and documenting the results online. This will be good practice for college; the site notes that she will be studying economics and gender studies at the University of Chicago in the fall of 2010. Selena-Gomez-On-The-Cover-Of-Seventeen-Magazine-Prom-Issue-2010.jpg
Keiles is sharp and funny about herself as well as the magazine. She is pleased with the results of a hairstyle she tries from the magazine until she looks at it again and finds that it was voted “not” by the magazine’s readers. I loved her comment on some of the dresses in the special prom issue: “Seventeen calls this trend ‘High-Low’ but I think ‘Mullet Dress would be a more fitting name.” She has some very thoughtful comments on the glossy magazine’s portrayal of race, gender, sexual orientation, and sex. “Teen mags often do better in the race department than their adult counterparts, including women of a variety of races and even offering some pretty level-headed advice on interracial dating. Still, out of curiosity, I wondered exactly how the racial content of Seventeen broke down. So I counted!” Keiles was pleased to find that the races of the models in the magazine were proportionate to the races in the US census, with the significant exception of Hispanics. But she astutely noted that there was more racial variety in the females than the males. “It seems like Seventeen’s idea of female beauty is more varied, while the races that are considered attractive for males are extremely more limited.” What could have been a stunt is an engaging, impressive, and nuanced assessment of the magazine, its advertisers, and its readers. We worry so much about media messages and the way they influence children and teenagers. It is a pleasure to see this kind of objectivity and analysis from a young woman. I hope she gets a lot of readers and I look forward to her next project.

The Other Toy Story

Posted on June 22, 2010 at 12:22 pm

It’s a shame that a movie about the enduring pleasures of imagination and re-purposing and recycling treasured toys is also one long infomercial for more than 300 new products specifically tied to “Toy Story 3.” Susan Linn of the Center for a Commercial-Free Childhood writes:

A search for toys licensed by the Toy Story franchise brings up more than 300 items on ToysRus.com, most of which squelch exactly the kind of creative play the film celebrates. One business writer described the number of Toy Story 3 products at Target as “jaw dropping.”

…

It’s well known that children play less creatively with media linked toys and with kits–but even more damaging are the Toy Story 3 video games for Nintendo, Sony PS3, Nintendo DS and X box. And of course, there’s the preschool educational media market: V-tech has the MobiGo Toy Story 3 Learning Software for children as young as three, and Leapfrog has learn-to-read digital story books. Never mind that screen media already occupies, on average, about 32 hours a week in the lives of two-to- five year olds at the expense of the kind of hands-on play that is so revered in the film.

It’s ironic that the real threat to toys like Woody, Buzz and the gang is not that the child who loved them grows up. It’s that, in real life, companies like Disney/Pixar have commercialized children’s leisure time to such an extent that a preschooler who might be the beneficiary of outgrown creative playthings is likely to have no idea what to do with them.

A Useless and Stupid Product for Expectant Mothers

Posted on June 18, 2010 at 3:56 pm

Children should be exposed to music as early and as often as possible and there is nothing wrong with pregnant women doing the best they can to surround themselves with soothing and beautiful sounds for their own benefit and the baby’s. But this new product, Sound Beginnings and its competitors are simply idiotic. They are belts for a pregnant woman to strap to her belly so that she can pipe music and other sounds directly to the baby from her own MP3 player.
Research does show that babies hear in utero. But that does not mean that they need some contraption to provide more benefit more than they get from what is going on around their mothers as they conduct their lives. If you want the baby to hear music, play some. If you want the baby to hear voices, talk. There is no data to show that the baby, surrounded by amniotic fluid inside the uterus, can hear any better via a belly strap than via the ambient environment as conducted through the mother’s skeletal system. There is no evidence to support any benefit whatsoever from this product other than for the companies prying more money away from expectant parents and their families and giving them even more anxiety and homework.
Additional stupidities: “The speakers are made to keep the total sound output at a low level for babies with the loudest it can go at 85 decibels. Furthermore, the speakers are encased in padded vinyl which almost eliminates the vibrations making it even safer for little ears.” Again, no data whatever to support this claim of what is or is not safe “for little ears” or at what stage of development the ears are functional. And it comes in three colors, black, white, and a pinkish they call “nude” — an offensive use of this term in a world where pregnant women and their babies have many different skin tones.
The people who sell this junk should be ashamed of themselves, as should the bogus organizations that have given it “awards:” Disney’s Iparenting media award, Mom’s Best Award, and the Parent Tested Parent Approved Media Award. All three of these “organizations” are money-making semi-scams that charge fees from products submitted for “awards.” Note that there are no awards from any educational, obstetric, or pediatric associations.
I remember a visit to my obstetrician when I was pregnant with our first child. The doctor said that the baby would recognize our voices when he was born from hearing them so frequently in utero. “Well,” my husband said, “the baby will probably recognize Cary Grant’s voice, too. She watches a lot of movies!” To this day, our son will tease me when he hears Cary Grant’s voice by saying, “Why does that sound so familiar?” And just think, even without a belly strap that protected his little ears.

Can Drunkenness Be Funny Anymore?

Posted on June 16, 2010 at 3:59 pm

One of the many unpleasant elements of The Killers was the light-hearted portrayal of one of the main characters as a substance abuser. Catherine O’Hara plays the mother of Katherine Heigl’s character. Her role is one drunk joke after another. And there is never a suggestion that anyone in the family has any concerns or resentment or sadness about the fact that she is perpetually drinking, tipsy, or both.

A few decades ago, the funny drunk was a comic staple. Dean Martin and Foster Brooks created entire personas based on an “I’ll drink to that” approach to just about everything. (In real life, both drank very little.) Lee Marvin, best known for playing tough guys in war films and westerns, won an Oscar for a funny drunk role as a broken-down gunslinger (and his identical twin brother) in “Cat Ballou.” Another character introduces himself by saying that he is drunk and a sight gag shows a horse that has had too much to drink.

Lucille Ball had comic drunk scenes (after inadvertently imbibing) in both her television series (the “Vitameatavegamin” episode) and the movie “Yours, Mine, and Ours.” Many serious actors had comedy intoxication scenes on their resumes, from James Stewart (another Oscar-winner, for “The Philadelphia Story”) to Charles Laughton (directed by David Lean in “Hobson’s Choice”). Perhaps most surprising, these kinds of scenes and characters were even found in children’s movies like “Dumbo” and “Aristocats.”

But these days, with heightened awareness of the consequences of drunk driving and the visibility of celebrities who participate in 12 step programs or stay in rehab facilities like the Betty Ford Center, drunkenness, alcoholism, and other substance abuse problems are hard to make funny. In the case of “The Killers, it’s just evidence of the same laziness and bad judgment that makes the rest of the film so painful to watch. But even the deftest 21st century comedies may not be able to find a way to make comedy based on drinking too much work. I am pretty sure that’s progress.

Little Orphan Annie Says Goodbye

Posted on June 13, 2010 at 4:20 pm

The sun’ll come out tomorrow, but Little Orphan Annie won’t be there to see it come up in the morning. After 86 years, the daily comic strip about the plucky redhead and her dog, Sandy has come to an end.

Harold Gray created the strip and was its writer and artist from 1924 to 1968. During the Depression, the story of the feisty, independent-spirited orphan captivated newspaper readers. It became a popular radio show and Annie merchandise included everything from books and dolls to piggy banks, tea sets, board games, and, as anyone who has ever watched “A Christmas Story” knows, a decoder ring. Decades later, a musical based on the comic strip was one of the biggest box office hits in Broadway history. Several of its young stars went on to careers in show business including Sarah Jessica Parker. There is even a documentary called Life After Tomorrow about the girls who played Annie and the orphans and what happened to them while they were in the show and after they outgrew the role.

The musical later became a movie with Albert Finney as Annie’s adoptive father Daddy Warbucks and Carol Burnett as the cruel Miss Hannigan, and was remade for television. In 1977, Leonard Starr of “On Stage” took over the strip, retitled “Annie.” Under his direction, it received the National Cartoonist Society’s Story Comic Strip Award in 1983 and 1984. Starr retired in 2000 and the cartoonists who followed were not able to continue at his level. The fading appeal of comic strips and the struggles of print newspapers led the syndicate to announce its cancellation.

Little Orphan Annie survived the Depression, WWII, the Cold War, Watergate, and the dot.com bubble. She began just four years after American women got the vote and six years after the end of World War I. Gray, Starr, and all those who worked on the strip created a cultural touchstone that will continue through future generations. A junior version of the musical is performed frequently in elementary schools. Somewhere, someone is singing “Tomorrow.”

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