Teen magazines play important role in adolescent girls' lives

Volume 16, No. 3, Spring/Summer 2001

Debra Merskin

by Debra Merskin, Associate Professor

Something happens to girls during adolescence. Not the obvious changes you and I might think of… like getting a first bra or pimples. Rather, something happens to the self-esteem of girls when they go through adolescence. Prior to this, girls typically live large —responding to the world with self-assurance, enthusiasm, and clarity. But once these changes take hold, a girl’s image of her self and her place in the world diminishes. Whereas boys are encouraged to experience life widely and to view bodily changes as signs of maturity, girls become less confident in their bodies and abilities. Although scholars such as Carol Gilligan wrote about this crisis back in the 1980s, it wasn’t until the 1994 publication of Ophelia Rising by Mary Pipher that the subject of girls’ crisis of identity came to popular attention.

Personal experience and professional curiosity led me to investigate the impact of advertising on girls’ body image and identity. I consistently found that teen girl magazines play a central role in the formation of a young girl’s identity. How to look, live, and be liked by boys are lessons taught in teen girl magazines.

The magazines take advantage of the process of comparison—comparison with other girls in terms of popularity, physical appearance, and dating. These magazines become a sort of training manual and are filled with stories of revenge, and embarrassment; and of course, advertising.

"…for every social or fashion faux pas there is an advertisement for a product that can solve the dilemma."

Seventeen magazine reaches more girls more often than does any other teen magazine. Teen and preteen readers are eager and interested in the world around them and magazines create a sense of community where girls can read about other girls and compare their lives. At an age when there is a natural rejection of parental advice and an increasing valuation of peer input, a magazine can serve a girl well in her search for what’s right, wrong, valued, labeled, and trusted in the eyes of her peers. The magazines are divided into sections that present different kinds of problems and it is no coincidence that for every social or fashion faux pas there is an advertisement for a product that can solve the dilemma.

One of the most popular parts of Seventeen and other teen girl magazines is the so-called "agony" column. In Seventeen this is called "Trauma-Rama," a section that presents letters from real readers revealing the most embarrassing/disgusting/humiliating experience they had. These letters are the subject of a study by doctoral student Kumi Silva and me. After looking at more than 100 of these letters, we found that most dealt with situations where a teen girl was embarrassed in front of or by a girl’s "crush." In other letters, a girl is embarrassed in front of her crush’s parents, in front of classmates, or is the victim of a practical joke.

Reading the "Trauma-Rama" section of Seventeen provides a safe place for a girl to vicariously experience the humiliations and embarrassments of other girls while simultaneously learning lessons about what is good, bad, popular, or unpopular in teen society. Ultimately, our research showed that these columns reinforce traditional and stereotypic roles for girls, show the body to be a site of betrayal and risk, and emphasize that the most important concern for a girl (besides how she looks) is how to be interesting to boys.

Self-deferential behavior was rewarded in the columns, whereas independence led to social ostracism. What this suggests is that girls continue to be socialized into a culture that values what boys (and eventually men) think over what a girl may believe about herself. Ultimately girls learn that male and peer approval are the most important arbiters of worth. This perspective keeps girls constantly on self-patrol, looking for anything showing about her body, any glaring faux pas in terms of clothes or makeup, and anything that might contradict her perceived "fit" into teen culture. Self-esteem is thereby dependent not upon what a girl does or achieves, but rather what others think of her.

The current study, “Trauma-Rama: Confession Columns in Teen Girl Magazines,” will be presented by Debra Merskin and Kumi Silva at the May 2001 International Communication Association Annual Conference in Washington, D.C., and has been submitted to Sex Roles: A Journal of Research.

FRONT PAGE

flash@jcomm.uoregon.edu