She stares out at you from the magazine, slim, sexy, bare-bellied with pouting lips and tousled hair. She knows how to dress, to apply makeup artfully, to flirt across a crowded room. She knows all about sex and how to turn a guy on. And the most important thing in the world to her is to get that special guy — her squeeze, her crush, her major lust object — to commit.
Of course, he’s only 14.
And so is she.
Welcome to the world of teen magazines. While the adult world is devising programs to raise girls’ self-esteem and combat sexual stereotyping in the schools, in supermarkets, school libraries and living rooms across America, magazines like YM, Teen and the old dowager, Seventeen, are busy reinforcing the oldest of stereotypes: that the focus of a girl’s life is to look good and snag a guy.
But it’s a stereotype with a couple of new twists. Adults who assume that these magazines are simply dishing out the old-fashioned advice they remember from their teenage years (be friendly, well-groomed and a good listener) should get ready to be, well, like, totally freaked.
“Boys are into your tresses big-time. … So if you really want to make him look twice, flip it, toss it, shake it, twist it, but do it ever so casually, as if your locks just can’t be tamed.” — YM, July, 1998.
“Find any excuse to touch him: mussed-up hair, imaginary shoulder lint. Push his shoulder if he tells a joke. Grab his hand for a second.” — Teen, October, 1998.
“I like it when girls wear tight dress shirts. They look dressed up and you still get to see their body.” — “Guy Likes/Guy Gripes,” Teen, July 1998.
And sandwiched between the obligatory photos of velvet-cheeked teen idols and the relentless ads for cosmetics, hair products and the hottest new fashion styles is explicit sexual information that could make a special prosecutor blush. In the sprightly, snappy Valley Girl dialect that adults believe passes for real teen talk, girls are advised, for instance, that, indeed, they cannot get pregnant from oral sex, anal sex or “fingering.” (“It’s his finger!”)
With the magazines popping up in supermarkets, middle-school libraries and the young-adult sections of public libraries, some adults are wondering: Is there still such a thing as too much, too soon?
Stretched out on the rug in a quiet living room in Staten Island, N.Y., Lauren (not her real name), 13, and her friends, 13-year-old Kate and 12-year-old Lisa, leafed through a stack of teen magazines, squealing at photos of Leonardo DiCaprio and scanning the ads for cosmetics, hair products and skin-care products with the skeptical eye of the smart consumer. “Didn’t this soap give your sister a rash?” Lauren asked Lisa. “False advertising!”
But when they came across an advice column entitled “Ask Anything,” Lauren grimaced. “Some of this stuff is nasty,” she said. Perhaps embarrassed by the presence of an adult, she flipped rapidly past the pages. On later examination, the column was found to contain subtitles that included “Do guys think girls should shave down there?” and “I pee when I get way turned on!”
Content like this has caused one school superintendent to pull several teen magazines from his district’s middle school library. “The children in our middle school range in age from 10 to 13,” said Paul A. Lochner, district superintendent of Hauppage, Long Island, who last winter removed YM, Seventeen and Teen from the Hauppage Middle School library over the objections of a committee that included the school librarian. “Some of them get off the bus on the first day of school carrying dolls.”
Others welcome the sexual frankness. They argue that in the hyper-sexed ’90s, the more information girls have, the better they will be able defend themselves against the specters of AIDS, sexually transmitted disease and teenage pregnancy. And if this information comes in the context of silly teen magazines, so be it.
People who want the magazines removed “think girls should be reading about Florence Nightingale,” said Barbara Bernstein, director of the Nassau County chapter of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which opposed Lochner’s actions. “But that’s not what they’re reading.”
To Professor Annie Rogers of the Harvard Project on Women’s Psychology and Girls’ Development of Harvard University’s School of Education, such arguments are missing the point.
“If explicit sexual information is delivered in the context of a romance ideology, it’s useless,” she said.
A “romance ideology,” Rogers explained, is the cultural belief that girls should learn to suppress their own feelings, needs and emotions and concentrate on the feelings, needs and emotions of boys. As an example, Rogers said that many of the girls she encounters report that they don’t know what to do when a boy visits them at home and overstays his welcome by hours. “They might want to be off with their friends and some other activity, but they’re afraid to hurt his feelings,” she said. “If they can’t deal with a situation like that, how can they deal with sex?”
A review of a dozen issues of common teen magazines shows that the “romance ideology” is alive and kicking. Headlines such as “Boys blab: What turns them off,” “Why guys fall in love” and “Real guys confess” abound, as well as regular columns that purport to tell what “guys” really like, want or feel.
And while all the magazines carefully advise girls to practice safe sex and postpone sexual intercourse until they are “ready,” it is clear that, in the meantime, a cafeteria of other sexual options are available. “Saying no to the wild thang doesn’t mean don’t touch,” promised one article, entitled “21 Sexy Alternatives to Sex.” (The 21 alternatives included extended kissing exercises that sounded suspiciously like what Catholics used to call an “occasion of sin,” a situation very, very likely to lead to transgression.)
This means that girls, at younger and younger ages, are expected to negotiate a vastly more complex sexual minefield than girls a generation before. Even during a brief interview, it became clear that Lauren and her friends had at least a superficial awareness of a gamut of sexual alternatives to intercourse. And although all three girls insisted that they themselves were sexually inexperienced, they all claimed to know girls their own age who had, for instance, already performed oral sex.
“Certainly, there is huge pressure for girls to have these kinds of sexual experiences at earlier and earlier ages,” Rogers said. “And they can get really hurt. Kids this age change boyfriends and girlfriends all the time. It’s betrayal at the highest level.”
The girls themselves seemed troubled by the sexual precocity of other girls their age. “They shouldn’t be doing things that their mothers wouldn’t approve of,” Kate said. “It ruins that buddy-buddy relationship you have with your mother.”
And the girls nodded vigorously when Lisa complained, “I hate when they have those articles about how to get along with your crush. I mean, most of us don’t even have a boyfriend. We’re only 12 or 13.”
The girls seemed to be defending a childhood that is in danger of slipping away too fast. Neil Postman, professor of communication arts and sciences at New York University, said it’s a realistic fear. In his book, “The Disappearance of Childhood,” Postman noted that in modern society the distinctions between adults and children, from dress styles, eating habits and entertainment choices to sexual behavior, have become blurred. He attributed this blurring to the onslaught of the information age, which made it impossible for adults to keep what Postman called “adult secrets” about sexuality, violence and adult vulnerabilities from children.
Postman said it was these secrets that made possible the existence of childhood as an extended period of protection and education. And in an age when children are a major consumer market and the target of thousands of television shows and advertisements, parents and schools have been replaced by the media as children’s primary source of information about the world. A gradual and careful introduction to the adult world, in sync with a child’s developing curiosity, is impossible.
“Our children are seen as a market to which things can be sold,” said David Elkind, professor of child development at Tufts University and author of “The Hurried Child.” But Elkind said it is too late for parents to shield their children from too much information. The cat, it seems, is already out of the bag.
“So much of this material is available in other domains that banning it from the schools seems kind of silly,” Elkind said. Rather than attempting to censor the material available in school libraries, he said, parents should help their children deal with it.
“I would rather just sit down with a 12-year-old and read the magazine and talk about it,” he said. “I think this is a much healthier approach than simply banning it, because that just makes it more attractive.”
But Catherine Prinsell, a clinical psychologist in Glen Ridge, N.J., said this puts too much responsibility on the parents. “Some parents may not have the necessary insight or the knowledge or desire to sit down and convey their moral values to their children,” she said. “Maybe part of society’s job is to help them do this, but society isn’t assuming the responsibility.”
Mary Pipher, author of “Reviving Ophelia,” a best-selling book on girls’ self-esteem, agrees. “Even if somehow you heroically manage to process this information with your own child . . . they live in a world of children who have not been so protected,” she said. She pointed out that other countries, such as Canada and several European nations, have far more restrictions on materials and advertisements directed at children.
Even without government intervention, Pipher said, parents and schools can still ensure that girls have access to healthier alternatives, such as New Moon, a Minnesota-based magazine that is entirely edited by girls 8 to 14. She said schools and parents can also promote “resistance training” among children, teaching them to be aware and critical of the messages they are receiving from magazines, television and advertising.
Of course, some people still believe in plain old censorship, at least for some children.
“If I had a little sister, I wouldn’t want her to be reading all that sex stuff,” Lauren said. “Little kids shouldn’t have to worry about stuff like that until they’re,” she hesitated, her face screwed up in doubt, “our age, at least.”
