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

Teenage Girls, the Media and Self-Image The steady of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.-Virginia Woolf offspring is beauty, money is beauty, hell, beauty is beauty sometimes. Its the luck of the draw, its the natural law its a joke, its a crime.-Ani DifrancoThe 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 slightly 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 open the secrets of boys, makeup tips to accentuate a girls natural beauty, and quizzes to help one arrest her celebrity dream date. In the span of a few weeks, every(prenominal) girl had a subscription to her very own teen magazine teachers were agonistic 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 months 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 secluded world of our older peers, full of the excitement and glamour of teenage experiences. Originally, the message of these magazines had no direct bearing on our lives I spent my pardon 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 schoolboyish 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 the States Pageant. Encounters Essays for exploration and Inquiry. Ed. spue C. Hoy II and Robert DiYanni. Boston McGraw-Hill, 2000. 224-38.Geller, Jacly n. 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 womens liberationist 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 of opinion Growing Up Female in America. New York Warner, 1994.Miss America Organization, The. The Miss America Organization. 27 Oct. 2001. <http//www.missamerica.org.