Gender Roles In Teen Magazine Research

The audience for the magazine titled, I Surveyed More Than 1,000 People to Find Out How Having a Working Mom Really Affects Kids, written by Pamela Lenehan (2016), is both scholarly and general. Lenehan shows she did research by providing statistics, which is scholarly. In addition, the magazine is also for a general audience because the amount of complex vocabulary is limited so that everyone is able to understand it. The information provided is primary in nature. In other words, Lenehan describes her own research and findings. She also gives general background information on this specific topic. Additionally, the page gives three links to other magazine articles related to this topic: 1) Gayle King: How to Let Go of Working Mom Guilt by Gayle

In society nowadays, we are surrounded and affected by the social media. Often times we turn to social media to under the world around us, and also to make sense of our identity. For instance, people are influence and come to understand their identity with the interaction they make with media. Therefore, our perception of our existence is socially constructed through the influence of media. As stated by Duke and Kreshel, “we create and perpetuate and understanding what it means to be a woman [or men] in our society.” (Duke & Kreshel, 1998). But with this overwhelming clutter of information from social media it can impact on how we view our identity. Female adolescent’s self-identity is socially constructed through the magazine which can negatively impact their perception of their own femininity. Magazine creates female ideology, giving girls insecurity about their look and weight, and finally the feminine identity is socially structured from male point of view. In this paper I will analyse the magazine Seventeen how it socially constructs negative perception of female identity. Seventeen magazine is chosen for analysis because it is one of the top selling magazines and it is highly popular amongst the adolescent girls in the United States. I restrict my analysis only on teenage girls only because they are the largest consumer of magazines compare to male. Also, adolescent is the stage in life where they try to figure out their sexuality, gender identity and where would they fit into society (Durham, 1998).

Popular culture has an undeniable influence on how society perceives itself. When examining mass culture, one must keep in mind the equilibrium between how much we, as a society, affect the way popular culture is constructed and to what extent popular culture influences the way we view ourselves and shapes our ideologies. An aspect of popular culture that may serve to greatly exemplify this theory of society as both the affecter and the affected is the genre of magazines targeted at young women. Though these publications are targeted as the representation of our society’s adolescent females, they actually have a great influence over the ways in which teens view and construct

(Heubeck 2006) For many young people, especially girls, the ideal continues to chase them as they grow into young women. Young girls begin to internalize the stereotypes and judge themselves by media’s impossible standards. The power that the media holds in impacting the lives of young girls is detrimental and eventually affects their body image, their satisfaction of their own body, and portrayal of their body as an object.

Gender and the Media by Rosalind Gill addresses gender stereotypes that are brought onto women and men through the media resulting in objectification and subjectification. Gill discusses how the representation of gender is altered as a result of the media in Western societies. Gender and the Media is aimed to address the rapid transmission of media and how those changes affect the construction of feminine and masculine gender roles in society. Gill uses her interest in the contradictions of gender construction by society, to analyze gender and the media. Using feminism as a backbone for her research, Gill and many commentators support the idea that feminist ideas are common and may even affect the media. Gender and the Media addresses multiple forms of media: postfeminism in advertising, gender in the news and journalism, and gender in magazines. Gild aims to address the construction of gender representations, elements for gender analysis, and feminist culture with Gender and the Media.

Women’s Body Image (www.wellesley.edu/Health/BodyImage) helped demonstrates the young influence of magazines. Those days when girls strive to be something they weren’t, were probably the most crucial days in body imaging. They succumbed into the pressure of looking how everyone else wants them to look. Such teeny bopper magazines sell to many young girls the idea of beauty. Teen Magazine is the princess of that royal court. In every young woman, or man’s mind, there is this longing to be desired. To be desired, you must be attractive. To be attractive, you have to look like that girl on page seventy-one in the latest Teen Magazine (Women’s Body Image).

I open up the “hottest” teen magazines on the market; Allure, Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, and Teen Vogue are a few at the top. As I flip through the magazine this holiday season I see pages of clothes that only the rich can afford, pictures of half-naked people draped over each other, articles about horoscopes and editorials talking about which teen star is the sexiest. Fashion, makeup, men, sex, celebrities, and exercising are the most popular topics I see as I peruse these magazines. These popular magazines take no time to tell me how beautiful I am, but only tell me the hundreds of things I need to do to improve. They tell me that I need more new, expensive makeup to look like a movie star. These magazines teach me how to seduce a man, but

Originally I was going to focus more on the media such as television and movies/ music videos for example music videos promoting girls in a negative way, exploiting their bodies and the way they should act. Instead I decided to focus on the print media aiming towards magazines involving the models about how teenagers compare themselves to them even though they have been photo shopped and sometimes ending up looking completely different to what they naturally would.

The quality of American television has become a national disgrace. Young women in America who are displeased with their appearance more likely then not can trace those feelings directly back to images from the mass media on television. The unrealistic representations of women that the mass media bombards young women with indicates that the television has become a source for a distorted understanding of gender roles among adolescent women. These images warp young women’s views of their own gender identity. The mass media on television should in an attempt to provide more positive gender identities for adolescent women depict women on television in more realistic ways, should stop

Teenage girls are at an impressionable time in their lives. Mass Media is a key idea in one of the factors of socialization that become important to teenagers. Teenagers look to the media for a sense of entertainment. Whether it is movies, magazines, or even some aspects of social media, teenagers get a lot of influence from the media’s message. The problem with this is the media has a specific way of doing things and can be negative to a susceptible teenage girl. Media’s way of portraying a woman can be skewed and unrealistic way from what reality is. Teenage girls then have a desire for this look or way. In this essay the three ways I will describe as to why the media can negatively affect a teenage girls body image is by showing

Every time you open a magazine or watch a commercial, individuals of both genders are wearing minimal clothing and promoting sexuality. This is especially true for women. Research conducted by Sarah Murnen and her colleagues at Kenyon College has found that over the last several years, there has been a steep increase in the pervasiveness of images in magazines that show young women in highly sexual ways. In the media, women are viewed as sex toys and captured in compromising positions. The hypersexualization of women in the media has a powerful effect on young girls. Girls grow up with an unrealistic body images. In addition, girls are turning to increasingly provocative clothing and using makeup earlier to imitate the women they seen in the media. Girls grow up trying to change themselves, not realizing that God already made them beautiful and perfect. Young men also gain a misconstrued perception of women. Rather than respecting and honoring the women in their lives, young men growing up believing that girls owe them something. In conclusion, the degradation of sex in the media is distorting normal relationship patterns for both

Al., 2013, p.152). Magazines are notorious for influencing girlhood with their catchy article titles, fashion advice, and celebrity endorsers. Girls use magazines to look to their favorite, role-model celebrity for fashion and sexuality advice. Cory, age 12, claimed she was a fan of Miley Cyrus, and noticed how she and other girls buy certain things because their favorites celebrities have them as well. This is an example of how the pervasive and powerful marketing to girls presents them with the possibility of “being” their favorite celebrity by adopting their style (Jackson et al., 2013). These are but a few girls out of millions who recognize the media’s advertising tactics, and it does not improve from

In “Low-Cut Shirts and High-Heeled Shoes: Increased Sexualization Across Time in Magazine Depictions of Girls”, Kaitlin Graff, Sarah Murnen, and Anna Krause cite a report stating that “women were underrepresented compared to men, and when they were depicted it was often in a sexualized manner.” (xxxxxx). In a study conducted by the researchers, it was discovered that hypersexualization of young girls was becoming more and more present:

How is it that on one page in a magazine the topic is focused on “Being Yourself” and on the next page it focuses on how to dress, look, and act like someone the complete opposite. If this isn’t confusing then I don’t know what is. The girls living their life out of a magazine are the ones who have the wrong interpretations of what’s most important in this world. Girls are transforming themselves to what they see portrayed in these magazines because they think those are the only images that are accepted in this world. These magazines are corrupting these young girls, making them believe that just being yourself is not enough. Many teen magazines are marketed towards girls between the ages of thirteen and fifteen, but of course, these magazines are attracting younger audiences as well. Carol Platt Liebau, who is a writer and political commentator, mentioned that some of the content is relatively innocuous teen fare, with stories about lip gloss, parties, and how to be popular. But 18 percent of magazine articles pertain either to sex, sexually

perceived identity is reinforced.” (329). To understand how a woman is viewed socially, this paper analyzes representations of the female figure on the covers of magazines, specifically. Magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Elle and Marie Claire, were analyzed as a whole in the quest to understand how this phenomenon, composed by several genres, organizes and spreads the hegemonic female representation. First, it will be argued that magazines shape identity by selling the image of the perfect