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by Adrienne A. Lovelund

The beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.
-Virginia Woolf

Youth is beauty, money is beauty, hell, beauty is beauty sometimes. It's the luck of the draw, it's the natural law; it's a joke, it's a crime.
-Ani Difranco

The 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 around 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 unlock the secrets of boys, makeup tips to accentuate a girl's natural beauty, and quizzes to help one find her celebrity dream date. In the span of a few weeks, every girl had a subscription to her very own teen magazine; teachers were forced 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 month's 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 mysterious world of our older peers, full of the excitement and glamour of teenage experiences. Originally, the content of these magazines had no direct bearing on our lives; I spent my free 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 young men the magazines displayed, the objects of affection who would one day take us to the movies in convertibles or stare in awe as they would recognize the new shade of eye shadow we would expertly apply.

Yet, I watched as the magazines slowly infiltrated our pre-pubescent bubble of safety. Girls began wearing a bit of makeup to classes, the kind they could get away with under the watchful eye of our Catholic school teachers. Hair was styled in the fashion of magazine models. To the dismay of school officials, the skirts of jumpers were shortened with the help of mothers, excited that their daughters were finally "growing up" enough to pay attention to physical appearance. I recall shaving my legs for the first time later that year.

This incident, typical of pre-teen American girls in the early 1990s, was my first conscious encounter with the power of the media over the details of individual lives. Mass communication allows for the exchange of information instantaneously and thoroughly so that no one is immune to absorbing the messages of the media. It is no secret that the media has a profound influence on the ways in which we view ourselves as members of American society, neatly defining each person by gender, race, and economic status.

In his essay "Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant," Gerald Early dissects the Miss America Pageant's role in creating his young daughters' perceptions of themselves as African-American females. While the author has good intentions, the issues of gender and race that he chooses to tackle in this essay are far too large and important to limit to one annual television program; there is much more information available on the issue of learned gender roles that agrees with his findings and that supports these findings from different angles. From this information we get a sense of the pervasive influence it has on the lives of women, both young and old.
Although Early could have used a better example for his argument, his mention of the pageant's influence on American culture is not unfounded; the pageant is heavily supported by donors, who contributed over $40 million for tuition scholarships in 2000 (The Miss America Organization 2). According to the official Miss America website, the pageant has been an important part of Americana since its beginnings in 1921:

Its national scope and longevity alone has had an effect on our nation's conception of womanhood, providing an important register of significant social and cultural trends in American society. [. . .] It has reflected ideas about national identity, community, and moral standards, as well as beauty, femininity, and the roles of women. (1)

Interestingly, for an organization that claims to have "maintained a tradition for many decades of empowering American women to achieve their personal and professional goals, while providing a forum in which to express their opinions, talent and intelligence," five of the six powerful executive staff members of the organization are male (The Miss America Organization 3). While the level of the pageant's influence on young women in comparison to other television programming is highly debatable (the contest is annual while most television dramas air at least once a week), the pageant is part of a matrix of media, advertisements, magazines, music, and so forth -that profits off an image of the ideal woman by selling this image back to the American public.

Early describes the pageant as exactly such an entity: "the worst sort of 'Americanism,' the soft smile of sex and the hard sell of toothpaste and hair dye ads wrapped in the dreamy ideological gauze of 'making it through one's own effort'" (225-6). Like teen magazines, the pageant presents image after image of beautiful youths, heralding this small percentage of women as the ultimate ideal toward which their peers should strive. In this sense the pageant was the perfect choice as an example of total bombardment of the victim (the audience) with both stereotypical images of femininity and advertisements that feed off these images. As authors James E. Cote and Anton L. Allahar note, gender inequality still exists in modern American society because it is profitable; "exaggerated conceptions of gender" presented to young people turn impressionable children into big business" (85). Craig Winston LeCroy and Janice Daley have written texts together for a program called Go Grrrls, which seeks to raise the self-esteem of girls through activities that encourage learning and creativity. Through their work with girls, LeCroy and Daley have found it is impossible to "prevent a child from hearing all the myriad messages that reinforce stereotyped notions about girls and women" (17). Through exposure to media which, like the Miss America Pageant, stresses the importance of physical appearance as a major component of what defines a woman, girls are taught at an early age to become consumers of their own exploitation, to accept these manufactured images of the female as truth.

Girls are exposed to gender stereotyping as young children through the fairy-tales they are told, the toys they are given to play with, and the television shows they watch, all of which foster a traditional image of the female as nurturer and object of desire. Pre-teens are faced with a new challenge, as articulated by Vivienne Griffiths:

As girls move into adolescence, they not only experience bodily changes, they become sexual beings. Girls are also heavily sexualised and eroticised, particularly in the media, although at the same time there is often a "moral panic" around the expression of girls' sexuality [. . .] Such cultural contradictions make this a difficult time for young women. (152)

Girls mature a few years earlier than boys, and their changing bodies are often a source of shame or embarrassment because they quickly become radically different from their male peers. While they are still children on mental and emotional levels, pre-teen girls develop the bodies of women. With the acquisition of an adult female body comes the responsibility of learning how to use this new body to act like a woman.

Suddenly, girls are dropped in the middle of the ongoing battle between conflicting messages of what is expected of females: women must be, as Jaclyn Geller states, "both virgin and coquette, embodying the modern ideology of femininity, described by scholar Joseph Boone as 'a paradoxical combination of chaste innocence, sexual overtures, and economic opportunism' " (278). This confusion leaves girls vulnerable to media influence specifically designed to provide a sense of fellowship and unity to pre-teens and adolescents. Cote and Allahar explain this phenomenon:

Young people are hungry to have their emotions, identity, and tastes defined and redefined for them by the massive industries that market fashion, music, art, and other consumer items. These goods all have in common an identity-conferring quality. To be "someone," to be "in," one has to have or consume a particular item. (26)

Girls deal with the dichotomy of images set before them as best they can, seeking camaraderie with other girls by conforming to media standards. There is a comfort in looking like everyone else, a feeling of being accepted as an equal instead of ostracized for being strange-looking. Consequently, young girls literally buy into the latest fashions, thus continuing the cycle of consumerism.

As Early illustrated with the Miss America Pageant, advertising is a staple of all influential media. Advertisements reinforce the images presented by the media; they are targeted to appeal to a specific consumer audience. With 2.5 million issues circulated annually (Cote & Allahar 92), teen magazines are perhaps the most dangerous example of media that first pulls in a target audience and then insidiously exposes this audience to specially formulated advertisements. They are, as Judy Mann states, "a teenage reader's guide to Barbieism" (177) in that they are completely preoccupied with exploiting the exterior presentation of the female. Early describes the ideal girl in teenage magazines to be "the bourgeois girl who can do everything, [and who] is completely self-absorbed with her leisure" (235); she is self-centered and concentrates her energies on looking and acting as she is expected.

Photos and stories in teen magazines instruct girls in the fashionable way to look and act, thus selling products and making profit. A study done by Ellis Evans and associates in the early nineties found that over one-third of the content of teen magazines focuses on fashion and beauty issues while the remainder of the magazine addressed such topics as food, decorating, and dating/relationships (LeCroy & Daley 15). Almost one-half of the space in these magazines was given to advertisements, fifty percent of which sold products such as makeup and clothing that focus on improving outward appearance (Cote & Allahar 90). Evans's statistics reflect the strict, trendy definition of beauty that permeates pop culture and preoccupies teenage girls, barely escaping childhood, who are forced to make sense of contradictions between their present realities and the phony ideology presented in the media.

Teen magazines may be advertised as mainly appealing to teenagers, but their self-implied wealth of knowledge concerning the teenage girl's lifestyle automatically attracts the attention and respect of those a few years younger, eager to feel older and more mature. As illustrated by my own early experiences with teen magazines, young girls are transformed into consumers overnight by making self-worth a physical commodity that can be easily obtained through the purchase of a product, just at the point in their development when self-esteem is most elusive. As he discusses the pressures on his pre-teen daughters to conform, Early almost addresses the issue of teen magazines. At the end of his essay he employs a quotation from the teen magazine Cosmopolitan Girl to describe the essence of the Miss America Pageant, which he cites as a prime example of "America's vehement preoccupation with innocence, [. . .] the darkness, righteous rage, and bitter depth of its own daughters" (235). Like teen magazines, the pageant represents the fixation of Americans and the American media on the unobtainable dichotomy of the woman as both experienced lover and naive child.

Many females will strive for and fail to obtain this unrealistic dichotomy throughout their entire lives, to the advantage, of course, of the corporations that produce such images. These corporations strive to convince teens that they need beauty products or high-heeled shoes to be beautiful and feminine, and therefore worthwhile human beings. This belief becomes truth, and the companies that produce such products profit off girls as they grow into women and continue to buy the products that make them feel like women; once girls learn to look to the media for instructions on how to dress and act, they are likely to continue this dependency throughout their adult lives.

Teen magazines bear a striking resemblance to women's magazines, which also focus on traditional feminine images and act largely as one long sales pitch. Jaclyn Geller analyzes the images of male and female presented in the February 1997 issue of People magazine in "The Celebrity Bride as Cultural Icon." This issue of the magazine was devoted to celebrating various celebrity weddings in honor of Valentine's Day. As with other magazines geared toward women, People presents its celebrity weddings as playgrounds for materialistic femininity. Geller notes:

People's equation of weddings with femininity is clearly demonstrated by its section on bridal dresses. That there is no equivalent portion of the wedding issue devoted to grooms' attire suggests that the wedding is a day on which the woman alone casts an image of herself through her fashion choices. (279-80)

People adds its voice to the chorus of other magazines for women that turn events as personally significant as the wedding into fashion shows. As a teenage girl who has just escaped her final prom season, it has occurred to me that this passage by Geller bears an uncanny resemblance to the issues of teen magazines printed a few months before the prom season begins. Like the celebrity weddings issue, the prom issue focuses on the colors and styles of fashionable dresses and accessories, presenting the prom as an excuse for the woman to dress like royalty and spend almost as much money as a princess would on such an occasion. Both the wedding and the prom are rites-of-passage for the participants, benchmarking the beginnings of more mature lifestyles. Ideally, these events celebrate unity-the unity of the bride and groom and their families, the unity of groups of high school friends and of the junior or senior class. However, fashion magazines water down the sanctity of such gatherings, shifting the focus away from the celebration of unity and growth and onto the physical appearances of the women involved. The woman becomes a pretty object, an accessory to her male counterpart, at the very same occasion on which those involved are celebrating their solidarity. The following statement by Geller can be applied to both weddings and proms in relation to the magazines' treatments of women and girls, respectively:

The wedding codifies our notions of sexual identity, enshrining an image of the contemporary woman as domestic, delicate, sexually coy, romance-driven and maternal. To view celebrity marriage photographs knowingly is to perceive the generative power of such texts. (280-81)

The twisted interpretation of proms and weddings by teen and women's magazines evolves from the same images of feminine perfection that the media thrusts upon American women on a daily basis. The introduction of this process through teen magazines is a cunning marketing strategy that prepares young women to more readily accept the notion of the beautiful bride as they become adult women.

While it can be argued that, as its website proudly announces, "the Miss America Organization provides young women with a vehicle to further their personal and professional goals and instills a spirit of community service through a variety of unique nationwide community-based programs" (4), the means to these ends must be questioned and criticized. The pageant is not simply a community service organization, but part of a larger body of media whose appendages work with one another to create a supreme definition of beauty and then profit from girls and women who are lured into its grasp. Because idealistic images of women have permeated every aspect of pop culture, young girls cannot be completely protected from exposure to such propaganda. LeCroy and Daley teach parents of girls involved in the Go Grrrls program that the only way to help their daughters develop healthy conceptions of themselves and women is "to equip [. . .] girls with the knowledge that these negative stereotypes do exist, to encourage them to carefully analyze the messages they receive, and to teach them ways to think critically [. . .] [about] depictions of their gender that they find unrealistic and offensive" (17). Early reaches a similar conclusion in his essay, calling on African-Americans to teach their children to have pride and find comfort in their own beauty without comparing themselves to a white ideal of beauty. Like LeCroy and Daley, he believes that actively criticizing stereotypes will allow children to see that such stereotypes are merely illusions. "Race pride," Early argues, "is transcending your degradation while learning to live in it and with it" (236). Women must find within themselves a similar pride in their own beauty without striving to become the manufactured ideal woman.

Recognizing the danger of idealized beauty is the first step toward abolishing it. Girls and women who are indoctrinated with images of idealized beauty begin to see themselves as flawed if they do not look like the images they see. This leads to innumerable mental and physical problems, some of which include low self-esteem, eating disorders, anxiety, and depression. When women lose respect for themselves, they may fall into self-destructive behaviors, like drug and alcohol abuse, and they may not fight back when in an abusive relationship with a man. Businesses that prey on women through the consistent use of images of idealized beauty are direct contributors to these problems, although they claim they are just trying to sell their products. Corporations should be held responsible for this guerilla warfare on the minds of girls and women; they rob the lives of so many females of their pride and individuality.

Works Cited
Cote, James E. and Anton L. Allahar. Generation On Hold: Coming of Age in the Late Twentieth Century. New York: NYU P, 1996.

Early, Gerald. "Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant." Encounters: Essays for Exploration and Inquiry. Ed. Pat C. Hoy II and Robert DiYanni. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2000. 224-38.

Geller, Jaclyn. "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 Feminist 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: Growing Up Female in America. New York: Warner, 1994.
Miss America Organization, The. The Miss America Organization. 27 Oct. 2001. <http://www.missamerica.org>.

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