The stakes are high, for she believes that, by purchasing the “right” beautifying products and clothing, she will be more popular at school-and even find a little romance. By the age of 12 she may have added romance novels to her reading repertoire, gossiping with her friends about who had “done it” while passing around a copy of Judy Blume's classic teen romance story, Forever . . . in which the well-read portions of the book automatically open to the steamy scenes. These magazines and novels were an important influence on many North American girls' understandings of what it meant to be girls, and on our dreams for our lives as women.
Publications created for adolescent girls are incredibly popular. For instance, the classic teen romance Sweet Valley High stories and their offshoot series were distributed internationally in 25 languages with 250 million copies printed (Schoenberger 2002). Seventeen magazine will distribute over 4 million magazines in 2007, according to the latest semi-annual publication numbers (SRDS 2006). In schools, girls socialize by circulating and discussing storylines, advice, and fashion found in adolescent publications (Cherland 1994; Durham 1999). Although they are marketed toward women, teenage girls also read publications such as Cosmopolitan, Mademoiselle, or Glamour (Currie 1999). If simply because of the number of adolescent girls purchasing and reading them, these publications deserve scrutiny. Although dismissed by some as mindless entertainment, these pieces of literature have ideological implications. Millet (1970) stated that the way women are represented in literature influences how they define themselves as subjects in their own lives. Readers often do not critically evaluate these texts or question the patriarchal, capitalistic premises upon which dating and clothing advice is based. Therefore, this essay will discuss how mass media serves as an important communicator of social norms by reviewing themes related to sexuality, romance, and consumption that commonly appear in Western publications created for and by adolescent girls.
One important goal of feminist scholarship is generating knowledge of how gender is defined through cultural practices. Dow (1996) argued that critical media analysis is not an effort to create the correct, best, or most widely accepted audience interpretations of a text. Rather, “. . . criticism is an argumentative activity in which the goal is to persuade the audience that their knowledge of a text will be enriched if they choose to see a text as the critic does”. Understanding themes within teen publications increases knowledge of how gender and consumer norms are produced, reproduced, and challenged. Many scholars have conducted analyses of novels and magazines marketed to and created by adolescent girls. These researchers work under the assumption that these publications inform, rather than dictate, readers' understandings of personal identity and social values. Although mass media may not always create ideas, they reconstruct and broadly circulate particular systems of meanings pertaining to gender and consumption. Feminist-inspired media challenge some of these ideas. Therefore, textual critics examine what role media play in both facilitating and opposing dominant ideologies. Given this, textual analyses can provide insight into prevailing ideas of femininity and, equally important, spaces of resistance.
