Monthly arts and media column

On the shelves of your newsagent or supermarket are plenty of pink magazine front covers aiming to catch the eye of young girls.

They are mostly covered with brand names such as Disney, Barbie and Bratz and littered with the names of celebrity teens. There is free plastic jewellery, sparkly purses and eye shadow attached to their front covers beneath glamorous looking girls with swooshy hairstyles and shimmery blusher. Barbie and Go Girl! magazines are both aimed at girls as young as seven, yet they claim to offer ‘fashion and beauty tips’ as a key part of their content.

Cause for concern

Anyone at all concerned with the early sexualisation of pre-teen girls will be worried by how early girls are being targeted with this sort of content, even if the pages are generally filled with letters about pets and friendship. Interestingly, it is the BBC who is responsible for the bulk of this output. BBC Magazines is the biggest publisher of magazines for the pre-teen market in the UK. It is through their collaboration with Disney, Hit Entertainment and Ragdoll that we have so many branded magazines from TV and film.

Christian alternative?

There are many stories of Christian editors who have attempted to provide something different for young girls. Yet their hard work often goes up in the smoke of poor distribution and low sales. However, having already run for over two years, it seems as if Special, a magazine for girls aged 9-12, may well last longer.

I had not seen Special before when I saw it by the till in a Christian bookshop and grabbed it as an impulse buy while waiting for my card to go through. I was amazed that it looked like a normal girly pink magazine and even had a key ring and sticker giveaway pack attached to the front, all for £1.85 which is cheaper than most branded children’s magazines. The fonts and style were a bit desktop publishing but generally it looked very professional and the cover lines were intriguing: ‘Why did God make me so ugly?’ and ‘Beauty or Beastly…which are you?’ Most importantly the cover girl, aged 14, did not have a crazy hairstyle or make up. She looked fun and normal, like many of the girls I know.

Beauty

The issue that I had picked up, number 13, was devoted to the theme of beauty. Not the image-obsessed styles-and-make-up of Barbie and Bratz but the less visited area of inner beauty. At the top of the Health and Beauty page is the full text of 1 Timothy 2:9 that begins, ‘I want women to be modest in their appearance’. It slams ‘beautiful celebrities’ whose lives and loves are often less than beautiful and reminds readers of the loneliness that follows those who gain their friends and their money using their looks. In fact, all the articles led the reader to consider God’s view of them as being ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’. The world’s lies about beauty were exposed and the wonder of God’s creation revelled in.

Too ‘fundamentalist’?

The magazine hopes to ‘help enlighten, empower, equip and encourage girls to live a life pleasing to God’. It carries a lot of the same ‘fave’ and ‘cringe!’ lingo of the pre-teen culture but its inclusions and omissions speak of a dependence on the Bible for wisdom and authority. It has even drawn criticism for being ‘too fundamentalist and hardline’ from a blogger on christianmums.com. The editor, Dr. Laura Richardson, is unrepentant: ‘I honestly take that as a compliment’, she says. ‘God’s mandate for Special magazine is to be a relevant, unashamedly Bible-based magazine and I won’t be changing the format to please a few worldly parents’.

I must confess that I have not done an extensive survey among 9-12-year-olds to see what they think. Yet the reader letters and trendier articles seem to authenticate its appeal to this age group. The publication is wonderfully devoid of adverts which is refreshing in the extreme, replaced by a bit of in-text endorsement.

Congratulations

I could nit-pick about a few aspects of the magazine, but I’m not going to do it here. Instead I want to congratulate Laura Richardson and her team on the sacrificial effort that they are no doubt making to fill girls’ minds with the truth. This magazine will help pre-teens to learn about the God who made them by distracting them from the lies that others wish to sell them.

Eleanor Margesson

Sadly, since this article was written, it has been discovered that the issue Eleanor reviewed was the last one. The publishers have since closed down because of financial difficulties.

This magazine is SPECIAL