20 years ago I was 14 and an addict. I couldn’t get enough of Just Seventeen magazine. Every week it would arrive with the newspaper through our letterbox and I couldn’t do anything else until I’d read it all. When I went to camp one summer, I even insisted to my parents that they had to send it to me through the post and by the time my obsession was at an end, I had amassed hundreds of copies in my chest of drawers.
What is the attraction of the girlie magazine? Every month a new collection of glossy magazines hits the shelves of your local newsagent, aimed squarely at teenagers between the ages of 12-16. This month I bought the pink and yellow Bliss magazine, which was offering me three free nail polishes, a nail file and a set of false stick-on nails to use it all on. All of which would suggest that this is a magazine aimed at young girls wanting a fun activity for their next sleepover. However, the front cover follows design conventions that are used for fashion magazines aimed at older female readers, such as Red and Instyle. There is a glamorous cover girl, in this case Britney Spears, pictured behind provocative and sensational cover lines. ‘I went to the loo and had a baby!’, ‘Six steps to a thong-tastic bum!’, ‘My classmates don’t know I’m a prostitute!’. Tantalising stuff, particularly when the largest cover line on the page screams ‘Get Sexy Now!’. All of which begs the question, what are these magazines coming to?
Before you get too hot under the collar, let me urge you to take a closer look at the inside of this magazine to see what ‘incessant messages about sex’ the excited teenager parting with her £2.10 is actually going to get from this apparently incendiary item.
