Of Teen Magazines
To all women who are reading this, I have questions, and it’d be nice if you could answer these for yourself, or let me hear your opinions on this subject.
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Why do you see yourself in the middle of magazine pages? Seriously though, why do you see a reflection of your body on the glossy pages of corporate toilet paper. Why? It’s always amazed me how women will do that to themselves. Tell yourself you’re fat and you start exercising. Tell yourself it's going straight to your thighs and you start eyeing the calorie facts on the back of a candy bar. Why?
It may, in fact, be actually going straight to your head.
Two HUGE warning signs : (1) You start sprouting blonde hair and botox enhanced quantities all at once and/or (2) the fat that you thought was going to your thighs is actually collecting in your brain and creating reactions such as, "Oh my god, that girl in the magazine is so fat" in a voice that sounds like Barbie on helium. If any of you get the one, or both, of these symptoms, please contact your local psychologist and/or Richard Simmons to tell you what an idiot you actually are.
Back to all seriousness though. When I hear women wondering about the cosmos with crooked queries like, "Why can’t I ever be good enough," "It’s so hard being me," and "Where’s my handbag?" I can’t help but wonder if it all comes back to looking at an image no one person can perfectly immulate without too much time on their hands. If there’s one thing girls should realize about teen magazines, it’s that the models that they see are not down home girls like themselves. They are not even the women who buy the products they’re selling, they are not the women who can carry a sane conversation without using "like" as a verb less then ten times, and they are not the women who care about anyone less than themselves on they’re glossy page.
Models in magazines work day and night to look as they do for you. To please the eye of a girl or a guy. It works this way because it sells this way. I can tell you from a guy’s perspective that if I grow up and and find myself in a relationship: If it’s with a woman that looks that great, then I should realize I have no humanity or taste whatsoever, nor a deepness in my mind greater than a mud puddle. No woman looks this good when she steps off the pages of a magazine. So why should you be two-dimensional?
Beauty on page is designed to match the ideal in the mind of the consumer. Do you ever see a real anarexic person modeling (sometimes I think I do, though). Do you ever see an obese woman modeling? Or course not. Do you ever see women with smudged makeup in a movie scene? Do you see James Bond’s hair ever messed? Even when he runs through a wall with a tank? Really, it happened. And he straightens his tie afterwards. But no, you never see this. For the purpose of market capitalism and net profit, you are never allowed to see a less than perfect body that doesn’t exude the presence, beauty, elegance and allure of the product that is being sold.
So what are you buying, really? What you see nowadays is not the hand-knit skirt that earned a Chinese woman two cents on a double-figure hour workday. You see that skirt draped around the prettiest set of thighs that exercise can create. Are you buying the quilt? Or are you buying that you, too, could be this allurring vixen?
Questions that require more than thinking, I'd hope. Next time you go to a store or receive one of these in the mail, I’d encourage you to read the headliners of magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Teen People, Cosmo Girl or Seventeen. And when you’re looking at the covers, ask yourself, "What is this really selling? And why?" "What are they trying to sell me?"
It may just be a guy’s answer, but a few answers I came up with were sex, shallowness, submissiveness, naïvety and ignorance of the world; and all from one line: 21 Ways To Make Your Butt Look Bigger. Just think about it.
How are you being sold?
What are you buying for?