The Consumer Republic

Girl Crazy In today's teen magazines, the ties that bind young women seem to be a deep sense of embarrassment and shame. It took the Spice Girls-the miniskirted, tube-topped prefab female '90s version of Menudo-about 10 months to emerge from MTV's playlist and the pop chart's top 10 into America's mass consciousness. By now, most adults know about their calculated meteoric rise into the pop empyrean-as well as their global slogan: Girl Power. Girl Power is everywhere because teen girls are everywhere, thanks to the boom in boomer-spawned offspring. And where the demographic goes, the media and marketplace follow. Teen girl magazines are also booming, as established titles such as the venerable Seventeen and the more upstart YM face competition from new entries with such kinetic names as Jump and Twist. For most postwar girls of any age, checking out the new teen mags is a trip down memory lane. Today's teen-girl books offer their readers pretty much the same editorial mix their counterparts did 30 years ago: "What Boys Really Think," self-knowledge quizzes, celebrity profiles, teen pinups, fashion, makeup, body obsession and "What Boys Really Really Think." Yet the more things stay the same, the more they change. The most obvious difference in current teen-targeted magazines is a post-Sassy frankness, especially about sex. There's lots of talk about penises and breasts (or as a deck on a Jump story put it: "Hooters ... knockers ... headlights ... rack... melons ... boobs!") plus stories about alcoholic moms and violent boyfriends. The inevitable "Improve Your Body" features include more pictures of "real" girls with fat thighs, bulging stomachs and flabby arms-although the heads of the models are always cropped, as if to protect the identity of the poor souls afflicted with such bodily embarrassments. And while the editorial tone of these mags is pitched at the level of a teeny-bopper squeal, it's glossed over with the new obligatory patina of ironic detachment. Jump's letters-to-the-editor section is called "Like, We Care." Teen culture, millennium-style, is a mass event, but it feels like a subculture. Blame it on our expanding media universe, which provides teens with magazines, cable channels and TV networks of their own. Dipping into this world is like crashing a slumber party on another planet and finding yourself in a weirdly self-referential place where the big question-the only question-is: "What are you into?" There's a host of marketers who want their brands to be the answer. As Dick Clark learned long ago, that's why teens are such a luscious market. Teen-market wannabe Twist represents a new level in "What are you into?" teen talk. A Web site imitating a magazine, Twist gets its answers from the horse's mouth. Its editors realized there was no reason to hire 25-year-olds to write sentences such as "Let's suss out your sitch before condemning the dude," when their 15-year-old readers could do it for them. Next to tidbits (there are no stories in Twist, just blurbs, lists, captions, charts and Q&A's) about what celebrities like are in-their-own-words takes about what readers like. Often, it's the same thing. "Forget the experts," Twist says, focusing its editorial on "real life" friends, triumphs, issues and girls. Welcome to journalism's future as a pendulum in perpetual motion, swinging between the two poles of consumers' attention: celebrities and themselves. On the surface, Twist confirms the reigning clichƒ that paints today's teens as feel-good, TV-hunk-besotted airheads with no tolerance for problems too deep or sentences too long. Yet if these magazines are mirrors, the teen image reflected in their pages radiates an aura of angst. Both YM and Twist (a kind of subliterate YM) feature columns that reveal readers' most humiliating moments-most of which involve either menstrual blood or farting in public. Here is the tie that binds the demographic of young womanhood: a deep sense of embarrassment and shame. This helps explain Jump, the magazine for "girls that dare to be real." Its pages read like a seminar in self-esteem. Learn to love your body, Jump advises. Going without a boyfriend is cool, it avers. Be creative, be original, stand up for yourself and forge your own path, it urges. Just read Jump's conversation with five guys from Santa Monica High. The good news is that the guys are turned on by "girls who have a life and a sense of their own individuality." The bad news is that these are qualities that girls have the most problem achieving; otherwise, magazines such as Jump would have no reason to exist. Being "real," the driving concept behind '90s teen-girl mags, should be the easiest thing to do. Yet these magazines suggest teen girls spend a lot of time feeling unreal, uncertain and unsure. Which is why they need help to be real-and why they take comfort in these publications. This driving need gives adolescent girls plenty of market power. But Girl Power? No way.

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The Consumer Republic

Debra Goldman

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Debra Goldman