Introduction
They call to us from newsstands and racks by grocery store checkouts,the bright colors on their covers competing with the candy displays;teen magazines are the literary sweet that satisfies the craving for normalcy.The covers of the latest teen magazines aimed at adolescent girls promise readers dates,beauty,and success,and feature celebrity role models smiling beneath the mastheads.The experience of reading the glossy booklets seems ultimately depressing;compared to the rich superstar singer,the skinniest model,even the glamorous writers,the reader would require an identity face lift to compete with these supposed peers.Yet teen magazines continue to flourish as,in the last five years,traditionally women's magazines have released“little sister”editions of their titles,including the best-selling Cosmo Girl In 2002,teen-targeted magazines Seventeen,YM,and Cosmo Girl were among ABC's top 100 circulating magazines,with average circulations of 2,445,539;2,231,752;and 1,062,271,respectively(MPA Resources).Amid the arguments against these systematic,monthly self-esteem deflators,readership grows.What needs are being fulfilled by these monthly publications,and what makes them such popular reading material?Magazines created for teenage girls are effective because of their developmental appropriateness;the relationship developed between magazine and reader represents a distinct feminine space,while the demands of the text itself are appropriate to the analytic ability of the adolescent.The inclusion of the confessional“embarrassing story”column that has become the mainstay of the teen magazine is a unique example of the sympathetic space created between reader and text by the magazines.The embarrassing stories content of these magazines is purposefully constructed not only to entertain but also to offer behavioral guidance;the editors of these columns rely on specific hypotheses regarding adolescent literacy and development to maintain this dual function.By examining theories of adolescent identity development and the implied effects of environment on self-esteem building,we can investigate the influence of teen magazines and their“embarrassing stories”on adolescent girls and theorize through the use of reader response-the full impact of these texts.
Developmental Psychology and the Teen Magazine
We may look to the discipline of developmental psychology to support our theory of the developmental appropriateness of teen magazines.Psychologist Erik Erikson examined the effects of the environment on child development and concluded that,in adolescence,identity development is relative to gender.Freudian psychology pronounced this presumption as well,linking identity and self-concept to recognition of gender;however,Freud's identity construction theory is centered on one symbol.To Freudian psychologists,identity is created on the basis of genitalia;one is the possessor of a phallus or one is not.On the contrary,Erikson theorizes that identity development begins with the recognition of one's gender as unique and not necessarily relative to its opposite.Erikson has written:“It is never enough,then,to characterize the sexes by the way they differ from each other...Rather,each sex is characterized by a uniqueness which includes(but is not summed up by)its difference from the other sex.”Mayer,Elizabeth Lloyd,“Erik H.Erikson on Bodies,Gender,and Development,”In Ideas and Identities:The Life and Work of Erik Erikson,edited by R.S.Wallerstein and L.Goldberger,p.82,adison,Conn.:International Universities Press,1998.Thus,according to Erikson,identity begins in either sex with a positive construction,not a relative or negative association with a power figure.
Erikson's theory of the uniqueness of gendered experience was developed after his observation of children at play and,later,by an iteration of tests of play construction.As Erikson observed children playing with a prescribed set of constructing objects,he noticed a difference in the theme of constructs based on sex.“In evaluating a child's play construction,I had to take into consideration the fact that girls and boys used space differently and that certain configurations occurred strikingly often in the constructions of one sex and rarely in those of the other,”noted EriksonErikson,Erik.Identity,Youth and Crisis,p.270.New York:Norton,1968..Under Erikson's observation,boys had the tendency to build towers and tall buildings and then destroy these scenes in elaborate action sequences.Girls'constructions,however,were of interiors and included elaborate attention to the detail of the entrance of these buildings.Each gender's construction seemed categorically symbolic of sexual identity,though neither employed the same language of symbol.That is,instead of constructing an elaborate shrine to the phallus,as Freud may have expected,girls celebrated the womb.These observations led Erikson to believe that the recognition of sexual identity is not relative but singular.
