The story of most significance to the health and wellbeing of girls this issue is the reporting of results of a survey of 1000 of Girlfriend’s readers who were asked how they felt about their appearance.
Among the findings are:
25% don’t like what they see in the mirror
Only 9% “proud of the way you look” (‘proud’ seems an odd word to use in the survey, given GF a page before tells us genetics means we can’t help how we look)
45% have been on a diet, 56% have skipped meals, 35% have cut out a food group, 19% have thrown up after eating
32% have overexercised
45% know someone who’s been diagnosed with an eating disorder, 5% of readers surveyed have an eating disorder
67% said they feel bad when they compare themselves to their friends
65% said they feel “self-conscious” about their bodies
96% wanted to change a body part (69% wanted to change their stomachs)
94% say there’s room for improvement when it comes to how they feel about their appearance’, 66% of those said losing weight would help.
75% have been victims of negative comments made about their bodies
What strikes me about the three page feature is that there is no critique of the culture which sends girls toxic messages about themselves. There’s no mention of the growing body of research that point to, for example, media representations which objectify women and girls as a significant factor in body image issues.
No mention of the National Body Image Advisory Group report (Girlfriend’s editor sat on the advisory group) and recommendations which appear to have made little difference. Read entire article at Generation Next blog.
One Response
I think your critique was fair and raised many good points about the contradictions in the magazine industry. As a freelance writer there’s only so much I can comment on about the industry as I do not sit in on editorial meetings, however, I do find myself sympathising with these teen magazines.
It’s really easy to view magazines as the “bad guys.” All we see are the grim statistics about how the media contributes to a myriad of negative body issues, and an industry that apparently refuses to change. We often picture editors sitting at their desks, planning something diabolical, and caring more about profit and circulation than the wellbeing of their readers (with a maniacal laugh or two thrown in for good measure). But I think that’s because of the lesser-known evil, being advertisers. For a uni assignment I stumbled across a great journal article that talked about feminism and glossy mags, and it mentions that although there are so many feminist editors out there working in teen mags that genuinely want to make a difference, it’s almost impossible due to the tight grip of advertisers. They contribute an enormous amount of money to the magazine, so can basically do whatever they want. Although the journal article talks about magazines in the US, I imagine it would be the same here, and I even witnessed the control of advertisers myself when I interned at a women’s magazine. My internship was sponsored by a huge company, and every article I wrote had their logo on it. The company had very strict “rules” that the magazine and I had to adhere to (I was not allowed to talk about certain things and HAD to include certain things), and although the editorial team was getting increasingly frustrated (everything I wrote had to go through the company before it could be published, often messing with deadlines), the magazine was being given hundreds of thousands of dollars, so we were tiptoeing on ice. I think everything you said was correct, however I do believe that Girlfriend is doing a lot, taking into consideration that they probably don’t have as much control over their own mag as one would think. Especially as the production of magazines is almost entirely dependent on the revenue from advertisers.