How Harmful Are Teen Magazines

People say that reading expands the mind. The idea of expanding the mind might be true, but what happens when what you read are teen magazines. Teen magazines for a long time now have been shaping and altering the mentality of teenagers in the United States. Teen magazines portray juveniles in sense of how they think teenagers should act and be. Surveys and questionnaires that can supposedly tell teens how perfect they are, because the editors of teen magazines have an idea of a perfect teenager. With the idea of a perfect person in these magazines many teenagers try to be that perfect person. The magazines then almost force us to try and be this perfect person, so much that we go to certain extents. An example would be one striving so hard …show more content…
With many girls looking elsewhere for advice research shows that teenage girls depend on these magazines for information and guidance (Loke and Harp, 2010). Bulimia among many teen girls is in many times due to what they view, like teen magazines being that more than seventy-five percent of teenage girls read teen magazines (Loke and Harp, 2010). Teenage magazines are pressuring this idea on certain girls that might be already going through their own problems. When teenage magazines portray a slim girl and then tell everyone that reads it, that this is how they are supposed to look, when then causes too many girls get traumatized. The traumatization can than later lead girls to become bulimic; meaning binge eating just to later purge everything they had consumed. This disorder can be very harming to not just teenage girls but boys also. Many girls now a days are so dependent on the the view and perceptions of other people that it does not matter what they do to themselves. One might ask, how is it that teenage magazines are supposed to avoid leading many girls to binge. The editors of teen magazines can decide not to only portray slim and healthy girls but to have an array of girls that do not send out the wrong message about how a certain girl is supposed to be viewed. The magazines seem to only want to sell the magazines to a certain group of people, those being the ones that gave the ideal image teen magazines are looking for. Anyone else would not certainly appreciate constantly being told that the way they look is not normal or that they are supposed to look a certain way, because if they do not; then they should change. Too many girls are also being invited to like certain things that otherwise they would not (Loke and Harp, 2010). The idea of girls trying to be someone else should be saddening because one never knows the true beauty