Seventeen Prom Gets It Right (Mostly)

I went to no less than 20 bookstores to track down a copy of Seventeen Prom, which was published months ago-- months before I even thought to start planning for The Most Important Night of My Teenage Life. Every store I went to said they hadn't had the issue in stock for months. I finally got a copy of it from a friend of a friend who heard through a friend that I was looking for the magazine. Talk about luck!

My prom is this Friday, and I am one of few people at my school who appears to be relaxed, or even excited, about the event. Conversations seem to skew more toward, "Lauren is crying because we invited Mike and Sarah to be in the limo with us," than "I'm looking forward to dancing and having a good time with my friends." Also popular topics of discussion among my peers: worrying about table seating, worrying about plans for acquiring post-prom booze, and worrying about the humidity on prom night. (Okay, that last one might just be me.)

Nonetheless, I am actually excited for the evening. Today I conferenced with my date about corsage/pictures/transportation. My hair/nails/makeup appointments are booked. Everything seems to be in line for a good weekend. I practically feel like a normal teen. I'm a sucker for rites of passage, though.

And so are a lot of other people, presumably, judging from the nearly 400-page length of the 2010 issue of Seventeen Prom. Surprisingly, the magazine actually gets a lot right, much more than their non-prom counterpart Seventeen, in my opinion. Seventeen Prom has lots of reasonable advice on how to do prom in a way that's low-cost, high-glam, and surprisingly unconventional. Here are a few things that stood out to me:

The Good

This hair is so cute! Definitely not the typical half-up half-down curling-ironed look that 90% of everyone I know will probably sport. Just cute natural hair, times THREE.

These nails are really cute-- fun and subtle! (two words I don't often put together to describe Seventeen)This picture! A well-dressed couple goofing off and having a good time. Sort of personifies my opinion of what prom should be.

Conceding that there were some good things in this magazine, though, does not mean that it is without flaws. A few things were downright bad, but most were just weird.

The Bad

Lots of dresses in the issue were really ugly or really bizarre. Seventeen calls this trend "High-Low" but I think "Mullet Dress" would be a more fitting name.

Maybe I'm conservative, but a silver lamé bikini does not a dress make. I can't imagine dancing in that. Same goes for the super tight, super short, super gaudy red minidress, which is so short that the model needs to hold the hemline down just for the photo shoot.

This dress itself isn't that bad in my opinion, but I am curious to hear the thinking behind putting a cutout in a place that most people work diligently to camouflage. The model looks good in it, but I don't really know anyone who is looking for a dress with a love handle window.

I don't see anything wrong with the dress in this one, I just wonder, WHERE IS THIS GIRL? There's a stage, there's a disco ball, and there's an..... exercise ball? This appears to be shot on the set of a bad 80's exercise video.

Speaking of bad 80's things.... this hair looks a little Dynasty to me.

There were, of course, lots of bits in the magazine about dates and dating. This blurb itself actually addresses something that a lot of people in my school have been discussing. The example of a romantic prom proposal, though, seems likes its really setting the bar low. (That is, unless Craig and Emily are huge stoners, which in that case, the McDonald's breakfast might just be the holy grail of romance.)

Prom Sex is one of the hugest teen movie clichés of all time. Googling the phrase brings up some really entertaining advice forums. Lots of things in the magazine allude to doin' it, some not so subtly....

....and some REALLY not so subtly.

If you think teenage boys struggle with bras, you'll get a huge kick out of watching him struggle with this number before your Prom Sex:

Overall, the magazine was pretty good. It delivers what it promises.... advice on hair and makeup, and pictures of dresses. I think that niche magazines such as this one do a better job of actually giving people what they want in terms of content. In attempting to provide one been-all end-all magazine for lifestyle, fashion, and beauty, normal Seventeen ends up tackling each area poorly.

Seventeen and Race

Today's post addresses race, which I understand is a sensitive topic for a lot of people. I put this post together a while ago, but have been hesitant to post it, if only for the fact that I am not that well versed on the subject of race. The town I live in is 95.24% White, so I am not exposed to much discussion about race in my daily life. Any conversation on the subject that I get to observe typically takes place on the internet, which is not necessarily the best place to learn anything, especially a thing that is likely to upset people if addressed clumsily.

That said, I feel like this post is honorable in its intentions. I ask you all to please look at the post for the issue it is trying to explore, and not to crucify me if I have made any offensive missteps in the way that I address it. Instead, feel free to post feedback and constructive corrections in the comments, or email them to me. As a young person with limited exposure to discussions of race, any respectful feedback that could broaden my horizons would be much appreciated.

In selecting models and actresses to photograph, lots of people have recognized that mainstream print media disproportionately showcases white women. Recently, this pattern has been called to the forefront of the blogosphere with the publication of the whitewashed "Young Hollywood" issue of Vanity Fair. Over at Jezebel, Dodai wrote a great article on the controversy. This piece from Racialicious (and its comments section) makes some interesting points as well.

I wondered to what degree this pattern of whitewashing held true for teen magazines like Seventeen. Teen mags often do better in the race department than their adult counterparts, including women of a variety of races and even offering some pretty level-headed advice on interracial dating. Still, out of curiosity, I wondered exactly how the racial content of Seventeen broke down. So I counted!

There are 332 faces in this month's issue of Seventeen. I counted a face as a head with at least one visible eye. That is, backs of heads and disembodied mouths or eyes were not included in my data. I researched the races of the models and celebrities that I could identify. Those whose race I could not determine with reasonable certainty I've excluded from my data, making for 319 surveyed faces.

I thought it would be an interesting exercise to compare the race content of Seventeen with the most recent Census Bureau estimates of race demographics in the U.S. Personally, I don't think its reasonable to expect an entirely equal distribution of race in every issue, but it does seem reasonable (and logical) to expect that a modern magazine would have a race breakdown that is similar to the race breakdown of the country in which it publishes, in this case, the United States.

I'm actually surprised at how close Seventeen came to having a breakdown comparable with the United States statistics. Noteworthy, though, are Seventeen's underrepresentation of people of Hispanic ethnicity, and their inclusion of more biracial and multiracial people percentage-wise than live in the U.S. Anyone have any thoughts on why this might be?

Thought it might also be interesting to look at the racial breakdown of males and females in the magazine. It seems like Seventeen's idea of female beauty is more varied, while the races that are considered attractive for males are extremely more limited.

I also separated the data by faces in Seventeen produced content, and faces in advertising content. There didn't seem to be any significant difference in the racial breakdown between these two categories of pages, except for the exclusion of Hispanic models in the advertisements.

Overall I was pretty surprised at how inclusive Seventeen was. Obviously, there is some room for improvement, but I would venture to say that Seventeen is better at including people of color than most other publications of its kind. Otherwise, I have no real conclusions to draw from this data. What does everyone think?

P.S. Expect some fluffy fashion and beauty posts for the rest of the week, as this Friday is my PROOOOOM.

The Opposite of Tanning

Today was beach day. I'm not a huge fan of the beach, as I burn pretty easily. I'm more a walk-along-the-water-in-cuffed-jeans-and-look-pensive sort of girl, but in the name of this project I felt obligated to put some time into bona fide beach-going.

I read through all of the bathing suit advice in this month's issue. Most of it was about minimizing body flaws. I feel pretty comfortable in a bathing suit, though. My biggest complaint is probably that my skin is the same color as the sand, so often I imagine myself looking like a floating bikini. Seventeen didn't address this issue, so I just took bathing suit inspiration from a photo of Annalynne McCord that the magazine featured in their "Look Amazing in Your Swimsuit" section. Like her, I wore a ruffled top and frilly bottom. Unlike her, I refused to pose for a photo like I was in the midst of a spontaneous frolic.

I felt pretty comfortable in my bathing suit. If I am going to fuss about my weight, which I assume to be most people's issue with bathing suit season, I tend to do it more in winter clothes. Something about wearing a bathing suit doesn't really bother me, because I feel less constricted when I wear one. In winter clothes, I feel like it is difficult to find clothes that don't pull or stretch or sag uncomfortably across various parts of my body. A bikini merely covers the necessary parts, so I can avoid this issue altogether. I realize this is a matter of perspective, though. I am fairly petite, so I have the privilege of bypassing most typical bathing suit hang-ups.

Because it is May, and I'm in New Jersey, I didn't take any time to swim in the still-freezing ocean. I spent most of my time reading and sleeping on the beach under an umbrella. I finally got the chance to finish reading The Purity Myth by Feministing editor Jessica Valenti. I found it to be a little bit extremist, but definitely well-written, and definitely worth reading, if only for the sake of gaining some perspective into the role of virginity in shaping America's girls and women.

Seventeen suggested that I take some beach time to flirt with boys on adjacent blankets, but the beach I go to is mostly middle-aged Jewish men, so there weren't really any opportunities to apply this advice. After about two hours I went home, in fear of getting sunburned.

Tonight I am doing a little more shopping, then some dinner with my parents, then going all alone to see Conan O'Brein's "Legally Prohibited From Being Funny On Television Tour." The opportunity to see this show came to me at the last minute, and I wasn't going to turn it down just because nobody wanted to go with me. Not sure if this makes me lame or awesome, but I'm excited either way.

The "Tribal Trend" Trend

I'm at the beach. Well, I am in close proximity to the beach, but today was too cloudy to actually work on my tan and look confident in my bikini, so I decided to spend the day doing what every Seventeen reader, except me, does best-- shopping. The Atlantic City Outlets are about 5 miles from my grandpa's house, or a half hour bike ride. I ride to school in dresses pretty frequently, but that's less than a mile. I assume that Seventeen doesn't expect its readers to sacrifice their hobbies in the name of fashion (are Seventeen readers even expected to have hobbies?), so I didn't, and I rode the 5 miles in this outfit, which was actually not a big deal at all. I have yet to find an outfit that I can't ride in, heels not excluded.

I've been consciously avoiding trying this trend though, which Seventeen calls "Bright Prints," because to me it seems like a thinly veiled variation on the "tribal" trend. Actually, its not even veiled at all. The blurb describing the look explains, "These tribal patterns have an 'I picked this up on vacation' feel, so you can look like you traveled the world--without leaving your backyard!"

Besides the obvious absurdity of trying to use clothes as a substitute for actual travel experiences, I'm not okay with this editorial because I'm uncomfortable getting behind a trend that seems to lump all non-Western cultures together under the homogenous, inaccurate, and offensive moniker of "tribal." It takes fashion's habit of cultural appropriation one step further by saying, "Not only are we going to mark elements of your culture as passing trends, but we are going to marginalize them by packaging them together with elements from other unrelated cultures as well." Simply put, the whole thing sends a message that says, "Look how adooorable (and marketable) other cultures are!" It reeks of colonialism to me. I'm not opposed to designers taking fashion inspiration from artifacts of other cultures, but I'm opposed to this practice being insensitively marketed as tribal. It creates a distinct "us" and "them" dichotomy.

The "tribal trend" is a trend within itself. Every so often this sort of thing pops up in a magazine or in a designer's line, and the online community is quick to draw attention to it. Dodai at Jezebel touched on this issue a few years ago in her piece about American Apparel's "Afrika" print. Over at Sociological Images they have collected a huge number of examples of appropriation of Native American icons in style.

When it came down to it, though, I wore the outfit on my shopping trip, and nobody seemed to notice or care about which cultures I did or did not appropriate. In fact, plenty of stores stocked things that fit perfectly within this trend, which is at least an indicator that Seventeen is successful at highlighting current trends. I would be concerned if they weren't, though, since this is basically the only direct redeeming quality about the publication that I have been able to ascertain up until this point.

Some tanks in line with the "Bright Prints" trend at Old Navy:

To go with my "Bright Prints" look, I also got my nails done to follow the "Bright Colors" trend that Danielle, age 15, from Minneapolis speaks so highly of. She writes, "Whenever I'm feeling down, I can just look at my nails and feel peppy!" This is bleak. I wish Seventeen would suggest a hobby for Danielle so she didn't have to look to idle nail-gazing as her only source of joy.

Hopefully tomorrow will be warmer so that I can go to the beach!

The Only Rule You Need To Know When Talking To Teenagers

Lots of people have no idea how to communicate with teenagers. Some of the responses to this blog have highlighted this sad truth for me, though its something that I experience frequently in my daily life as well. When adults disagree with you when you are a teenager, its rarely because its because your viewpoint is inferior, and more often because you as a teenager are inferior. Many people assume that because you are younger, it is impossible that your opinion is actually a valid point based on sound reason, not a function of your age.

This is definitely not to say that all teenage viewpoints are well developed, or that all adults are unfairly judgmental when it comes to conversing with teens. Plenty of teenagers are incoherent, and plenty of meaningful exchanges happen between non-judgmental adults and the teens to whom they listen. I am beginning, however, to think that these cases are exceptions to rules, and that a problem does exist-- a problem that is impeding productive communication between adolescents and adults. The good news is that this problem is a lot simpler than you’d think, and if we worked together to correct it, we could form the basis for a prolific cross-generational relationship.

I polled my friends on what they found to be the biggest problems with the relationship between teens and adults today. People were really helpful and we generated a long list of gripes that we have about the way that adults treat teens. I was going to post the whole list, but I realized that the entire thing could be summed up in one simple rule that, if followed, would help to foster a less hostile relationship between generations. So, without further ado:

The Only Rule You Need to Know When Talking to Teenagers

1. Don't make assumptions.

Following this guideline will ease a lot of intergenerational tension, and allow kids and adults to communicate more comfortably, which is something that is entirely worth pursuing. We, the people in my generation, are the first people to be raised with the internet as a permanent fixture in our lives. We are the lab rats for a new kind of culture, and the first generation to wholly embrace a web-based way of perceiving things. It goes without saying that there must be some practical application, somewhere, for this new way of thinking. We can’t possibly explore this option, though, unless we overcome the communication gap between teens and adults.

I can’t offer any advice on closing this gap for teens from the adult perspective, but I can say that following the above advice will at least help bring teens closer to a state conducive to conversation.

To clarify this rule, here are some things that adults shouldn’t make assumptions about:

Don’t assume that teenagers need things “dumbed down” for them. Don’t assume that just because you know and understand one teenager that you know and understand all of them. Don’t assume that our opinions are a function of our age. Don’t assume that when a bunch of us are hanging out that we are up to no good. Don’t assume that what we are going through is exactly the same as what you went through as a teenager. Instead of assuming your journey to adulthood was the same as ours, simply offer us what you learned from your experiences, and allow us to pick and choose those that seem applicable to us. Don’t assume that everything we do is the result of an insatiable desire to be cool or liked.

These things may be true, but don't assume them at the outset!

I know it is easy to fall into making these sorts of assumptions, because we as a society very much subscribe to a, “kids these days…” way of thinking about adolescence. These assumptions are also helpful for adults to cut down on the awkwardness that sometimes ensues when trying to talk to teens. In the long term, though, these assumptions are hurting us by creating an environment that makes it difficult for teens and adults to collaborate. Ceasing to assume will ultimately benefit everyone—teens and adults alike.

If anyone agrees that this is an issue and would like to write some adult advice to teenagers on cross-generational communication, I would definitely be interested in cross-posting it here. Feel free to email me any thoughts on this topic, or post them in the comments.

In Pursuit of the Teenage Dollar

Seventeen Style Council member Anna, age 20, feels "remarkably 'West Coast'" in her cutoff sweatshirt. To be honest, I am not sure to which west coast she is referring. This photo is featured in the June/July issue of Seventeen. Even in my tee shirt variation on this outfit, I was sweltering amidst eastern Pennsylvania's high-80s temperatures. I can only imagine what it would be like wearing this in mid-summer Los Angeles. The full face of makeup I am wearing didn't do much to help me keep cool. Neither did the "sultry waves" that I styled last night. Perhaps Anna summers on the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. Seems like the only logical explanation for a sweatshirt in July being described as "West Coast."

I always question how real these "real girl" fashion bits are. With the number of teen magazines that have folded lately, I've lately assumed that every article of clothing/accessory spotted in the pages of a magazine was the result of some sort of lucrative product-placement deal. Some investegation revealed that Anna, 20, is indeed a real person-- in fact, she goes to Columbia University and has Twitter. I wonder if she actually chooses the outfits she wears in the magazine. What sort of authority do you think the Style Council has? Can they veto official style bills?

I had difficulty finding information regarding how much compensation Seventeen receives for including items in the magazine. I'm going to continue to look into this, because I am curious to see how much of what is being suggested to teens is actually thinly-veiled advertising. In the mean time, however, I decided that the actual ad content included in Seventeen was deserving of some scrutiny.

Magazines profit from ad sales more than they do from newsstand sales or subscriptions. From a business standpoint, the essential purpose of magazines (or television, or radio) is to round up a group of similarly demographic'd consumers that advertisers can easily target. I figured that the advertising content might have something to say about what the average Seventeen reader is imagined to be like. In the 171 page issue, there were 91 ad spaces. Here is how the content broke down:

This amount of data was too overwhelming. I decided to group products into categories to see if I could discern some sort of trend.

Unsurprisingly, over 75% of the advertising content in Seventeen is "stuff that makes you look better."

I'm not heading toward any sort of conclusive argument with these graphs. Just thought it was an interesting exercise to explore how low the bar is set for Seventeen readers when it comes to what advertisers think will interest them. Products advertised definitely skew more toward tangible than experiential, and more toward short-term use than long-term investment. It would be interesting to do a similar data sample with the Economist or the New York Times. Wonder if this way of thinking is something that applies to all demographics, or mostly just teens.

Tomorrow I'll be riding in Critical Mass, a decidedly non-Seventeen activity. I'm going to break character for a second and encourage people in metropolitan areas (or anywhere) to get out and ride their bikes tomorrow (and every day!).

The rest of the weekend I'll be at the shore solemnly commemorating our fallen soldiers, along with the hundreds of other Philadelphians who head towards Jersey's beaches to get a more firsthand perspective on what it was like to be on they beaches at Normandy. JK we're all actually going there to get bronze, go shopping, and participate in other Seventeen-approved activities.

Your hair is (probably) ugly

This is what my hair looks like naturally:
My hair is not silky. It is not smooth. It is not sleek. You cannot run your fingers through my hair without considerable effort. When I ride in a convertible with the top down, my hair hardly moves, if it moves at all. My hair lacks both luster and shine.

My hair grows wide before it grows long. On rainy days, I sport a halo of frizz. On sunny days, I also sport a halo of frizz. If I wear a hat, there is always the possibility that I will end up with some variation of a Hey Arnold hairdo. It is probable that my hair has more in common texture wise with a golden retriever's coat than it does with any model in a mainstream magazine.

I spent a lot of years struggling to learn to accept my hair. There were definitely days in elementary school when I would come home from school and cry about my hair. Its poofy. Its frizzy. It doesn't cascade or fall down my back and shoulders; it merely rests. When I was younger I went to a Jewish sleep-away camp. The girls in my cabin ritualized hairstyling. There I learned techniques on coaxing my "jew-fro" into a more secular style. When I was 13 I (embarrassingly) spent $700 to have my hair processed with a Japanese hair straightening technique. It didn't work. I still had unruly curly hair, now I just had $700 unruly curly hair.

Hair is something that societies in general ritualize, and not just the image-obsessed Western world. Some groups ritualize it formally, as with the Hindu ceremony of Chudakarana, and some less formally, exemplified by Black hair culture in the modern U.S. It is evident that, as humans, hair represents a lot more to us than just dead cells. Hair represents beauty. It represents power. Hair, or lack thereof, serves to make a statement on who we are, who we want to be, and how others to perceive us.

Whether or not this is fair doesn't necessarily matter. It is a fact with which we must contend to some degree. If we choose not to internalize the importance placed on hair, we must live knowing that others have, and it will affect how we are viewed in their eyes.

What makes this fact worse, at least for me personally, is that media has constructed a dichotomy in which one type of hair is marked as "good," and all other types are designated as lesser. Think about what you wish your hair looked like. Chances are, you probably thought of hair that is shiny, silky, and has a reasonable amount of body. The number of people I actually know with this hair texture I can count on two hands, yet this is the texture that our society has designated as the norm. This is the hair to have, and those of us who do not have this hair type are encouraged to make efforts to get as close as we can to this imaginary standard of average.

This article in Seventeen is a great example of this. The article is a special section for "Thick Waves, Frizzy Curles, or Poufy Hair." There are a lot of things in it that designate this texture of hair as wrong and "the other."

A) Implicit in the title of the article is a belief that thicker hair textures are "misbehaved."

B) Designating this article as "a special section" makes it clear that people with coarser hair are an inferior group. The rest of the magazine addresses normal hair, but frizzy hair girls are relegated to this separate section.

C) The phrase "fall in love with your texture again" implies that there was ever reason to fall out of love with thick hair. It also assumes that most readers have fallen out of love with it.

D) Must-have products include products that give hair smoothness and shine. These are not properties inherent to curly hair. These products are intended to move curly haired girls closer to "average" hair texture, and away from naturally curly styles.

E) Not a single style on this page embraces the natural hair texture of any of these people. All of these styles require blow drying/curling iron/flat iron (except maybe the braid). The bottom of the page is a literal manual on how to make your hair NOT look like its curly. AND every single person on this page is White, thus completely ignoring the fact that non-White readers exist/have hair concerns they may want addressed.

As an experiment I wanted to see what would happen if I tried to do a hairstyle from the normal non-"horrible-and-frizzy-and-totally-unsexy" section. This took me about two hours.

Frankly, I think this hairstyle looks like a community theater left the stage door open and the understudy from Annie escaped. I'm going to sleep on it. I will see how it fares tomorrow.

For some good examples of the "normal" phenomenon in beauty, check out this post on Sociological Images.