Anda di halaman 1dari 3

Victoria Coren Girls' mags are not sexy, they are sweet

The first piece of writing that I ever sold for money unless you count magazines that I wrote, photocopied and sold at school for 10p, much as others sold homemade rosewater to their parents - was a short story for Just Seventeen magazine. I was 14, using a pseudonym and inspired by Jo March from Little Women who was always putting unsolicited stories in the post. I still have to acceptance letter framed on my study wall, with its magical opening paragraph: "Although your story is a bit rough in places, I would like to buy it at the usual rate of 90 per thousand words..." I have never read a letter as exciting as this before or since and I open all my neighbours' mail. The story was about a fat girl going to a party. As she gets ready, she thinks about how lonely and difficult life is when you're chubby, how hard it is to wear trendy clothes, how she wishes she was thin like everyone else. She sits in a solitary corner, watching the thin girls dance, wondering how to look busy. (This was before iPhones were invented.) Suddenly, a handsome boy sits down and starts talking to her. The world is transformed. She is chatting, flirting, laughing with a boy! Everything is going to be OK. Normal teenage life starts here; friendship, romance and social confidence will all flow from it. The boy offers to go and get them both a drink. He disappears into the crowd. When she looks down her handbag is gone. Cherry, eh? See if you can guess what my social life was like at the time... But when the magazine came out, my heroine was no longer fat. It had been edited; now she was just "shy". This really shocked me. The story wasn't supposed to be about the surprise twist, it was about the misery of being fat. I was a fat kid and thought of little else whatever I was doing, much of my brain permanently engaged with wishing with wishing and praying, staring and worrying, jogging and wheezing and I had never read anything in my teen culture about this particular form of lonely alienation. Proud though I was to be a published writer, it was a kick in my little round guts to discover that there was no room for fat girls in magazines, even in stories, even if I had written them myself. But I have stayed fond of the teen world for giving me my first exciting printing page and my first clue that confidence might come from something other than the physical and 90! Which I spent on sugar-free yoghurts. I am sad whenever I hear (as one often does; it's an endlessly recycled fear ) that teenage girls' magazines these days are all sex and materialism: hard-edged, hard-eyed and inappropriately adult. The latest worrier is Joan Bakewell, who spoke at the Bath literature

festival a couple of weeks ago about teen mags being "coarsening trash on a huge scale". I thought I'd better have a look. And at the risk of disagreeing with the great Dame Joan, who is up there with Jo March and Minnie the Minx in my heroines' pantheon, I found it the most charming, innocent, healthy, nostalgic little world I could imagine. The problem page of Bliss magazine took me right back to 1987. There it all was again. A girl who thinks she might be bisexual is advised to discuss it with the school nurse. A girl whose friend is a copycat is told to stay cool and laugh about it. A girl who is worried about her periods is told she is completely normal. Oh yes, I remember, I remember... There are celebrities on every page, which there weren't in my day. But they are all so terribly good. Rihanna talks about the importance of fearlessness and loyalty, like an Enid Blyton schoolgirl. Labrinth [sic], who Im guessing is another pop star, says you must never take anything that doesnt belong to you. I dont like bad karma, cos when it happens to me Im just gonna be like aarrgghh, Labirinth eloquently explains. Misha B talks about the power of prayer. JLS explain the importance of school sport. These are old, prim, do good messages; perhaps they must now come from celebrity mouths to carry any weight, but thats televisions fault. Here fame is used as a rather clever little Trojan horse. A page devoted to social etiquette asks: Is it OK to eat cheese and onions crisps on the bus? No, says angel. (not eating round a table thats gross! adds Angel, whose new single is called Go In, Go Hard.) I dont know who these people are but their hands seem safe to hold a generation. Other pages tells of a boy who escaped Glasgow gang culture for a better life and the gripping story of a brave, kind girl whose mother has dissociative identity disorder. Leafing through copies of Shout, Mizz, M and Seventeen, they all offer a similarly sweet, stout little universe with its heart in the right place. As for "over-sexualisation", I found an average of two small references per magazine to the idea that anyone is actually having sex (which is probably useful, because they probably are), but dozens of anecdotes and readers' letters about the shame of having their pants accidentally glimpsed when falling over or exercising in the school gym. So, as a canon, the magazines have a hint of intimacy, but a horror of immodesty. Even Teen Vogue, which is sexless but mindless (mostly advertising designer clothes its readers can't afford), has a page where Madonna's daughter Lola recommends a good book. The book, a memoir of American poverty, is photographed next to a lipstick: side by side as important girlish accoutrements. Honestly, there's nothing to worry about here. I might keep reading them. They offset the dark relativity of the internet; their frame of reference is daffy and trivial, but their morals are

sound as a bell. They make you smile. I bet they'd even print a story about a fat girl, if you sent them one.

Anda mungkin juga menyukai