Bingo! Then they graduate to Cosmopolitan to find the perfect guy in 10 days and please him in 57 different ways each month, get married, and do post-graduate studies at a distance via HGTV, The Style Network, etc. on how to color coordinate the latest spring handbags with their Italian granite countertops. It’s the American Dream!

Well, thank the Maker that today’s kids are growing up properly. I had such a hard time having to do all the design decisions by myself when I was having my house built. The next generation will be supremely trained to help out my childrens someday.

This is precisely what middle-class Christian parents of girls in the 18th and 19th century said about the romantic novels their daughters were so keen to read. I don’t see that either they nor you are wrong.

Making people feel bad about themselves in order to sell them a whole new lifestyle is pretty much what “traditional religion” is all about. Seventeen makes girls feel ugly and unattractive so they will buy all the beauty products and clothing advertised, and many purveyers of traditional religion makes people feel bad and sinful to sell them the lifestyle and the line of products churches offer.
A good question would be, if people weren’t made to feel bad about themselves, what kind of lifestyle and religion would they be attracted to?

“You kind of wonder if the whole point of Seventeen and magazines like it is to make teenage girls even more insecure about themselves than they are — which is to say, to hate the lives they have and to aspire to the lives they’re missing out on, if only they’d buy the crap in the magazine’s pages, and adopt the shallow, materialistic, nitwit values of its editors.”
Isn’t that the point of all consumerist culture? God forbid any child of mine wants to go into advertising. The industry is evil.
captcha: performances guild

I’ve always thought that the whole point of education was to make people feel bad about themselves, in a way — or at least feel bad about their ignorance in a way that makes them want to remedy it by working to accomplish something of value. Certainly a lot better than the modern preoccupation with instilling self-congratulatory “self-esteem” into kids who haven’t actually done anything to earn it.
Of course that’s not the same thing as making people feel that the only way to fill the emptiness they feel in their lives is to *buy* something.

Magazines like this exist to sell products to a specific demographic and everything they do is focused on that goal. It’s not any different then GQ or Country Life or Backyard Poultry or Glen Beck and his gold.

You kind of wonder if the whole point of Seventeen and magazines like it is to make teenage girls even more insecure about themselves than they are — which is to say, to hate the lives they have and to aspire to the lives they’re missing out on, if only they’d buy the crap in the magazine’s pages, and adopt the shallow, materialistic, nitwit values of its editors.
For the male version, see Playboy: without their advice, you’d be listening to the wrong music on the wrong audio system while drinking the wrong scotch and wearing the wrong clothes…
See, reading the articles does pay off.

forestwalker @ 3:35 PM writes:
“Isn’t that the point of all consumerist culture? God forbid any child of mine wants to go into advertising. The industry is evil.”
On balance, I agree with you; the advertising industry is intrinsically evil. One would almost think it better to have a felon in the family than an advertiser. At worst, the former only kills the body of the victim; the advertiser’s foul product can destroy the soul. Plus, the criminal is much more likely to be repentant of his crimes.
Full disclosure: my practice does not practice more of this particular dark and vile art other than to post a strictly fact-based and non-pictorial flyer at the front door of my building. I would no more do a television ad than I would walk around unclothed in the street. My position on engaging in so-called “social networking” should also be known by now—White Christ forbid ! So now let’s knock off the “gotcha-Karth” ‘s and stick to the issue: is advertising inherently moral or inherently not ?
My answer is a resounding “NOT”.
Your servant,
Lord Karth
Clever captcha got another one right: “impious working”

Certainly a resounding NOT. The industry’s entire purpose and method is the inflammation and manipulation of the passions. That’s supposed to be the job of the demons, not of Madison Avenue.
captcha’s brilliant today: deceiver manager

The growth of the ad industry is related to the growth of an economy based on making and selling things you really do not need. One must be persuaded to buy stuff you never thought of buying before and that you could happily (sans the mind molding messages of advertising) have lived without.
So yeah – I’d say it is ultimately immoral but what about all of us dumbos who allow ourselves to be persuaded by ads to part with our money for stuff we really don’t need?
But given the size of our population – what other kinds of jobs would people have if they were not busy making and selling all this needless stuff the advertisers persuade us to buy?

when she turns 18, she can graduate to the “women’s magazines” that infest our culture and supermarket news stands. The journalistic excellence seen in these magazines consists of fashion tips, recipes, articles on why men are swine, discussions of how to dress yourself thin, articles on why men are swine, weight loss, housework tips, why men are swine, weight loss, diets, surviving office politics, why men are swine, weight loss diets, an interview with a women who have broken the glass ceiling, articles on why men can’t commit and are swine, makeup choices, choosing the right shoe, why men are swine, weight loss tips, why liposuction is right for you, why men are swine, weight loss etc …
Can you see common themes??

It appears that Seventeen has not changed since my mother subscribed me to it when I was a teen.
It made me feel so bad about myself that I stopped reading it. I did not learn to use makeup or flirt and I never developed a sense of style.
In retrospect, Seventeen did me a favor.
CAPTCHA: score tannest

A much better choice for girls 8 and up is New Moon, which has an online presence at newmoon dot com
It is written by girls and is completely ad-free. There is no diet advice, fashion tips, make-up or any of that crap – nothing to make growing girls hate their bodies. I gave a subscription to a neighbor girl years ago. She and her parents loved it.
There is much research to suggest that women’s mags and celebrity mags serve to make women dislike themselves. The better to sell useless products, apparently.

The journalistic excellence seen in these magazines consists of fashion tips, recipes, articles on why men are swine, discussions of how to dress yourself thin, articles on why men are swine, weight loss, housework tips, why men are swine, weight loss, diets, surviving office politics, why men are swine, weight loss diets, an interview with a women who have broken the glass ceiling, articles on why men can’t commit and are swine, makeup choices, choosing the right shoe, why men are swine, weight loss tips, why liposuction is right for you, why men are swine, weight loss etc …
As opposed to the journalist message of GQ or Maxxim which are beacons of rationality and provide a holistic and complimentary view of women.

Seventeen is truly stupid.
I cannot fathom how magazines such as it manage to sell. It seems to me to be nothing short of an assault on women, girls, and femininity itself. 43 ways to lose weight because you’re fat, 77 utterly STYLISH make up tips because you’re ugly, 93 ways to please “your man” because we have jettisoned notions of fidelity and love, and he will ditch your ass the moment you become inconvenient to him. It is the most insidious strain of misogyny; not the kind that is a flow of hatred from man to woman, but the internalization of man’s hatred of woman, within the woman herself.
Oh and Broken Yogi, none of the world’s great religions are concerned with making us hate ourselves, but rather with us recognizing our weakness and striving for the transcendent.
CAPTCHA: of gatorade

Seventeen is truly stupid.
I cannot fathom how magazines such as it manage to sell. It seems to me to be nothing short of an assault on women, girls, and femininity itself. 43 ways to lose weight because you’re fat, 77 utterly STYLISH make up tips because you’re ugly, 93 ways to please “your man” because we have jettisoned notions of fidelity and love, and he will ditch your ass the moment you become inconvenient to him. It is the most insidious strain of misogyny; not the kind that is a flow of hatred from man to woman, but the internalization of man’s hatred of woman, within the woman herself.
Oh and Broken Yogi, none of the world’s great religions are concerned with making us hate ourselves, but rather with us recognizing our weakness and striving for the transcendent.

Re: The growth of the ad industry is related to the growth of an economy based on making and selling things you really do not need.
Paul Sweezy argued that same point- and more specifically, argued that the sales effort and the advertising industry were inevitable features of oligarchic late capitalism- in his 1966 book ‘Monopoly Capital’. I’d highly recommend it.

Advertising is inherently immoral? I’ve never taken a philosophy course, but seems like a silly assertion. For example, right now I have trees that need to be trimmed or cut down, and the trees are too big for me to do it myself. I’ve asked around, and nobody I know can recommend a good company. How, pray tell, am I to find a tree service without advertising? Even the yellow pages are advertisements. I have nothing to do with the ad industry, by the way. That said, I have no patience for Seventeen, and think it (and Cosmo, GQ, Maxim and the like) are just trash.

Happily, no one here has succumbed to the temptation unheard in these precincts, grown-up to a fault, to waste an entire thread bitchslapping “the culture” (whatever the flock that sort of spook is supposed to be) and other commenters – in other words, themselves.
Bookmark with printer enabled and with highlighter handy this article from The World Book Encyclopedia, which in its online and $39.95 DVD form is as good in 2010, I’m happy to discover, as it was in 1974 when I took its steamed-up brown-and-beige volumes into the tub with me nightly, when not watching Archie and Edith and Fred and Lamont and Florida and J.J. and Maude and Walter:
Literature for children
Find within, beneath “Books to read”, over 150 books, fiction and nonfiction, marked “Older readers”, i.e., grades 7-12.
Suddenly, it’s Christmas in June – for you and your Seventeen-year-old.
Now, if we could just get the magazine to tuck a wafer-thin sliver marked “Blog commenters” within its Hot-Guys pie-chart…

Actually I’ll bet the 17 editors do not have nitwit values. Those who have kids, probably enroll them in rigorous private schools. The editors simply have a profitable gig, like cigarette companies, but they themselves know the difference between fantasy and reality, even though their readers don’t.

“Oh and Broken Yogi, none of the world’s great religions are concerned with making us hate ourselves, but rather with us recognizing our weakness and striving for the transcendent.”
I beg to differ, that there are certainly some advocates of some of the major religions who have, indeed, sold their religion to the masses with precisely that message: that we are dreadful sinners who cannot possibly survive without their message, and without buying into a whole line of “products”. Whatever the “good intentions”, the results have often been a great deal of self-hate. The editors of seventeen are not, I’m sure, consciously trying to promote self-hate, but that is indeed one of the effects, and it’s at least in part to be expected when one is trying to sell something that people don’t need. There are many religious messages that people don’t need, and so they are sold by convincing people that they need things that they really don’t need at all, telling them that there is something very, very wrong with them, and that they have the solution to their sinful nature. This does indeed produce self-hate in a great many people.
This doesn’t mean that religion doesn’t have transcendent messages, or offer means to love oneself and others, but that’s not always how it is preached or practiced. Many religious preachers are no better than commercial salesmen or even con-men, and many religious believers are no better than empty consumers of dangerous nonsense. There are many equivalents to “Seventeen Magazine” and far worse, in the realm of religion. And there are many great examples of transcendence as well.