Magazine Influences

A magazine that we studied was Dolly. In this issue it had Lea-Michelle, who is a well known actress to most teen/ pre-teen girls, and this was an issue just talking about make-up and how to get guys. Also it gives advice on how to boost your confidence and getting your "dream job".

Most teenaged girls like to buy popular magazines like Dolly, Girlfriend and Creme. These all have similar topics as they all talk about make-up, fashion and boys. All of these things most girls are interested in, but then the magazines also have skinny models for most clothing they advertise. Some girls that are reading these magazines would possibly think "I would like to be like that," so they would start to watch what they would eat and try to look more like the girls they saw in the magazine.

If the people were at a young age and buying these magazines, I think it is bad because it has all these make-up advertisements and it would influence them to start using these products. They may believe that using these products would help their skin improve. For example, if I came home from school, opened up a magazine and saw a product advertising a new type of mascara with a beautiful model, I might start to wonder if I needed to buy this product for my own eyelashes. I might not have even been thinking about how my eyelashes look, but now they're in my mind. This advertisement may make me believe I would need this mascara myself, and then I would be more likely to buy the product.

Also, as we may know, the people buying these magazines are getting younger and younger. Pre-teen girls see these actresses and models, try to dress like them, so younger girls are starting to look older than they actually are. Their clothing style has changed so much because what 10 to 12 year olds are wearing these days is so different to what I wore when I was that age. It seems like there has been a shift and girls are becoming concerned about their appearance at a younger age than before. Also because in these magazines, the models are very skinny, this could effect teenaged girls and make them want to have that body type so they can get compliments and good feedback on their figures. These magazines teach us that being skinny is the ideal body type. They might start to try and lose weight not because they need to for health reasons, but because they think they should look more like the magazine models, and this could lower their self-esteem.

In this cover it show the most unnessary thing that most teen girls may believe in  like "Love at first sight." This shows that many teenage girls may just grab the magazine on what it says that would make them believe that some advice that the magazine is giving may be helpful to use at some point.

Also magazines are always presented in bright girly colours (for example, this cover uses bright pink and purple with a white background) to help attract more of its target audience to buy that particular magazine.This would help the magazine publishers because girls always look at the colour of the magazine and go for the one that looks the most appealing to them. As for within the magazine, they have articles about tips you could use to make your skin look "better." These have an influence on teenaged girls because they have all this advice on how you may look better, in order to feel better about yourself, so long as you follow the steps given. They also have, and write articles on products which promise to benefit your skin and make it look "perfect," but in reality it may actually make little to no difference to the skin at all. So in a way that is also false advertising, about the product that they were 100% sure it would benefit you in some way. These advertisements also emotionally appeal to teenaged girls, because they usually have professional models who are thin and pretty, wearing fashionable clothing, and perhaps with a handsome boy somewhere in the picture. This is promising a lot for a ten dollar tube of moisturiser - no wonder people want to buy it! Magazines talk us into buying overpriced, tiny tubes of product this way.

    

All images from Google.

Comparing Regina in Mean Girls to Torrance in Bring It On



Regina

As we see in the picture to the right, Regina is a blonde and looks confident and secure. In this shot, she is smiling, but she looks like she's up to something. She also has short, revealing outfits and a diamond studded necklace with the first initial of her name, which shows that she is rich. The diamond studded necklace and Regina's clothing gives teenaged girls the message that to be popular, you need to have money. In fact, I can't think of any teen movies where the popular character was from a background with not a lot of money.

In this picture, Regina also wears a lot of makeup and pink and white clothing. Pink and white are seen as very girly colours. A possible message both the makeup and Regina's pink and white clothing have is that to be popular, girls have to be girly and not very sporty.

As well as being blonde and pretty, Regina is also thin. When teenaged girls see this movie, afterwards they would think that their body is probably not what they want it be. While they may not be aware of it, teenaged girls may be processing these images and gradually developing a negative body image for not looking like Regina. Similar movies might make girls feel bad about themselves and develop eating disorders like anorexia. So it's not just that these movies make girls feel bad, they can be potentially bad for their health as well. Teenaged girls are not only seeing these images in movies, but in magazines and television  shows.



This image represents an unrealistic view of teenaged girls because what we see in the media is not your average teenaged girl. In fact, most people would not have a body type like Regina's. There is a gap between the main body type in movies (thin) and the average body type in the real world. When I watched Mean Girls, I was aware that the actress who played Regina probably had a personal trainer and people on the set to do her hair and make up, so I didn't take her image that seriously. But if I wasn't aware of those things, I might go away and feel that I should look more like Regina myself.



Torrance

This image is of Torrance, the protagonist from the movie Bring It On (2000). In this image of Torrance we see her in a school represented cheerleading uniform which makes her seem to be one of the popular people. If I was in the audience and saw this image, I would automatically think that as a cheerleader, she is popular, and could be one of the mean people. Also she is blonde, very pretty and skinny. This a similarity to Regina in the movie Mean Girls.

Even though she is blonde and pretty, like Regina, Torrance is still an athlete and her hair and make up in this image are more practical because of that. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail, and she isn't wearing dangly earrings and long necklaces. Torrance is still dressing in a way that an actual cheerleader would dress and be able to perform complicated routines and practices safely.

As for Torrance, she may be blonde but she has a kind nature towards people and lets them have a say in what they do. Even though she is the head cheerleader, she would not be so demanding at the trainings that her squad would be too tired at the end of it, but she still makes them work until they get the routine right.  She would also include everyone on the squad and not just have particular people do the main stunts.  Also unlike Regina, Torrance studies hard because she is in an AP class (Advanced Placement) which shows that she was doing really well in her class work as well as being head cheerleader. She is also genuine, nice and gets along with most people. Torrance is not just popular; she is well-liked. 

The differences between the two characters is that Torrance is more of a practical person because she is into school sports. We could tell this by the school cheerleading uniform she is wearing in the image above. This shows us that she likes to be an athletic type. Regina is more of a contolling person, as she is the type of person who gets what she wants when she wants it, and always needs to be the centre of attention. I like the contrast between these two girls because they may look the same but have different characters and lifestyles. We can easily tell by how each character acts which is sporty, nice, out-going ( Torrance), or is simply rude, mean, ungrateful (Regina) by their clothing and makeup.

As we see in most movies the expectation would always be the head cheerleader dating the captain of the football team. This happens at the start of the movie but then it always seems that they end up with a different person that doesn't care about the reputation as a cheerleader. This male character eventually sees the real person the cheerleader/popular girl is from the inside and as long as they be themselves, they should be alright.
 

Every girl in these types of of movies has to like a guy that is sort of unique in their own way. In Bring It On, this guy was Cliff, who happened to be the brother of Torrance's close friend Missy. To Torrance, he was different because he didn't take peoples opinions towards him personally. Cliff wears t-shirts of the bands that he likes, plays and writes his own music, and doesn't really care about what the "cool" bands are that everyone else listens to. Torrance admires Cliff's individuality, that he is basically in his own little world and only listening to what he really wanted to hear, and just was himself. 

All images from Google.

Mean Girls

My View on Mean Girls:

Mean Girls is a movie that shows high school stereotypes well. It does this by having certain groups like the jocks, "Asian Nerds," "Cool Asians," and "Burnouts" seated together in the cafeteria. Janice makes this obvious to Cady by giving her a map of the cafeteria and where the different groups sit. This is not a seating plan from the principle. It's something the students decided themselves.

Styling

The movie shows us these different groups and who belongs to what group by the clothes the students wear. For example, Janice (Burnout) does do her hair and makeup, but she wears dark colours and makes herself look tough. She does this by having really dark make up and ear piercings. The time she spends on how she looks is telling us that she does care about her appearence but not enough to take the judgements from people at her school seriously.

This is in comparison to Regina and the rest of the Plastics, who wear short skirts and expensive, fashionable clothing and look similar to the models we see in magazines. Also in calling the popular girls "Plastics," the director makes the audience link between the characters and the material plastic, making us think of them as real-life living Barbie Dolls. In this image, they are all wearing pink, which is not only a "girly" colour, but which they use as a type of uniform to show that they are all part of a group. Cady is wearing a pink shirt as well, but her outfit is not as feminine and looser fitting, and she has not styled her hair and make up as much as the other girls. The way she is positioned on the outside of the group, her more tomboyish clothing (even though the shirt is still pink) and her awkward body language all show us that she is not part of the group yet.

Dialogue

The director also shows the groups by using the character Cady, who is an innocent girl from Africa and who has been homeschooled all her life. Cady is a good student, but she doesn't understand how the social side of high school works. You can tell this by when she says " Girl world has a lot of rules"

But this soon changes when Cady slowly turns into one of the plastics without realizing it. When this happens, Cady doesn't even seem to care about whats happening around her because she was focused on the present moment. Like when she says, "I know it may look like I'd become a bitch, but that was only because I was acting like a bitch". This dialogue is a good example of her starting to change. Also in Calculus, she pretends to not understand the qestion so she could talk to the boy that she has a crush on, but this boy is also Regina's ex boyfriend so she has to do this very discreetely so no one will know it's that obvious. "In Girl World," she says, "all the fighting has to be sneaky." She also gives two candy canes to just Karen and herself and tells Gretchen that they were from Regina. This is so Gretchen gets jealous and the friendship of the Plastics splits up. When Cady achieves her goal, her appearence starts to change. Her hair gets straighter and her clothing is much more revealing to everyone. She is starting to look a lot more like Regina. The change in her dialogue, behaviour and appearance shows that she is no longer just pretending to be a Plastic anymore. As Janice says after she catches Cady in the act of throwing a surprise party (when she had lied to Janice and said she couldn't make it to her Art show), "You're not pretending anymore. You're plastic. Cold, hard, shiny plastic."

Scene Analysis

In this scene, Cady meets the Plastics, who invite her to sit down at their table in the cafeteria. They instantly start to interrogate her and ask her a lot of personal questions. Regina is positioned in the centre of the group, which shows that she is the dominant member of the group. The director also uses dialogue to show Regina's dominance, as she is the one who is doing most of the talking in this scene.

The director also uses dialogue to show how little Cady knows about "Girl World."  Cady's dialogue is also used to represent how untouched she is. When Regina tells her that she's pretty, she says "Thank you." Regina was really expecting her to reject the compliment and complain about her body, like the Plastics do in the scene in front of the mirror. "So you agree?" Regina responds. "You think you're really pretty." This shows that in the Plastics' world, when someone gives you a compliment, you are expected to reject it and complain about your appearance.

When Regina tells her to "shut up," Cady also gets confused because she sees "shut up" as a way to get someone to stop talking, but Regina says it as a way to show disbelief. This is easily showing the diffences of each person's personality. Regina also interrupts Cady a lot in this scene, which is not only another way of showing that she is the boss, but that she doesn't really listen to other people and let them finish their own thoughts.

At the start of the movie, Cady is dressed innocently and not really showing a lot of skin. This shows us that the director wanted us to see her as a trustworthy, genuine character. In this scene Cady has her hair pulled back, and is wearing a plaid shirt. This gives the impression of Cady being "fresh faced" and innocent, and the plaid shirt links back to the countryside and her childhood in Africa. As for the Plastics, they are stylish because they spend a lot of time on hair, make-up and expensive jewellery, and wear low cut tops, which are less innocent than Cady's plaid shirt. At one point, there is a long, body-length shot of Janice, who is across the other side of the room. Janice is wearing a long skirt, striped stockings as well as Converse shoes. This was to create an "edgy" sense of style. Like Cady, she is shown to be styled very differently to the Plastics.

The Message of Mean Girls

Mean Girls was based on a book, Queen Bees and Wannabes, which was written to make high school girls more aware of social groups and to challenge these. If a viewer read that book, they would be more critical of characters like Regina and the rest of the Plastics, and see the movie in a different light. However, if they hadn't read the book, they may have wanted to be something similar to Regina, and thought that they needed to dress and act that way to be popular. I think Mean Girls may have successfully sent its message across towards the end of the movie, where the characters were being much nicer towards each other and everyone was treated as individuals.


All images from Google. Video from YouTube.

Stereotypes

A stereotype is the view that we have on a person just by taking a quick look at their appearance and judging them for it. When we underestimate someone because of what they may look like, we are stereotyping them. For example, if we see a girl with blonde hair, we may automatically think, "Oh, she's blonde, so she must be not very smart."

We also form stereotypes against people with disabilities. Some people underestimate them because for example, if a student is in a wheelchair, assistant teachers or school helpers may think that because she is in a wheelchair, she needs the most academic help. Actually, that person may be really bright and good at schoolwork, and it is other students that need the help. Or if you look at Disney characters, they are all slim as well as attractive. Except for Princess Fiona, who chose to stay as an ogre, we never see any overweight or "normally" sized Disney princess.

Another example of the way teenagers are stereotyped is with high school social groups. In programmes like Glee, there are many different types of groups, such as nerds, jocks, arty kids and cheerleaders. In Glee, the examples of sterotypes are very exaggerated, but they still give a fairly accurate version of how most high schools work. The character of Brittany (left), who is a part of the cheerleading squad, has a GPA (Grade Point Average) of 0.0. Even though most teenaged viewers would realise that real-life cheerleaders are not actually that stupid, they would still have low expectations of their intelligence because of stereotypes like Brittany.

This may have an effect on the audience because some people can be a bit sensitive about what group they are actually in. They may feel self-conscious and like they should be in a different group. It may also encourage people who identify with these social groups, such as band geeks, to act or dress in the way that their representations do on the show.


All images from Google.