Week 10- Wednesday

I sat today with a few junior highers in Border’s as we looked through magazines like those mentioned in class on Wednesday. I believe that adult women can negotiated the meanings associated with these magazines; adults can use the magazines for their own benefit and decide what effect they want these magazines to have. Yet I do not see the ability of a junior higher to do this, at least not from what I saw today. They take in the messages conveyed in these magazines without abstractly thinking or critically engaging with them- they see women as sexualized objects of perfect proportions, and they think that this is their model for being. So while we can gain hope in that women are negotiating the meanings of these texts, that is not true of early adolescents, and it is these young women who are the most vulnerable to attack.

Advertisement