Sending Teenagers A New Message Publications Defy Girl Magazine Formula

Clothes and boys. Hair and boys. Popularity and boys. Makeup and boys.

That’s what you get from your average magazine for girls.

Oh, sure, there are exceptions to the triumvirate of Teen and YM and Seventeen, with their prom-fashion layouts and Maybelline ads. There has always been a handful of small, earnest publications that printed girls’ poetry and fiction, or stories about women of achievement who weren’t supermodels or superstars.

And certainly, even the big teen mags do tackle the big girl issues: Eating disorders and sexual harassment in the halls are given respectful treatment, even if the articles do appear alongside ads for swimsuits or concealing cream.

But the bottom line: From the time a girl picks up her first comic book and watches Betty and Veronica flirt with Archie, until the day she graduates to Mademoiselle and checks out the mascara ads, the focus of what she’ll be reading is how to be pretty, how to be popular, how to be thin, how to get dates.

Until now.

“Home Ec in the ‘50s: You Gotta See It to Believe It!” sneers the title of an article in Foxy, an on-line magazine full of “interviews, life tips and trips for cool girls.” (Check it out at Foxy@tumyeto.com).

“Red, White and Clueless? Republican Women of Color” is a title from HUES (Hear Us Emerging Sisters), a publication created by three University of Michigan undergrads.

Bust writes about feminism. Blue Jean, which accepts no advertising and has an all-girls editorial advisory board, targets body image.

The New Girl Times, with a masthead that looked just like the New York Times, until that paper slapped its youthful competition with a cease-and-desist order, covers child labor and sweatshops from a young consumer’s perspective, in a story called “Sweatshirts From Sweatshops: Girls and the Gap.”

Blue Jean, which has just gone national, boasts that “you will find no beauty tips, fashion spreads or supermodels within.” The publication’s being snapped up at bookstores nationwide.

Frank, irreverent, funny, profane ‘zines with names such as Sourpuss and Odd Grrrl Out circulate through the mail to girls all over the country.

And there’s Get Real comics, where girls play soccer, boys babysit, and the multi-racial, multi-ethnic cast deals with real issues - like how it feels when a parent starts to date.

Chalk it up to the Internet, where any girl with smarts and computer savvy can launch a homepage, or send her poems and essays into cyberspace.

Credit do-it-yourself copy shops and desktop publishing software, which would let the same girl blanket her junior high with professional-looking copies of her own journal.

Give props to books such as “Reviving Ophelia” and “School Girls,” which raised adults’ awareness about bright, bubbly, talkative 8-year-olds’ emerging from junior high as silent, super-sensitive teen-agers, who’d rather lose a limb than raise their hands in science class.

“Ophelia” was the catalyst for Sherry Handel, the 32-year-old publisher of the Rochester, N.Y.-based Blue Jean. “The media, and teen magazines especially, focus on how girls look. It tells them that’s the only way they’re valued. And you end up with a lot of girls trying to achieve the impossible. I think the look-focus is damaging… There’s a lot more to focus on. A lot more to do.”

Handel did her part, ditching her job in sales, devoting her personal savings and taking out a second mortgage on her home to produce the magazine. It first hit stands in the spring of 1996, and now has a circulation of 10,000.

Mollie Goldstein, the magazine’s 16-year-old assistant editor, spokesperson and de facto Web page designer, said Handel’s bright idea hit her like a lightning bolt. “I saw a flier in the public library that said there was this new magazine trying to provide an alternative to mainstream publications. I couldn’t believe that someone else had figured out there was something wrong with those messages - with the image of the beautiful, thin, attractive girl who always gets the guys.”

Mollie signed on to the 14-member board of teen editors and illustrators (Blue Jean also has four paid adult employees), and went on to write articles on everything from vegetarianism to feminist artists. Stories, like everything that appears in Blue Jean, reinforce the magazine’s message “that young women are interested in all kinds of things, and can do all kinds of things.”

If Get Real comics are any indication, this sassy, empowered spin, and a vision of a world where boys and girls are on equal footing, might become required reading at a very early age.

Debbie Rogow and Kate Churi launched Get Real after personal experiences with a child having trouble learning to read. A reading specialist advised letting the child read anything. What the child wound up reading were comic books - in all of their sexist, stereotypical glory.

Rogow, a former international consultant in women’s health, and Churi, who has a background in business and the arts, knew they could do better in creating a comic book that could be used as a literacy tool and wouldn’t feature, for example, a recumbent, voluptuous Supergirl exclaiming breathlessly how good helping people makes her feel.

Like other publishers, they were sick of the mixed messages that the media feeds to boys and girls. “Don’t have sex, but be fantastically sexual. And if you’re white, be skinny. And if you’re a boy, be strong and brave all the time. Those,” Rogow said, “are pretty tall orders for a kid to hear all the time.”

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: NEW VOICES “Fact Sheet Five” is a regularly published compendium of the ‘zine world, complete with reviews, recommendations, and post office boxes of where to obtain the ‘zine of your choice. Pick it up at most major bookstores. Forthcoming: This summer, look for “A Girl’s Guide to Taking Over the World: Writings from the Girl Zine Revolution,” edited by Tristan Taormino and Karen Green. For The New Girl Times, send $12 for 12 issues to 215 W. 84th Street, New York, N.Y. 10024. For HUES, call (800) 483-7482 or look for it at local bookstores. Subscriptions are $14.99 for four issues. For Blue Jean magazine, send $29 for a one-year subscription to Box 90856, Rochester, N.Y. 14609, or call (716) 654-5070. To subscribe to Get Real Comics, contact COLLAGE (it stands for Comics, Literacy and Gender) at 709 W. Mount Airy Ave., Philadelphia, PA 19119, or call (215) 242-3211. For inquiries about reduced bulk sales call (800) 458-0006. The publisher of Get Real Comics said the magazine soon will be available at Auntie’s Bookstore. On the Internet: Check out Hilary Carlip’s Girl Power site at www.girlpower.com, and read excerpts from the book that are written by girls. Cybergrrl (that’s at www.cybergrrl.com) has girls’ writings, plus links to other sites of interest for women and girls. And Girl Talk is a forum for new Net users and veterans, where participants can post messages on any topics that interest them. Check it out at http.//www.pleiadesnet.com/voices/girl/girl.html