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Tuesday, 13th May 2008

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Life in the modern world for teenage girls



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Jemma Walton
HER naked back is partly covered by a rumpled bedsheet, her hair is messy and her lips are pouting. The actress who plays Hannah Montana certainly looked sexy in the pictures of her taken for magazine Vanity Fair – but she's only 15. Is this wrong?
Jemma Walton asked a group of 16-year-old Orton Longueville female pupils how they feel about the way the media portrays young women.

WALK into any newsagents, look at the magazine rack and you'll see picture after picture of naked or semi-naked young girls.

But there is growing concern about the influence such images may have.

How are young women meant to feel when they see such a sight? Disgusted? Entertained? Flattered? Intimidated?

What do you think?
Comment below, email us: features@ peterboroughtoday.co.uk or telephone features team 01733 588723.
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"I think that it's OK if girls want to do that kind of thing, but it's not for me," said Sam Adams. "Everyone's got the freedom to earn their money in the way that they want."

"I think in a lot of ways it's harder to be a young girl than a young lad," said Steph Ryman.

"Girls are under a pressure to look a certain way all the time, and I think that pressure comes from looking at other girls at school, from girls on TV and from the perfect girls with perfect hair and bodies in papers and magazines.

"I went through a period of being really depressed about how I looked because I thought I was big. I thought I wasn't a good person because I didn't look how I wanted to look, or how other girls looked, and I lost weight.

"Since I did that I've felt much better about myself. But I still think there is too much pressure on young women to look a certain way.

"Magazines are full of pictures of young women, and they're always saying that this one is too fat and this one is too thin, and you start to wonder what they think is normal.

"They are all holding up a perfect ideal, but don't ever say what that ideal actually is."

"I wouldn't be put off reading The Sun because of Page Three girls," said Sophie Glover. "Because it's just one picture. But it does make you think that that paper is meant more for men than for women.

"As for magazines like Nuts and Zoo, I think they give boys the wrong ideas of what girls should do or look like.

"I think the girls that pose in those magazines only do it for the money, and are probably unhappy. Pictures of them with their tops off downgrade women."

Most of the girls said they liked fashion magazines, but weren't particularly influenced by them, and none of them wanted a career as a model or a Page Three girl.

"We all want to go to university and make the most of our lives," said Steph Ryman.

"And I think most girls we know would say the same."

The full article contains 516 words and appears in Peterborough ET newspaper.
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  • Last Updated: 09 May 2008 11:38 AM
  • Source: Peterborough ET
  • Location: Peterborough
 
 

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