May 18 - 25, 2000
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Teen dream
If a girls' magazine refuses to write about glamour, will any girls read it? Teen Voices
hopes they will -- a million of them.by Camille Dodero
It's a Thursday evening in Manhattan, and Patricia Smith is at the pulpit talking about girls' magazines.
In Boston, Smith's reputation still carries a whiff of her dismissal from the Boston Globe. But here, she's a Ms. magazine columnist, a compelling MC dressed in black. "On the way here, I stopped in a drugstore and looked on the magazine shelf," Smith says to an attentive room, "and what I found was '32 Ways To Kiss Him So He'll Remember.' " She frowns, her disdain for the title capitalizing each word. "That's what's out there for teenage girls, all right?"
To the 200 people gathered here, it's not all right. The hip, mostly twentysomething crowd has congregated at the Limelight, a church turned high-profile nightclub, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Boston-based girls' magazine Teen Voices -- a magazine whose mission Smith deftly summarizes when she calls it "not 16 magazine."
No one would confuse Teen Voices with 16. There are many reasons for this, and a few are in plain sight. Hanging by the Limelight entrance is a collage of Teen Voices covers -- covers that don't pay homage to celebrity or fashion, but that feature young women from disparate races, with silvery braces and asymmetrical faces. Young women 16 or Seventeen wouldn't include in an article, never mind showcase on the cover.
And the covers don't gush about "32 memorable liplocks" or "50 gorgeous guys." Instead, headlines read: THE WAY OUT: SURVIVING DEPRESSION; FAT VS. SKINNY/WHAT UP?; AND ARE YOU BEING BOUGHT BY ADS?
Not 16. Not Seventeen. Not even subtle.
It's also not widely read. Seventeen counts more than 2.3 million girls as subscribers. Even 16 -- a pin-up book of the "cutest guys ever" that's so gleefully smug it doesn't bother trying to dispense directives beyond "see who made our list" -- maintains a distribution of approximately 165,000. Meanwhile, Teen Voices can barely manage to circulate 75,000 copies an issue -- something the periodical hopes to change with its "A Million Girls, A Million Voices" fundraising/consciousness-raising initiative, which it is promoting tonight at the Limelight.
"What we want is one million thoughtful, intelligent, and questioning women to have this magazine in their possession in five years," Smith says from her DJ-booth podium, her right hand twisting the microphone like a melting ice-cream cone. "Can we do that?" Dribbles of cheering erupt from the dance floor. Trying to bring the enthusiasm to a crescendo, she lets out a wildly ambitious plea: "Let's make it five months!"
We like to read about people who are on TV.
-- Katie, 13, Annapolis, MarylandThere's nothing worse than being ordinary.
-- Angela in American BeautyTeen Voices is going to need a lot longer than five months, if you use the sidewalk in front of 1515 Broadway as a lip-glossed litmus test for teenybopper appeal. Every weekday afternoon, gaggles of cackling teenagers flock to this Times Square corner -- about two miles from the Limelight -- to whoop and scream in the background of MTV's Total Request Live.
On the day of the Teen Voices event, I corral a focus group of four girls eager to froth about teen magazines: Katie, 13, and Jackie, 14, both enrolled in a private school in Annapolis, Maryland; and two 17-year-olds, Yvette and Veronica, both students at a public high school in Mesa, Arizona. All four happily confess that the TRL taping was their contribution to their families' Big Apple itinerary. They're all loyal to YM, Teen People, and Seventeen, they flip to humiliation stories and horoscopes first, and they always ignore the table of contents. Yvette conveys an unabashed love for "Thong Song" singer Sisqó, Veronica swears that Dawson is a dork ("You can tell he didn't get dates in high school"), and Jackie and Katie think 'N Sync are "really gorgeous."
Then I show them the most recent issue of Teen Voices.
Four faces turn sour. The girls have never before seen the magazine, but they clam up, treating its presence like a party foul. Finally, Katie, a scrawny blonde with eyelids dusted in corn silk, translates the silence. "We see people like that every day, so why would we want to read about them?"
"Yeeaaaaahhhhh," the other three sigh, nodding their heads in unison.
Suddenly, a silhouette appears in the studio windows. Jackie leaps up and points, "Jerry from 2GE+HER!!!" Katie pogoes up and down, shrilling like a banshee. A few pelvic thrusts for the curbside crowd and Jerry vanishes. Still convulsing, Katie exhales deeply and continues talking.
"It would probably be better for us to read that magazine," she says with the indulgent giddiness Homer Simpson might use to admit it'd be better for him and Barney to pump weights than to guzzle beer. "But we probably wouldn't."
I don't really identify myself with most of the girls at school. They're all into fashion, boys, and clothes.
-- Vanessa Santos, 15,Dear D -- Hi! I am a 15-year-old girl. I have very little or no self-esteem at all. I am always depressed and I absolutely hate myself. I think I am ugly, fat, stupid and worthless.
Teen Voices peer leader
-- Signed Putter (excerpted from the Teen Voices Web site)Alison Amoroso already knows that the salivating girls outside the MTV studios probably don't -- or wouldn't -- read the magazine she co-founded. After 10 years as publisher and editor of Teen Voices, she's in tune with who's listening and who isn't.
"We don't feel like all teenage girls are our universe," Amoroso says in her Washington Street office, near Chinatown, a little more than a week after the New York event. "If they're already in that celebrity culture, it's going to be difficult for us to reach them."
"A lot of our readers read Spin and the Source," says Teen Voices editor Alison Amoroso. If she's right, then the Donnas should be pretty typical readers -- sort of. All four members of the band are young enough to contribute to Teen Voices, and whether they read Spin or not, they've certainly appeared in its pages. Plus, they're humble enough to admit, "We weren't popular in high school." With this in mind, the Phoenix sat down with Donna A., Donna F., Donna R., and Donna C. and asked them to play magazine critics. Music critics
Q: The day before yesterday I was in New York, and I talked to a few teenage girls about this magazine. They told me that they probably wouldn't read Teen Voices because they don't like to read about normal people.
Donna A.: It might be the Voices part.
Donna F.: Yeah, that makes it sound religious.
Donna R.: But they put articles about real people in other teen magazines, don't they? Like Teen People. Don't they do sections that are like, "I survived blah blah blah," or "I did drugs for 10 years, I started when I was five years old"?
A.: Yeah, but that's usually the last thing you read.
R.: Well, I think kids don't really want to read, because they have to read in school.
Q: If kids don't like to read, why do they read any magazines?
R.: I think girls think of magazines as brainless, as something to look at.
A.: You buy a magazine because you want what's in it.
F.: You wouldn't buy that magazine, because you wouldn't want to look like that girl [on the cover].
Donna C.: It's too obvious that this magazine is trying to be all positive -- which is good -- but it screams, "This is positive."
A.: It looks like a self-help thing. You would never expect to see someone with friends with it.
R.: Another thing is that someone who had that [magazine] in their room and someone [else] saw it, they'd think they were weird. Like, if I had a friend over, they'd pick it up and go, "What's that?" They'd think it was a joke. It just looks like it might be a joke.
Q: It looks like a joke?
F.: It looks like something you'd get in school. Like your teacher would bring in.
R., C., A.: Yeah.
R.: Free at school.
Q: It's not something you'd read in your spare time?
R.: Maybe if it were free in schools people would read it.
F.: Maybe if it didn't have nerdy people on it.
R.: No, there's nothing wrong with a nerdy person. It'd be better if it was more artistic, because people look at things with an eye for design.
F.: The font is retarded, and it's got a bad color scheme.
A.: We didn't mean to trash the magazine.
R.: It just needs to distinguish itself from a schoolbook if it wants to succeed.
"What we're really looking for," says Amoroso, "are girls who don't feel that they can connect with mainstream bubblegum magazines."
When you're knee-deep in TRL fans, it's difficult to imagine teen girls' not feeling "connected" to boy worship, beauty tips, and Britney Spears. But the longer you listen to Amoroso, the more crisply you recall the fickle, fatalistic, often cruel climate of high school, and the more you wonder whether the girls who supposedly "connect" aren't in the minority.
"Right now, there's 14 million teenage girls [in the country]," says Amoroso. "Seventeen claims to have at least two or three million of them and YM another two million. Realistically, a lot of those readers overlap, but even if you said that both magazines have five million individual readers, that still leaves nine million that aren't reading anything. Those nine million are the girls we should be reaching."
For the past 12 years, tending to those girls has been a labor of love for Amoroso, who is now 34. She and collaborator Christine Diamond found themselves, back in 1988, disgusted with the mainstream media's imposition of unrealistic standards on young women. They resolved to "become part of the solution," and soon afterward they and 15 other women founded Women Express, Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated "to furthering social and economic justice" for teenage girls.
After two years of meeting periodically in a cramped studio apartment, the group published, on newsprint, its first issue of Teen Voices. The quarterly's tag line reminded readers that "you're more than just a pretty face," and it featured real young women -- young women plucked from all points on the bell curve -- on its cover and throughout its pages.
Not only was Teen Voices reaching out to an unexplored niche in the magazine world, but it also strove to give its audience a stake in the enterprise. It has always called itself "the magazine by, for, and about teenage and young adult women," and still upholds that mission by publishing essays, poetry, and artwork exclusively by girls nine to 21. Inside the office, the magazine is built around a mentoring program that allows inner-city girls to learn the fundamentals of writing and editing. Teen editors sift through submissions, choose pieces to publish under one broad subject, and write introductions for each feature. Adult volunteers oversee every step of this process, and they have the final say on all decisions and the final task of editing.
Over the past 10 years, the magazine's look has changed, but the voices have stayed the same. It has evolved into a quarterly color glossy, publishing pieces with titles such as "What Up Nigga! Would You Say It?", "Safe and in Control: Straight Talk about Birth Control," and "Leaving War Behind: Refugees from Kosovo Speak Out," as well as interviews with Judy Blume, Salt N' Pepa, and Cibo Matto. Today Women Express, Inc. lists more than 100 members and maintains offices in both San Francisco and Boston.
In conversation, Concetta Ceriello, a 21-year-old Boston University sophomore and part-time Teen Voices volunteer, calls the magazine's Downtown Crossing office "a feminist work environment." She's not kidding: in four visits to the office, I encountered only one male, a UPS delivery man.
Feminist microcosm or not, Amoroso's ethic of inclusion seems to have seeped into the people around her. Once I was quietly scribbling in the sixth-floor foyer and someone politely inquired, "Are you waiting for somebody?" And when I answered, "Thanks, but I'm all set," without proffering any explanation as to why I was all set, the anonymous raven-haired woman sweetly chirped, "I just didn't want you to feel left out."
"We started with no money," Amoroso remembers. "One of the volunteers gave us $500, and another volunteer's grandmother gave us $2000. Now our budget's almost $700,000. As they say, you manage money better if you don't have it."
Teen Voices still doesn't have it. That $700,000 budget may seem like a substantial leap from $2500, but by the standards of the media conglomerates that publish mass-market magazines, it's spare change. The bulk of Teen Voices' funding is provided by foundations, corporate donors, and private contributors. Although the magazine does run ads, it refuses to accept campaigns that Women Express, Inc. deems incompatible with the Teen Voices mission -- no Cover Girl, Paul Mitchell, or Maybelline ads.
Not surprisingly, Teen Voices continues to be financially strapped -- so strapped that it can't afford a publicist. A memo thumbtacked to an office bulletin board reminds staff, "Sorry no freebies. We just don't have the dough to send out free samples."
With funding so severely hobbled, Teen Voices can't hire a professional designer or a production manager, and the magazine's aesthetics suffer as a result. In talking with a dozen girls and four Donnas (see "Music Critics," facing page), the most common criticism of the magazine -- perhaps the reason Jackie from Annapolis handled the periodical like a hot potato -- is that its bright, saturated hues and cursive logo make it look "like one of those books you'd get in health class" or "in the waiting room at the doctor's office." Emily, 15, from Lakeville, even likened it to Highlights for Children, an activity magazine aimed at ages two to 12.
"We try really hard not to make it look like a school book," says Amoroso. But even she admits, "I think we have a lot of bad design in here."
Amoroso adds, "What we're hoping is that there are enough people that believe in the cause, who might go 'Uggghhh' at the cover or the design, but buy it anyway."
Teen Voices does dispense advice and offer tips, but the meat of the magazine is its first-person writing by teenage girls. Each issue is rife with candid stories submitted by young women ages nine to 21. Here are some excerpts from the most recent issue: Voices voices
From "Me and My Blue Hair," by Michelle Danda, 17
"I am a female punk. Punk as in blue hair, goes to all-ages shows, army pants -- the whole shebang. . . . I see people stare when I walk down the street with their disapproving glares and silent prayers, hoping that their children turn out nothing like me. I wish I could just scream at them, `Stop judging me because I am not like you!' "
From "Forced To Go Too Far," by Anonymous
"Jeff started to kiss me. . . . The sweet, innocent kissing was not enough for Jeff. He pushed me down to his waist and I had no idea why, so I came back up and started to kiss him again. He undid his pants while we were kissing, and he pushed me back down to his waist. He held my shoulders down. I was confused; I was not getting the hint of what he was asking for. I came back up and said, `What are you doing?'
"Jeff started to kiss me again and after a while he pushed me down and said, 'Suck it.' "
From "My Secret Life," by Shelby, 15
"My story of adoption is kind of unique. . . . I was adopted by my grandmother, my aunts, and then my birth mother. . . . Living with my aunt was so much fun -- until my aunt's boyfriend sexually assaulted me. After that, I felt like dying. I felt so ashamed that I didn't tell anyone until my closest cousin went through the same thing, told her counselor, and her counselor told our family. . . . So I went to my aunt and told her that I wanted to move in with my birth mother, who I thought was my sister at the time. . . . But the more I lived with my real mom the more I wanted to be away from her. . . . While with my mom I even thought about taking the easy way out and killing myself."
Reprinted from Teen Voices, Volume 9, Issue 1.
