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Seventeen and Self-Image
Silently reading an article about the images of women in advertising, one of my 11th-grade female students looked up and snarled: “This media literacy stuff is making me mad. Now when I open my copy of Seventeen magazine, I can’t look at it in the same way. I just renewed my subscription to it and now I can hardly stand it.”
I smiled and sympathized with what it meant to have her illusions of something shattered, but I honestly felt a little proud of the positive impact my advertising unit was having on my students.
Many of my students are walking advertisements and consumers of media. They purchase t-shirts, hats, and backpacks embossed with the ubiquitous Nike swoosh symbol. They sport images of their favorite heavy-metal band and sports team. They enter class talking of the latest episode of Dawson’s Creek. Typically, they will have accumulated 22,000 hours of television viewing by the time they graduate from high school, which is twice the amount of time they will have spent in school. They will have seen 350,000 television commercials by the age of 17.
