Shameless Magazine

So right away I was stoked to find a woman’s (or girl’s) magazine that isn’t all about celebrities or beauty or sex. I am an Elle magazine and Cosmopolitan magazine addict, and I easily get sucked into trends or celebrity gossip. Before Elle or Cosmo I read YM and Seventeen. If I had been exposed to a magazine like Shameless, I may have different values than I do today.

When logging into the website, the first article that pops up is an ad for Canadian Club whiskey. The picture is of a young man sitting in a chair holding a mixed drink and with a gorgeous brunette laughing and sitting on his lap. The headline reads, “Your mom wasn’t your dad’s first.” The following article is about sexism and how the ad is clearly geared towards men. What woman would want to imagine the father she looks up to as a womanizing man-slut who wasn’t always hopelessly devoted to her mother? The title of the article is: “Your dad was a womanizer, drink this!”

It’s a shame that the magazine isn’t more widely broadcast and that more young women aren’t aware of it. If publications like this were more mainstream and popular, the issues we (young girls) have may not be so prevalent. Magazines like YM rave about boosting the self-confidence of young girls, but they are still filled with layouts of stick-thin girls and they still hold quizzes with titles like, “does he like you?” and all the best make-up tips. Then there are mags like Teen Beat which actually make me nauseous because when I was a teenager (14-18), I wasn’t reading those types of “boy-crazy” bullshit rags, but I know that 10-13 year olds probably are. They are meant to look like they are targeted towards TEEN girls, when really it is the pre-teens who are reading them. I used to babysit a girl who was obsessed with Zack Efron, a boy nearly twice her age.

If magazines were more like Shameless and tackled actual issues (like sexism), and not just how to deal with split ends, we would most likely be a much more developed nation, with a higher intellectual population. Young girls would have idols that have journalism or science as a career, rather than walking cat-walks or reciting script for the camera. Girls would have bigger dreams than just kissing the captain of the basket-ball team and that would be perfectly acceptable. Perhaps that’s just my dream, though.