Highway to Belle: Oh lola!

My research question as it stands plans to look at the sexualisation of young people in magazines. I don’t have my question specified at the moment as I am awaiting reply from the Mitchell library to see if they archive any young people’s magazines. My research at the moment is revolving around which magazines I can gain access to.

I plan to analyse magazines which are marketed at pre-teens and teenagers but also look at magazines marketed at adults as they may also appeal to the younger audience.

(Example's of magazines young girls may be drawn to)

Once I know which magazines I can gain access to I will be surer of my research question but if all goes as planned I want to do a comparison of recent editions with older ones to see if the sexualised content in magazines has increased. I’m hoping to gain access to teenage magazines from the early 90’s and I will create a good sample of recent magazines by making sure the sample is spread out over different times of the year.

I plan to do a semiotic analysis of adverts as I want to find out how these adverts influence children's thoughts and feelings but I also want to analyse the UK’s ‘sexed-up culture’ through content analysis.

Postman (1994:137) asserts that children have virtually disappeared from the media as they are depicted as miniature adults. He feels this is reinforced by the increased level of sexual activity. This is partly something I hope to find out in my content analysis.

An example of some of the adverts I could analyse

Old School