I have talked about teen magazines many times on this podcast.

A big recurring theme is the reflecting on an analysis of the female millennial zeitgeist

and to say that teen magazines were influential would be a gross understatement unlike the

egregious overstatement of how at the threat we were at all times for toxic shocks syndrome

as communicated by teen magazines. I think that it's a tough thing and I find this with every topic

we go over. I want to celebrate things for what they were and what they meant for me at that time

within the limitations that existed within that time but also acknowledge the problem of

believing that's what I was limited to. When they're in that time the magazines I was reading

as a young suburban white young woman in Virginia, the stuff I was reading from memory,

it didn't have a ton of diversity, it didn't have a ton of body positive commentary,

like it was upholding the standards that we now realize were incredibly problematic

to be holding ourselves to of thinness of particular beauty standards.

What was represented in these pages is oftentimes pretty troubling when you look back on it

but it also was very normal for the time it was in and it becomes difficult to use today's

yardstick as a means to gauge the quality of something back then. We can absolutely criticize

and it's important to recognize how it framed the way we think we thought about ourselves,

the way we thought about others and these are the things I dissect all the time on this podcast

but there's also a flip side of that that I really like want to acknowledge and celebrate

on behalf of the teen magazine especially in the context of the sex ed episode I did last week

where we heard from countless people that had no information about their bodies, their anatomy

about sex that they were in abstinence only 90s, 2000s programs that gave them no information

about contraception, gave them no information about like helpful information about periods and

...