On the other hand, given the bleak future this generation of teens is being handed, I can hardly blame them for being shallow and narcissistic. I mean, if by chance the world doesn’t go completely to hell in a handbasket they can work on substantive later.

We get all of our information from the InterTubes.

And she’s never seemed to give a single damn about popular culture, as far as I can tell.

I know more about Paris Hilton than I want to, simply because this crap is freaking unavoidable. Being famous for being shallow and narcissistic and completely plastic-looking. Ick.

Lindsey Lohan, on the other hand, during her voluptuous phase, surgically enhanced or not, was….juicy….

The thing is, at some point our children stopped being, well, children and started being considered consumers.

P.S. Have you ever smelled elderberries? Ew.

Steve –

I think erotic vagrancy means having wild rumpy pumpy with someone other than one’s spouse. Or she was just too hot. I dunno…

(What is it?)

On the other hand, I’m almost equally squicked by the “keep your child so innocent she doesn’t know where babies come from” market–which is far from being a solely religious segment. When I hear other mothers talking about how sweet their 13 year old looks, it’s usually unconcious code for “I’m dressing my child like an American Girl Doll.”

There has to be a middle ground, but it takes a lot of work and negotiation, which is exhausting. And its in that exhaustion zone that stuff like J-14 weasels in.

PS: what’s wrong with smelling of elderberries?

You are a big fibber. You even said not to throw down punani as it would confuse the masses.

So there. Nyah nyah.
Your father is a hamster and your mother smells of elderberries.

There has always been a prurient side to the news. Hearst made a fortune pandering to it. But a distinction was made between real news and celebrity gossip. And you’re right, careers were ruined because of transgressions we would find banal today. (Probably the biggest gossip story of the 20th century, pre-OJ, was the affair between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Not only did it not destroy both of their careers, it made Taylor the highest paid star of her time. And she was even accused of “erotic vagrancy” by the Pope.)

My core problem with this magazine is that there was a craven indifference to the message being sent out to the intended readers. I don’t care that it was 2006. I don’t even care if the readers know that Hilton has a sex tape. By featuring her as if she were a standard to be achieved, they were sending a god-awful message to their readership. I don’t believe in unrealistic wholesomeness, but I do believe that when you feature someone editorially in a positive light, you’d best have some standards. A spoiled, ignorant, slut whose claim to fame is the accident of her birth and the promiscuity of her sex life isn’t what I think parents really want their daughters to aspire to.

The thing I remember about Tiger Beat (or whatever it was I saw when I was 11) was that it seemed, even then, to be pitched relentlessly to promote the downhome wholesomeness of the stars, in a weirdly corporate way.

Course I only read one or two of them, and thus my sample is not representative, and I may be talking out of my ass…

I believe what I actually said was “hey-nonny-nonnies.”

I fear I’m going to stray straight into fuddy-duddy territory here, but when TB was in its heyday, I doubt that Linda Lovelace would have been a featured celebrity between its, er, covers.

This has nothing to do with marketing, this has to do with editorial irresponsibility.

I’m still trying (not to hard, obviously) to find One Night in Paris, but all the descriptions of it indicate that it would be a great video to use about how boring heterosexual activities can be—and how boring one can look doing them.

HSM is a phenomenon, to be sure—it was our eldest’s favorite present this year—but the current interviews make it clear that the touring cast are having relationships. Between the several versions of the original, the pending sequel, and HSM on Ice (think “Crash Nebula on Ice” without the anomie) it looks as if DIS plans to continue destroying the long-term value of its properties. Can’t tell if that’s a good thing.

On the larger issue, I fear you’re just falling prey to the increase in available marketing. If there weren’t Teen People (oh, wait, there isn’t any more) and the like, there would still be “what a horrible turn for a child star” pieces. Remember Britney, Brooke Shields in the mom-released-my-transcript days and before, and all the myriad drug/alcohol (that’s redundant, I know) problems of the Mason Reeses and Anissa Joneses and Linda Blairs that were just as available for tween viewing in Tiger Beat and the like.

The tweens I grew up with were reading (or at least looking at the pictures in) TB and the like. That they’ve got their own magazines now doesn’t mean the fare has changed.