To what extent should magazines be held responsible for the social ramifications of the representations they offer?

The four magazine covers I analysed for a pre-task were all aimed at teenage/young adult girls. After comparing them all it really shows that from reading the type of magazines and articles within, it gives a perspective over what the ‘norm’ is for girls to look and act like. Social ramification is the bad effect of doing a certain thing, so when it comes to reading these teenage magazines this could be things like peer pressure or self consciousness. When it comes to teenage girls, there’s already a lot of stress and of peer pressure to have your hair in a certain cut, wear different types of make-up and wear the best clothes that fits in with your friendship group, from a young age, girls feel the need to fit into a certain stereotype of ‘pretty’ or ‘fashionable’ and they fear the confrontation that would likely come from looking or dressing differently than what’s supposedly expected from them. So when reading the magazines, it makes it that little bit harder. The articles are almost telling you what to wear, how to apply your make-up and which brand to get or how to get a boyfriend. One of the worst social ramifications that magazines represent is weight. The girls that fill the pages are always skinny and the stereotype of either pretty or sexy and it gives the idea that being skinny is the normal way and it gives a perception to girls who may be bigger that being slightly larger is a bad thing, and from this there’s a lot of problems with teenage girls and eating problems from anorexia to bulimia. But this is only because the magazines are almost shoving the way people should look and dress down their throats. The Hypodermic Needle theory comes into this as teenage girls will believe anything they read and will act or do things to their body to become this stereotype which isn't what they should be like, only what girls are expected to become from the lines in these articles.  There are problems now with girls as young as 12 and 13 that have been in hospital from eating disorders. It’s not only magazines that are responsible for these issues, magazines are only a part of this. A lot of media gives out hidden meanings of ‘the perfect girl’ especially shows on television, most of them involving stereotypes of ‘pretty’ girls, and things like ‘America’s Next Top Model’ giving a message that only super skinny, pretty and tall girls are the right fit to become a model. Also newspapers don’t help. When it comes to page 3 girls, this gives out more stereotypes a girl should fit into. The page 3 girls always have big breasts, which for all girls can make them feel self-conscious if they aren't only enough to produce them yet or if when they have aren't big enough, which leads to another social ramification of Plastic Surgery, millions of girls now go through surgery to get tucks and lifts to get better cheekbones, bums, stomachs and and boob jobs to go up a size because they don’t believe they’re a normal size because of stereotypes and perceptions of the normal thing. So the media is defiantly quite responsible for how children and young adults are becoming, girls are growing up now self conscious and have a lot of peer pressure to become something that’s not at all natural which when doing so, can take turns for the worst.