Smokey eyes peer out of the pale oval face framed by platinum blonde hair. Her lips bend slightly upward with a sly little smile and are painted the same color as the picture's baby pink background. Her dress matches this shade as well but is set off by the light caught in the skinny rectangular sequins that run its length. It's form fitting and low-cut, but shows no cleavage, due more to her boyish figure than the dress's modesty. "His Best Sex Ever," "Um, Vagina are you okay down there?," and "Too Naughty to Say Here: But you have to try this sex trick" in bold type frames her lithe body. "COSM" on one side of her head and "ITAN" on the other is all that readers can see of the magazine's title, but most any woman would readily know, even without the title, that this is an edition of Cosmopolitan, it's glossy front and sex-riddled headlines a dead giveaway for the iconic women's magazine.
The woman on the cover is Dakota Fanning, and she is only 17-years-old. A child actress, known for her sweet-little-girl appearance and girl-next-door appeal and most recently of Twilight fame, Fanning seems to be eschewing her wholesome associations by posing on the inside of the magazine in rabbit ears, redolent of Hugh Hefner and his bunnies. In truth, the magazine and it's staff seem hyper aware of the seemingly relative innocence of its cover model in using the baby pink color as a background, in printing several pictures of Fanning as she grew up, and even by drawing attention to the incongruency of an underage cover model for this particular magazine by captioning the bunny-eared picture with the statement "Two years ago, this would have been cute. Now it's hot."
This cover is only one of many magazine covers that seek to sensualize young girls on the cusp of womanhood. In 1980, Brooke Shields was only 15 when she posed for Cosmo. In February of 2012, it was Dakota Fanning. In March, Cosmo will feature Disney channel star, Selena Gomez, who may be 19 (only slightly overage), but is still young and very much associated with a younger age set and viewership. A few years ago, Miley Cyrus, also of Disney channel fame was involved in a scandal over her Vanity Fair cover photo. Not to mention the number of greatly underage supermodels today, coveted specifically for their undeveloped figures which allow the clothes to hang like on a coat hanger.
First of all: for real. I picked up this magazine and couldn't believe little Dakota Fanning was on the cover. I read that caption "Two years ago this would have been cute. Now it's hot" and didn't really understand how they got anything other than "odd" out of that.
ReplyDeleteAnyways, as for the piece: I think this will benefit most from something like we did for our essays for last Tuesday. The toggling. I would pick one thing that really clashes with this, otherwise you run the risk of sounding expected. There's little you can pair it with that won't sound like something we've all heard before: for example, if it became a piece where you explore all of this type of stuff that has surrounded you since you were little, you're talking about the same kind of thing plenty of people have talked about while critiquing the state of young girls today. Likewise, if you go the other way, and claim she is a symbol of femininity, that she's taking charge of her body and her image and that's good, it just sounds like a heralding for feminism (in a very reduced state). Rather, pair it with something totally unexpected. Maybe it's found in one of the ads or in the backstory of another girl in the issue. Maybe it's totally off the wall and not even remotely connected. In the end, your reflection can pair the two up together and you'll be able to explore new questions and new emotions, not just something like feeling sympathy or jealousy of Fanning.
More locally, right now this sounds very much like report. In a way, that's anticipated with these blog entries. But can you start off more concretely (rather than with the description of the women) and then go into the description? Maybe start off with Fanning's history? Or with the story of you going to get the magazine. Or something you've learned from the magazine previously, and then you can surprise us by saying that, this month, a 17 year old girl is the icon of such information.