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These provided girls with a romantic ideal which McRobbie discusses in her analysis of the magazine, McRobbie believes that young girls are conditioned to seek romantic based relationships instead of sexual ones and that romantic stories like the ones that featured in Jackie and other magazines aimed at teenaged girls at the time helped to reinforce this. Again, these can seem comically clichéd and dated by the standards of today. In fact, one of the reasons that Jackie may have regained popularity is that this style of article, although probably reasonable at the time written, seem almost laughable and maybe also politically incorrect by today’s standards (for example one article featured in The Best of Jackie Annual on ways how to attract boys suggests that a girl should try sitting on a park bench “looking tearful”, and a fashion feature refers to plus sized girls as “fatties” and very slim girls as being “stick like”). To many people in 2012, these almost seem like satire. Indeed, on the popular bookselling website Amazon, The Best of Jackie Annual and it’s spinoffs such as Dear Cathy and Claire - The Best of Your Favourite Problem Page can be found under the
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There are numerous discussions on the internet in forums with older women talking fondly about their experiences and memories of reading Jackie. When Jackie stopped being published in 1993, D.C. Thomson realised a new magazine aimed at teenaged girls called Shout, which could possibly be seen by some people as a rebranding of Jackie. Shout is still being published today and I compared a recent copy of Shout from May 2012 to a copy of Jackie from June 1981. Both magazines feature a celebrity on the front cover, with Shout having Cheryl Cole and Jackie having Adam Ant, and both also have tampon adverts on the back covers. A similar layout to that which Jackie used, and which McRobbie discusses in Jackie: An Ideology of Adolescent Femininity, is used in Shout. Problem pages, fashion pages, celebrity gossip, hair and beauty advice, “pin-ups” of attractive male celebrities, horoscopes and reader’s true-life stories all feature in both magazines, although there are clear generational differences in these articles between the two magazines. Advice given in the problem pages of Shout is more concerned with more serious issues such as sex and alcohol abuse and
There are numerous discussions on the internet in forums with older women talking fondly about their experiences and memories of reading Jackie. When Jackie stopped being published in 1993, D.C. Thomson realised a new magazine aimed at teenaged girls called Shout, which could possibly be seen by some people as a rebranding of Jackie. Shout is still being published today and I compared a recent copy of Shout from May 2012 to a copy of Jackie from June 1981. Both magazines feature a celebrity on the front cover, with Shout having Cheryl Cole and Jackie having Adam Ant, and both also have tampon adverts on the back covers. A similar layout to that which Jackie used, and which McRobbie discusses in Jackie: An Ideology of Adolescent Femininity, is used in Shout. Problem pages, fashion pages, celebrity gossip, hair and beauty advice, “pin-ups” of attractive male celebrities, horoscopes and reader’s true-life stories all feature in both magazines, although there are clear generational differences in these articles between the two magazines. Advice given in the problem pages of Shout is more concerned with more serious issues such as sex and alcohol abuse and