Teen magazines for girls

I went to my local Walmart yesterday and checked out all the magazines they had in their large magazine section. Three whole shelves were given over to magazines aimed at girls:

Teen Vogue
Pop
AstroGirl (not, unfortunately, an astronomy mag for girls, just a cool title for a crap mag)
Seventeen
Otaki US
J-14
Twist
QuizFest (NOT a quiz magazine asking about geogrpahy, astronomy, the sciences, etc., but rather quizzes on personal questins!)
TigerBerat
Yikes

I was so sickened when looking at these things. They were all full of fluff and garbage - "fall fashion and beauty tips" were the theme.

I mean, really. Kids reading these things are 14  years old or so...do they really need to dress in the latest fashions - that cost sooo much money? (Obviously, if they're i nCalifornia they do, but the rest of the country - the normal part of our country?)

Of course, these magazines are very popular, else there wouldn't be so many of them. And that's the saddest thing at all. Teenage girls need more in their lives than obsessing over "getting a boyfriend, keeping a boyfriend, getting a boyfriend back after he's dumped you" ya da ya da ya da.

Compare any boys magazine aimed at the same age. They're doing interesting things - making models, doing tricks on bikes, hiking, all sorts of fun stuff and not obsessed in the least bit about finding girlfriends. Of course they don't need to be obsessed - girls are trained from the get go to go after t hem these days.

I then went to the checkout counter and saw the gossip magazines there...there was one...the Star I think it was or perhaps the National Enquirer, featuring photos of skeletal women with their heads blocked out so you had to look inside to see who they were... oh my god what Angelina Jolie has done to herself - stick thin. No way could Lara Croft kick butt with those ruler-thin arms. Then there was some British model down to 70 pounds - literally a skeleton with skin on..

And I'm thinking, this is what the obsession with fashion and looking good and getting boyfriends - because you must have a boyfriend when you're 13 or so, otherwise the other girls will tease you for being unattractive to boys and god how horrible that is! - does to women.