The image of women has emerged as a major contemporary issue, and two Cal State Long Beach students added a spin on this concept in a symposium held Wednesday.
Michelle Aragon and Elise Leahy won the 1997 Cal State University award for their content analysis of the portrayals of African-American and European-American women in teen magazines.
This research was showcased by the Women's Studies Student Association "Sassy and Sister's in Style: Images of Women in the Media" symposium.
"The reason for the study was to look at what it means to be a woman and what the roles identified with being a woman mean," Aragon said.
The two magazines chosen for the research were "Sassy" representing the European-American female and "Sisters in Style" representing African-American females.
Aragon and Leahy chose the two magazines, to use in their comparative analysis, because both are recent publications and similar in conten.t This protected the integrity of the research.
The overall purpose of the symposium was to show the influence teen magazines have on the development of the self-image of adolescent and teen-age girls.
The research said, the content of these magazines has a direct impact on the way many girls view themselves and how they think society wants them to look.
The advertisements were found to be 60 percent of the content in the magazines and for this reason they were evaluated the most.
Aragon and Leahy found that in "Sassy" females were portrayed as innocent, immature, childlike and dependent. In "Sisters in Style" the females were portrayed more in a strong independent light. Both magazines lacked the portrayal of women in businesslike or educated ways, the two said.
The idea is to show girls that it is okay to look up to business women that have great jobs that do not necessarily have all the physical attributes of the models in magazines, Leahy said.
Leahy described her work with young children, and recalled an encounter with a young black girl who expressed her wish to look like Leahy. Instead of shrugging off the comment, Leahy took the opportunity to show the girl the beauty she herself possessed, to be happy with herself and not look like everyone else.
Attending the meeting was Casey Burns, a 16-year-old junior from Los Alamitos High School.
"They had excellent research but they should have looked at a broader surrounding," Burns said. "I think they are wrong in the advertisements being so influential because I think they're horrible and I don't even take a second glance at them."
Christine Lemburg, a sociology major at CSULB, was provoked by Leahy and Aragon's presentation.
"I agreed to a certain extent but I think it can be over exaggerated somewhat," Lemburg said. "But I do think that the media influences us even more than we think they do. I know that growing up as a teenager and seeing those images of perfect women that many times I wanted to be just like that."