Why Do All Teenage Girls Aspire to be Glamor Models?

I don’t believe you have to go back too far to uncover this change in popular culture, the mid 1990’s saw two pop groups in particular make a huge difference. The Spice girls and oasis were mimicked and provoked more media attention than any band since the Beatles.

Liam Gallagher almost single handedly renewed interest in flagging gossip columns whereas both bands courted media attention far more than bands from the eighties and early nineties like the Smiths and the Stone roses.

In the summer of 1996 England’s good showing in the European championships helped make football more popular which in turn led to more satellite T.V subscriptions and therefore more influence from American culture. With all this live football it was to be expected that footballers were to become celebrities. With David Beckham becoming the pin up boy for the new generation of celebrity footballers it was perhaps inevitable that he would form one half of the couple which would take celebrity obsession and gossip to a new level. “posh & Becks” weren’t the first celebrity couple in the U.K but they were the first of a new breed, a slick marketing machine who had the media in mind in almost everything they did and created a multitude of impersonators (one of which would become famous on reality T.V).

Despite all the other events of the mid 1990’s there can be no doubt what the biggest factor in this cultural change was, what was it? Of course it was the internet. During the early years the celebrity rumor was part and parcel of internet activity, there were updates available 24 hours a day and countless sites devoted to celebrity worship. Towards the turn of the century a new phenomenon was launched with the chatroom, which enabled the fans to gossip and speculate about their favorite celebrities with millions of others.

A more indirect influence of the internet was that it led a lot of people to become more isolated and spend more time in their rooms.

At the turn of the century the invention of reality T.V was to make things much worse. Big brother started in 2001 as a kind of social experiment and no one really knew what to expect. The first series was such a success that it was to spawn a whole new genre with such imitators as I’m a celebrity, Shipwrecked and the apprentice.

Some people became so obsessed with these shows that they dedicated all their spare time to watching them through live coverage on satellite channels and streaming over the internet.

With celebrities attracting so much attention and obsession it is unsurprising they are mimicked. As one American journalist said “celebrity journalism is like high school and the celebrities are the cool kids” and every teenager wants to be like the cool kids.

Perhaps more worrying is how teenage girls want to achieve fame, not for their achievements, or even their personalities, but for purely superficial reasons. The question is what can we do about it? Well stop watching reality T.V for a start, stop buying gossip magazines, stop visiting websites that worship celebrity and promote shallowness. If we all stop showing an interest then ratings, sales and hits will drop and eventually the genre will start to fizzle out. This all might sound a bit sanctimonious but if you don’t want your daughter to aspire to be a glamour model or your son to aspire to be like 50 cent then something needs to change and we all have to take some responsibility.