textfiles/magazines/MISC/cropd-01.txt

======================================================
CROPDUSTER -- Issue 1
Copyright 1992 by Steven Meece and Chris Woodill
======================================================

This is the ASCII version of the zine. It contains everything you would
receive in the real zine except for pictures and the feel of authenticity. If
you would like to receive the paper edition, send $1.10 for the United States
or 86 cents for Canada to:

Cropduster
79 O'Hara Avenue
Toronto, Ontario
M6K 2R3

All other enquiries should be directed to that office as well. The editors are
also available by international e-mail at:

ad522@freenet.carleton.ca (Steven Meece)
cwoodill@epas.utoronto.ca (Chris Woodill)

Naturally permission is granted to distribute Cropduster in any way you would
like, but please leave it as it is so that others can see our mistakes as
well. If you have a problem, don't take it out on a text file: Tell us.

==============
Editor's Words
Steven Meece
==============

Cropduster was born as a summer make-work project by the
editor. Why teeny mags? We have found them to be very
entertaining, because they are meant to be. They really try
too hard to be constantly entertaining without providing a
single break from the action. Maybe this is the way life
really is in the United States. Reading one of these
magazines is like watching television or eating food. They
also let us know of what we are missing because we are not
female, and because of the sad-but-true fact that the
readers of these magazines would have nothing to do with us.

We decided to not critique Sixteen, Tiger Beat, Superteen,
Smash Hits, and so on, because they cover the personal lives
of Luke Perry and not the personal lives of grade niners.
'Teen magazine was also absent from reviews because it is
slipping into this category. We reviewed only American
magazines because to our knowledge, there are no Canadian
equivalents. Wanting girls in this country will have to
borrow their mother's Chatelaine.

This issue was electronically produced. The articles were
composed on Appleworks v2.0, and the layout and construction
was the domain of First Publisher vx.x. The Apple platform
was an Apple IIc, and the MS DOS platform was a clone named
"COM Micro Computer". The files were transferred using Talk
Is Cheap v2.03 on the Apple side and Telix v3.44 on the MS
DOS side.

Apologies and rights reverted to YM, Sassy, Seventeen, and
all others where necessary. The publishers and/or authors
are not responsible for any of the content printed within.

The concept and most of the writing was undertaken by Steven
Meece, while the introduction, layout and dogsbody was the
responsibility of Christopher "cw" Woodill. Steven Meece is
attending Carleton University in Ottawa in the religion
programme, and cw is attending the University of Toronto in
the philosophy & semiotics programme.

Produced using grants from Gary Woodill and Heather Meece,
who are always more than pleased to bankroll the creativity
of their children.

Comments, questions, anecdotes, lawsuits to:

Crop Dusters
79 O'Hara Avenue
Toronto Ontario
M6K 2R3

This publication is dedicated to the memory of the Neopsychedelic Underground.

==========================
Pop Culture: An exposition
Chris Woodill
==========================

As an issue, pop culture has various definitions.  It can be
defined by various things, including the clothes people wear, the
attitudes they hold, and the music to which they listen.  It
seems that our generation (everyone born after about 1970) has
yet to discover its own pop-culture, for unlike our baby boom
parents, we have yet to spread our wings.

Cropduster revolves, as perhaps everything does, around the
substance that one calls pop-culture.  With various jargon thrown
around including: post-modernism, nihilism, etc. in an attempt
for one generation to understand the next, people forget what the
essence of pop-culture really is - a collection of somewhat
useless artifacts which are given exceptional value by groups of
people.  What we hope to show is not the trends but rather the
idols of pop-culture.  We hope to convey the simplicity of
everyday life through the icons which lead generation upon
generation onwards.  In this way, perhaps one reading this can
make a subjective interpretation of the trends of culture; but
this is not our own objective.  Rather, we hope to portray the
post-boomer child as he or she really is, by critically examining
the icons in which the child is represented.

As member of the post-boom generation, the authors must
include themselves in their ridicule, praise and examination.  I
think that this is perhaps necessary in any endevour, for only
self-reflection leads true results.  Thus, this journal is not
intended to be rigourous, for lack of rigour is one of the
characteristics of the pop-culture in which we reside.

Many of the articles presented here are true in fact,
without any changes in names, places, etc.  We make no pretence
that we represent our generation, nor do we make any pretence
that has any objective value in it at all.  For this is not a
sociology textbook, nor is it a psychology journal.  Rather, this
appears at the moment to be a compilation of minor life
experiences, which hopefully will give someone value.

======================
Young & Modern / Missy
======================

The dish:

YM is supposed to stand for "Young and Modern." Until a few
years ago it stood for "Young Miss," but the editors decided
that the title was too prissy and waif-like for the gritty
reality experienced by young girls today. It is theorized
that girls would rather be modern than a miss, which seems
to be like two coins with the same side.

The pages are quite glossy, and the magazine has a
particular smell to it. The pages don't feel like paper. The
girlie on page twenty really looks like cw's half-sister
Jacoba.

The second thing we noticed about this issue and possibly
this magazine is that its sole purpose seems to be the
promotion of maquillage. The magazine is bulked up by
advertisements for various-makeup products, many of the
reader inquiries include queries about the proper kind of
blush to use, and they themselves find that makeup is the
central core of any young and modern girl's existence. Other
things are delved into, but they are never treated with the
same amount of respect.

We tallied 32 of 104 pages consisting of full page singles
advertisements, and four doubles (Cover Girl, Maybelline,
"Caboodles" and Paul Mitchell Hair Products).

     BELIEVE IT: When your make-up looks this natural, you
     know it's Clean.

     One look says it all. Natural. Believable. Beautiful.
     That look is Cover Girl Clean Make-up (tm). So good to
     your skin. So clean. With pure Noxzema (r) ingredients.
     For healthy colour. Honest coverage. The look of great
     skin. That's the believable look of Clean Make-up.

We found an oxymoron in the term "clean make-up". To be
changed from the natural (which is to say, clean) you need
to be made up into something different, and therefore you
need something called "make-up" to do that.

The girls in these advertisements had the particular quality
of not resembling human beings at all. There is some heavy
airbrushing going on here. They don't even look human
anymore, of particular note is the girl squinting eyes,
crunching paper and sticking out her tongue in the
Maybelline double-ad. The girl for the Tampax one on page
four looks like a real person, with a black turtleneck
sweater and blue leggings with numbers on them.

     Doing anything for the first time can be tricky. But
     trust the makers of Tampax to come up with a tampon
     that's a total cinch for girls like you to...

The curious thing about this girl is that she appears to be
falling over backward for no discernible reason.

"Say Anything" is a collection of reader-submitted
embarrassing experiences and Freudian slips. The staff then
rates these harrowing exploits with one to four stars, the
four-star ranking being "Ultimate supremo humiliation". This
section is in actuality the most titillating thing you'll
see in YM. Hold onto your hats, this is heavy chick-talk:
The reason you bought the mag, right? The next best thing to
Peeping Tom-ing a slumber party. This month yielded three
four-stars, the first being about a girl exposing her
breasts during a school play, the second about a girl who
had her clothes ripped off by a ski-lift, and the third
involved a girlie having a tooth fall out during heavy
petting and having Prince Charming swallow the thing. There
were a few experiences at being ignored by a "guy" despite
all intentions, and one about a girl's dad sitting on the
crapper. Our favourite, although it was only given three
stars, was about a girl who 'accidentally' bought a dildo.
She thought it was a curling iron. Dr Freud would love these
magazines almost as much as we do.

The letter section found Jetha Marek from the Bronx
questioning the real value of makeup, which went unanswered
by Bonnie and crue. Crosstalk asked, "Should you stay with a
boyfriend who pressures you for sex?" and no specific answer
was given. Neither of the sides advocated that the victim
"do it" with her boyfriend, but Kim Kaan of Tempe Arizona
said that you should ignore him. The eponymous Jennifer Wise
of Stockton, Kansas (the probable setting of Tony Parker's
^Bird Kansas^, Knopf 1989) "will only have sex when I am
ready for it," when-ever that may be. She gets into the
Puritan ethic of ^The Cosby Show^ by getting steamed over
the inevitable results of sex before the wedding night: "a
damaged reputation, an unplanned pregnancy, or a sexually
transmitted disease like AIDS". Kaan is in her second year
at Arizona State University, but her arguments remain thinly
veiled rants lacking in intelligence.

The "Body Q&A" is not as erotic as you may hope. They
discuss different types of soap (superfatted or emollient,
transparent or glycerin, deodorant, french milled,
synthetic, acne and cleansing lotion) and publish
photographs of the tatoos of Julia Roberts, Jody Watley,
Roseanne Barr, Cher, Stephanie Seymour and "Roshumba".

The crue hit the beach, photographed nine surfpeople and
asked them "If your surfboard were a girl, who would she
be?" These questions were answered honestly. Three of the
seven dudes picked one of several fashion models. One guy
said his mom. Bud Struck wanted his surfboard to be a porno
star. This article was a veiled excuse for publishing
pictures of surf gods, with little erect boy-nipples.

The guy thing continued without another survey, "What's the
worst thing you've ever done to a girl?" Answers: three
dumpings on prom night, physical assault, yelling derogatory
comments from a car window, cheating, raping a drunkard,
crank calls, and one guy who puked on a chack.

YM also contains the now-obligatory ad for "Teen Spirit"
which remains "the Only Anti-perspirant For Teens". This one
pictures three happy-go-lucky girls whooping it up at a
carnival and presumably stinking up the joint in the
process. The girl in the middle looks like Lloyd's mom!

     The guy I'm going out with broke up with his girlfriend
     two weeks before we started dating. He swears they're
     just friends, but they flirt a lot, and he ignores me
     when she's around. Should I be worried?

We took the quiz to see if we were in fact boring. I had
long suspected that this was the case and the proof was
given when I scored 24 out of a possible high of 30
boringness points. cw, the freak that he is, was only 19.

"My stepfather sexually abused me" was an article that
seemed to be more geared as entertainment than information.
It was presented in a voyeuristic tendency, viz. the
first-page oversized sidebar quote "Just about every night,
he'd get in bed with me after Mom had gone to sleep." These
attempts at titillation belong on ^A Current Affair^, not
for in a rag for 'teens.

"Twenty-five ways to get a job this summer" was merely a set
of guidelines on how one can be a pest to one's neighbours
and parents by continually trying to weasel money from them
for useless services that enrich neither party in any
tangible way.

cw was miffed by the bikini photo section, remarking that
the girls were skanky little teenagers with little boobs
trying to be grown-ups. I had to agree with him on this
area. Swimsuits that are $70 US are too expensive for most
babysitters anyway. He also found exception with the
fat-busters article, which offered up low-fat substitutes
for high-fat products. In his typical Newfoundlander
common-sense attitude, he suggested that the dieter
substitute wind and water for a Haagen Dazs ice-cream binge.
"Why doncha just eat nothing?"

The Tom Cruise interview was written in such a holy-shit
manner that it isn't even worth the energy to type about it.
This magazine is truly American trash, but like food fried
up by Ronald McDonald, it sometimes gives a curious
pleasure.

     Your best friend recently became part of a twosome, and
     your life has changed - for the worse. Forget about
     calling each other two or three times a week and
     getting together on weekends. These days you're lucky
     if you can even reach her on the phone, and whenever
     you see her, she's with him.

The horoscopes were uniformly false. I told cw that he would
meet "a cool guy with killer looks" on the fourteenth. He
did not seem to be too anxious.

The magazine is closed by four pages of postage-stamp
advertisements for fly-by-night fat camps, modelling
societies, correspondence highschools, and photo reprinters.

Of all of the magazines reviewed in ^Crop Duster^, YM seems
to paint the most pessimistic picture of youth today. YM
worships at the trough of animated mannequins, offering up
such notorious no-brains such as Linda Evangelista as role
models for our sisters and daughters!

It appears that being young and modern is not a very good
condition for the soul. YM implicitly believes that the
acquisition and sustaining of a boyfriend must be the
central focus in the goals of a girl, yet YM itself
showcases that most boyfriends are albatrosses at best, and
eventually only cause trouble. YM does not see the
contradiction of instructing its readers to pursue the
romantic ideal while admitting that Prince Charming is most
likely a goof.

Someone who is young and modern must be a clothes horse,
willing to apply massive amounts of varying kinds of makeup,
able to spend extravagantly on clothes, diet, use the right
kind of soap, wear a two-piece bikini and kowtow to a jerk
boyfriend who may or may not be stolen by your best friend.
If you cannot reach those levels, you are done like a
dinner. This magazine portrays female adolescence correctly,
as a series of banalities adding up to a tremendous
omnipresent burden. They recognize the faults of this value
system, but lack the conviction to attempt to bring about
changes. Espousing of deviant philosophies (to burn your bra
or your rouge) could cause what Jennifer Wise fears more
than AIDS, which is "a damaged reputation". Young Miss
readers cannot liberate themselves because they are too busy
trying to condition themselves for social acceptance.

=====
Sassy
=====

The dish:

If you have a ring through yr nose and believe that The
Butthole Surfers speak directly to you, Sassy will be your
bag. Witness this from the letters section:

     Dear Jane: I was going to send you this comic strip way
     before your "staff hate mail awards" ["Diary," April].
     I swear! My purpose was to show you that a way cool
     cartoonist like Lynda Barry has her comic strip
     character reading a way cool magazine like Sassy [only
     one panel shown below]. So I am glad that you're
     "spreading like the plague"!

Complete with spelling errors, this is the handbook of the
hippest home slices this side of Seattle. Hip though it may
appear to be, the Kurt Cobain-meets-Frankie Avalon article
on "Surf Punks" (p 46) features the grunge lady wearing $154
worth of clothes (not even counting those big clunky boots)
as she looks nihilistic. Anarchy in the USA? Not when you
look like that.

However, Sassy may be a victim of its demographic. In the
hopes of hitting the mark, they constantly engage in
overkill, as if their audience could never accept anything
but affirmations of what they already are. Instead of giving
the message that information on the cover photograph is on
page fourteen, Sassy has to say

     For a veritable hoedown of info about our cover, fee fi
     fiddly-i oh-ver to page 14.

This gets very boring very fast. Almost every other sentence
has to have a few words of teen-lingo inside of it to keep
the readers awake. Do the editors of Sassy wish to keep
these people sassy forever? Honestly, this stuff sounds as
if it is being spoken in the next Bill and Ted sequel.
Because of this constant gee-whiz overtone, Sassy is unable
to sound sincere when it deals with serious issues.

     Scorpio (Oct 23 - Nov 21)
     Partnerships are key to success this mo' (except for
     hassle-causing bratty sibs on the 10th). Break with
     routine on the 12th - you need a change. On the 16th
     you get what you ask for. Hang near water on the 21st
     for serenity and Esther Williams-y exercise. Day to
     Savor [sic]: 11th. Scratch Off Your Calendar [sic]:
     29th.

The "Cute Band Alert" further restricts Sassy readers into
this teenage pigeonhole. The Cute Band Alert is just that --
"Alert! Here is a new band with a cute bass player!" and
they publish a picture. This kind of narcissism is taken to
a further extreme with the "Sassiest Boy in America" contest
held every winter, in which readers can nominate their
boyfriend or brother as the epitome of sass. Who is the idol
figure of Sassy readers? Anyone who has sideburns,
Lollapalooza tickets, a backward-turned baseball cap, and
calls himself "a feminist".

Sassy takes a different slant than the other three mags: It
supposedly includes the reader in the personal lives of the
editors. Editors and staff contributors refer to themselves
in the first person, and the reader is supposed to feel
chummy with Jane, Lew, Christina, Margie, Jacinta, Mary,
Kim, Mary Kaye, Anne V, Andrea T, Janet, Mary Ann, and a
whole slew of others. They're supposed to be as familiar to
the readers as their cafeteria mates.

Positively, Sassy does contain the most record and book
reviews of any of the three mags, but these are limited. The
books are always the latest released kid books, the music
the latest six-month shelf life stuff, and the "movies" are
always what's playing down at the mall. "Stuff You Wrote" is
a poetry-and-quip feature that is passable but is slowly
shrinking month by month. Most of the poetry is kinda the
same, and an attempt at therapy - the desire to get
something out of one's system and not so much to create work
that transcend the medium and develop relevance on several
different planes. Still, the concept is commendable and the
neglect of this feature is not so good.

Sassy is still the only magazine that mention the words
"vagina" and "penis" as if they are related to each other (p
26) but they are very careful when they do it. Sassy does
set itself apart from the other two, but this difference is
shrinking.

The ads in Sassy are largely those of YM, primarily
disposable haircare products, and disposable music products.
May of the exact same ads appear in all three magazines.
Again - the ads, like the magazine itself, never leave the
realm of the day to day distractions of a fifteen and a half
year old.

Was it always like this? This short-sightedness is a new
development. Sassy is the newest of the magazines profiled
here, having made it's debut in March of 1988 (compared to
1941 for Seventeen and 1952 for the original Young Miss),
and therefore determined to take a new approach in order to
defeat the giants. This was a very ribald approach indeed --
they mentioned sex honestly and reflected teenage life for
what it really is. Someone also once let the cat out of the
bag that women, especially young women, actually look better
without makeup than with it. A flap arose by the end of the
year, and a group of "concerned parents" expressed their
outrage that their daughters were being told about dirty
subjects. Maybelline and Tampax were scared, expressed their
fears to Jane, and Jane buckled under. Sassy now is just as
flighty as the other magazines, and it actually spreads lies
in order to keep the status quo intact of the legions of
daughters that read the magazine.

A further slide happened late in 1991 when Sassy changed the
physical size -- from an oversized square to a regular
notebook size. Soon after, the magazine underwent yet
another layout overhaul and now is as active as an MTV
commercial with mixed-font headlines and text, and dingbats
by the dozen.

Weather or not it loses in editorial quality is irrelevant,
as long as it can keep a number of girls interested enough
to read it. For magazines are essentially trojan horses for
getting the reader to look at advertisements, just as the
only purpose of commercial television is use the guise of
entertainment to round up an audience to sit through the
commercials. Why do magazine articles break up after two
pages, to be "continued on page 132"? To get the reader to
turn through the next sixty pages, all while looking at the
ads.

It is a well-known marketing maxim that nothing should be
changed unless it is not working in its current incarnation.
The only thing that matters in the magazine publishing
business is to deliver the market to the advertisers. If
they are able to do this, everything else will soon fall in
line. Sassy needs to get girlies and keep them interested in
the product in order to survive. Constant changes in the
style of the magazine seem to indicate that Sassy can not
seem to get it right. Is Sassy stumbling? It could very well
be. The reduction in size was a cost-saving measure, as the
copy price did not decrease. Sassy is the shortest of the
profiled magazines (88 pages at a cover price of $2.50
equals 2.84c per page) while YM and Seventeen deliver more
product at a cheaper price (104 pages, $2.75, 2.64c per page
and 120 pages, $2.50, 2.08c per page respectively). Free
enterprise keeps the newsstand prices to within twenty-five
cents of each other, but Sassy is producing the least amount
of magazine for that price -- a full thirty-two pages less
than Seventeen. Naturally there is no such thing as
frugality, and if Sassy could have sold an extra thirty
pages of ads, they would have done it.

Sassy has the lowest 12 month subscription cost, at $10, in
comparison to $14 for Seventeen and $18 for Young Miss. This
translates to less than 50% of the potential newsstand
costs. While subscriptions eliminate many of the
distribution channels and therefore are cheaper for the
reader, this still translates to a net loss in sales revenue
for the Sassies. Then why pump up subscriptions?

To increase the readerbase to make the magazine more
attractive for advertisers. It is hoped that many people
will commit to twelve issues at a cheaper price, which
provide for a greater circulation figure to present to
potential advertisers, which hopefully translates to more
advertising funds to offset the loss in sales revenue.

Sometimes this method works, and often it doesn't. This
ponzi scheme killed the original incarnation of ^Ms^ after
it sold a tonne of subscriptions at a dirt cheap price but
could not translate those figures into more advertisements.
It is a very risky gamble, and is often a last-ditch attempt
made in desperation and fear and trembling. It will be
interesting and informative to see if the subscription price
for Sassy continues to deflate.

The Sass-meisters seem to be caught in a delicate circle.
Sassy was forced away from its old positions that made it
quirky, interesting, daring, and worth looking forward to
each month. However, there is no demand for a Young & Modern
clone, which is the direction that Sassy may have to drift.
Sassy is an entity at sea in search of a demographic, which
is a very perilous thing to be.

=========
Seventeen
=========

The dish:

Seventeen is the oldest of the group here, and in both the
literal and figurative senses it remains the mother of all
teenage mags. It is still the most professional, most
entertaining, and most professionally produced of the
magazines. But this is a small market, and ^The New Yorker^
it aint. The fashion features of Seventeen are the best
photographed, and the ads go beyond the norm a few times.

But even Seventeen has seen better days. The June 1992 was
weighing in at a rather svelte 120 pages, while as recently
as April 1986 it was 216 pages. A perusal of that issue
finds several ads for General Motors, Rice-a-roni,
"Chadwicks of Boston," and a feature film. This is an
indication that Seventeen, at that time, was almost a
"general interest" magazine, the two biggest of this genre
being Time and People. Certainly that is not the case any
longer. There are only a few ads in this category. The
remainder of the magazine is bulked up with YM-style ads for
Clearsil, Cover Girl, and Caboodles (a neon-coloured makeup
lunchbox). One thing hasn't changed, though, and that is the
last pages are ripe with postage-size black and white ads
for mail-order firms specializing in bust growing schemes,
photo enlargement operations, Groucho Marx glasses &
moustache ("fool your friends"), and fat camps. There's a
send-in application to "The Art Institute of Pittsburgh, Ft
Lauderdale Campus."

Well. It appears that every girly magazine is suffering in
one way or another, and for what reason? The time-frame of
six years is too brief to suggest a shrinking age bracket
and a smaller supply of young girls interested in beauty and
boyfriend tips. It is also too McLuhan to suggest that the
magazine concept is becoming obsolete and out-of-date. It is
a curious situation.

     LONG-DISTANCE LASHES: The mascara that lasts as long as
     you do.

     Marathon Mascara really goes the distance. Keeping
     lashes long, dark and beautiful, no matter what you do!
     So go ahead, put it to the test. Marathon looks just
     put on, 'til you take it off. MARATHON MASCARA

     COVER GIRL Renee Jeffus is wearing Soft Black.

     R E D E F I N I N G  B E A U T I F U L

But it would be premature to jump the gun and label
Seventeen as YM trash. The editorial slant does not suffer
from the laugh-track style happiness that infects Sassy.
Seventeen, after all, is the rag that published Sylvia Plath
in 1950. (She was also published in the Ladies Home Journal
and the Pi Delta Gamma Review, but ignore that.) The issue
reviews carried a very good fiction piece, actually worthy
of reading. It wasn't promoted very much, and appears in the
contents page as "FICTION: Leftovers by Cathi Hanauer". You
can't have too much, and this is a passing barb at best. She
also wrote the "Relating" column, which is an advice column
to the lovelorn.

The letters page was semi-interesting. Seven of the ten
letters were feedback regarding some kind of self-abuse or
suffering happening at the hands of the readers. One letter
was concerning school-leavers, three about eating
disorders, two about the persecution of the small-boobed,
and one about being stuck in the wrong corner of a love
triangle. Maybe it is only here that these girls are able to
admit that they are real people, and that is all they are.
Because if the girls can't admit that, they're lying to
themselves. Only then will they believe what the advertisers
say.

The cover girl was Samantha Mathis, which would be reason
enough to buy the whole thing. Yet, you don't get what you
pay for, because the cover feature translated to two
decent-sized pictures and 1/3rd of a page of text. cw (a
crack semiotician) called attention to the smaller picture
of the girl on a Californian beach. She appears to be
crouching down, and the shorts she is wearing have pulled up
a bit at the back, exposing a little bit of her ass. cw
pointed to the spot on the picture and smirked.

The girl on page 17 looks quite a bit like Lisa Habib from
Miz Laroche's history class at the Streetsville highschool.
That was where all the girls lived. It was the total
re-definition of egregiousness for me, I'll tell you that.
At lunches I'd go behind the portables with my walkman and
listen to Son House's 1965 recording of Death Letter Blues.
I'd have to jack up the volume to the deafness range so that
the steel-bodied National guitar would drown out the
blup-blup-blup of Camaroes tearing through the parking lot.

Page 24 finds a page on specialized swimsuits, and how to
use them to accentuate your body features. Also included is
a group of exercises YOU can use to trim unsightly soft
bits.

Batter down the hatches for the "Sex & Your Body" column.
It's hot stuff. The sub-title is "Are You Experienced?":

     There's generally a sort of hierarchy of experiences,
     with hand-holding and kissing at the bottom and
     intercourse at the top. But in between the list gets
     pretty blurry. When everyone you know talks about
     everything they do and grill you about everything you do,
     you may ot be able to avoid having your sexual
     experience (or lack of it) be public knowledge... the
     trick is too respect your body and your beliefs enough
     to always protect yourself, first and foremost, and to
     do what's truly right for you.

Then they pick four letters dealing with this topic. The
first two are of average level, but after that it gets
pretty hairy. The final two letters, printed verbatim:

     I am a virgin and I intend to stay a virgin until I get
     married. Instead of having sex, my boyfriend and I do
     everything else. The other night he used his fingers. I
     know it sounds gross, but I don't know how else to put
     it. Well, afterward, I started to bleed. Does this mean
     I'm not a virgin anymore? Did he pop my cherry?

and:

     My best friend Stacy lied to her boyfriend and told him
     that she wasn't a virgin. Now she's afraid that if she
     has sex with him he'll know she's a virgin because
     she'll be tight or it'll hurt. She's afraid to tell him
     the truth because she thinks he'll hate her for lying.
     If a guy's experienced, can he tell if a girl is a
     virgin?

Pretty crazy stuff, better not let Mom see it. Seventeen is
coming perilously close to reality. The former letter
affords an opportunity for moralizing: The Young Lady should
take Debra Kent's advice and do some thinking for herself,
and maybe then she will shed some of her hypocrisy. She is
trapped between two conflicting desires: To "just do it,"
and to preserve the sanctitude of what she calls "my
cherry". The unpoppable cherry has nothing to do with it,
because virginity is not a biological label, but a state of
mind. This girl is running the gamut of "his fingers" and
many Latin terms and what-have-you, and certainly it is
stretching it a bit to call her an untouched virgin bride,
which is the way she would prefer to exist.

She owes honesty to the mythical husband-to-be. If she wants
to be a virgin bride, more power to her, but she should see
to it that she *is* untouched. Obviously this appears to be
beyond her means. If she wants to do these deeds with the
boyfriend, more power to her. This girl has to learn that
she has to take responsibility for her actions, and that she
cannot deliver the goods and still claim her virginity.

But again, Seventeen usually redeems itself enough to make
it worth the $2.50 cover price. (BTW: North-west
Mississaugeans can find the latest copy of Seventeen in the
magazine rack of the Streetsville Public Library @ 132 Queen
St South.) There was a little bit of truth in this issue,
too. It was found in the article by Ann Patchett with the
yuk title "How to Survive a Breakup":

     If this guy is still the centre of every conversation
     you're having six months after the big B, you've got to
     ask yourself if you're really trying to get over him.
     Maybe you think that you'll be closer to him if you
     live in the past or that he'll see your love as true if
     you refuse to let go. Calling his house and hanging up,
     waiting around in the school parking lot to catch a
     glimpse of him, hounding his friends for information,
     -- none of this is going to help you get better. Nobody
     knows the answers to all the questions, but one thing
     is clear: He would be with you if he wanted to be with
     you, and he's not.

So Seventeen comes through in the end. Ninety-five percent
of it is shit, but the other five percent gives the reader a
glimpse into what matters in the lives of these girls,
beyond the day-to-day distractions. It is also the only
magazine that can hold the attention of someone outside of
the target group. Unlike the other magazines, Seventeen is
worthwhile, and it would be a loss to see it cease to exist.

=============
Three Bitches
=============

Age of actual audience:

YM            13
Sassy         15 (and a half, ha ha)
Seventeen     17

Short-term goals:

YM            Lose ten pounds
Sassy         Get the latest Chili Peppers CD
Seventeen     Senior prom

If it was a University:

YM            Western
Sassy         York
Seventeen     Ottawa

If it was food:

YM            Quarter pounder and shake
Sassy         Haagen-dazs with nuts
Seventeen     Spaghetti and to-mat-oe sauce

If it was a philosopher:

YM            Machiavelli
Sassy         Ghi-jac or St Augustine
Seventeen     John Stuart Mill

If it had a citizenship:

YM            American
Sassy         American
Seventeen     American

If it had an aura:

YM            Violet
Sassy         Magenta
Seventeen     Mental Tan

If it was someone that the editors know:

YM            Coby
Sassy         Fiona
Seventeen     JM

If it were sodapop:

YM            Cream soda
Sassy         Pepsi
Seventeen     7-up

If it was part of Mississauga:

YM            Meadowvale
Sassy         East Cooksville
Seventeen     Lorne Park

In one paragraph:

YM

Keep cheek colour low key - applying a few strokes of powder
blush on the apples of your cheeks is enough to give your
face a healthy, sun-kissed glow...
(p 75)

Sassy

Did you know that women hold only 2 of 100 US Senate seats,
the same number as in 1971? When I hear things like this, I
get so mad I could spit. Enter The Women's Voting Guide.
All these totally powerful women (like Pat Schroeder and
Gloria Steinem) worked on this book to help you and moi
understand that perplexing electoral process we've been
hearing so much about...
(p 36)

Seventeen

Before I worked at McDonald's, Collie and I ate White
Castles. We'd drive in and order like fifteen - ten or
eleven for him, a few for me. I'd feed them to him while he
was driving. Then we'd go to Dunkin' Donuts [sic] for
chocolate creme-filleds and Munchkins...
(p 100)

=============
Epilogue
Chris Woodill
=============

This is the first edition of Cropduster, and it is I suppose
a "labour of love," although such a phrase is exactly what would
be said in any of the three mags examined.

We make no promises in terms of future issues, and as this
particular issue took about three months to produce, I wouldn't
hold your breath. Future issues may or may not surface as they
come down the pike, depending on how busy or lazy the authors get
in their real lives.

cw - August 30th, 1992.


--
roasleen:ac174