Maxims for Markham

By Nicole Cohen

I.

In July, the National Post ran a story about Julie Bureau, the 17-year-old Quebec runaway who resurfaced and announced that she would remain living with the 38-year-old man who sheltered her while she was on the run.

According to the story, Bureau, frustrated with her strict parents, chose to flee boarding school instead of committing suicide. While her parents sent out a search team, Bureau hitchhiked to the town of Beauceville, met a man, dyed her hair and changed her name to Nancy.

Bureau assured the crowd she was happy in her new life, that she and the man were just friends. “We have a lot of plans,” she said. “I have no regrets.”

But the article told a different story. “A DAUGHTER GONE AND LOST FOREVER,” the dramatic headline screamed, playing out the story of Julie Bureau as every parent’s worst nightmare. As the reporter writes, “… Mr. Bureau and his wife must cope with the fact that their daughter, though alive, remains lost to them.

II.

This summer, the town of Huntingdon, Quebec cracked down on youth crime. According to newspaper reports, the bad behaviour in question included breaking tombstones, graffiti, bad language and loitering. Panic was spreading through the town of 2,600.

But instead of opening a youth centre or creating youth-focused arts and recreation programs, the Mayor pushed for blanket punishment. He clamped down a curfew on everyone under the age of 16, clearing the streets of teenagers between the hours of 10:30 p.m. and 6 a.m.

A police officer wearing a bullet-proof vest was hired to enforce the curfew. A Toronto Star reporter discovered that kids in Huntingdon are “profoundly bored.”

“There’s not even a movie theatre in town,” one teen said. “We just think there should at least be a skateboard park. What are we supposed to do?”

III.

Every year, a grade 12 class in Markham, Ontario, creates magazines as a Writer’s Craft project. We receive them here at Broken Pencil and find them intriguing, but never reviewable. Broken Pencil reviews ongoing zines and projects that can be purchased or exchanged, and these are one-offs. But what these projects do offer is some insight into the direction youth culture is heading. And it doesn’t look pretty.

These projects run the gamut from earnest to disturbing. On the innocuous end this year are a humour magazine and a couple of general interest titles reminiscent of those mediocre CanCon mags for teens that are dumped in school libraries every month. Things get slightly better with Y Me?!, in which the student editors take a stab at spoofing glossy teen magazines, and Great Indoors, a mag about indoor life and the only original ideas in the bunch. Then comes Soul Drive, “Reaching the Christian youth of today in an effective way.” There is not a hint of irony or innovation in Soul Drive. Testimonials about attending church, prayers and a moral Q&A–you can bet The Church would be pleased with its disciples’ creation.

But of particular interest are Hot Sunday and Cats & Dogs, magazines primarily focused on trying to understand the opposite sex, and a testament to the frightening hold lad mags (Maxim, etc.) and Cosmo have on young people. These mags are little more than an exercise in gender stereotyping. “Women are unique creatures and there is no way to figure us out, no matter how hard you try it is pointless,” reads a letter in Cats & Dogs.

The siren-red cover of Hot Sunday features a picture of a classmate flashing her stomach next to a coverline reading “Italian Beauty Reveals All.” The contents of the mag feature the female members of the group posing seductively as The Average Girl, The Catholic Schoolgirl and The Exotic Asian. They answer questions such as “Do you eat anything special or diet in a certain way?” and “Describe your dream guy.”

The first question Hot Sunday raises is why the girls in the group allowed themselves to be portrayed this way (ie. half naked and unempowered) in the first place; the second: is this what teens are really interested in? Clearly these teens put a lot of work into their projects, and understandably they have sex on their brains. But this class seems to have entirely missed the point of creating independent media. They were given the chance to challenge teen indoctrination by school, religion and the media, and explore their interests in a creative, no-holds barred way.

But, judging by these magazines, it appears that there is no teen culture in Markham, only a mimicry of adult culture funnelled to them through the mainstream.

IV.

The most popular things to do in Markham are shop at the mall, hang out in parking lots and coffee shops, watch blockbusters at the megaplex, and complain that there’s nothing to do in Markham.

This could be any quiet, boring, middle-class suburb in Canada. And one random class at one random high school in one random Canadian suburb is likely filled with a cross section of typical Canadian teenagers, who have interests and influences in common with their peers across the country. If we assume our students from Markham were given an assignment to create a magazine based on their interests and ideas, then we can conclude that teenagers, if given the chance to express themselves, will not create anything unique or critical of the world around them. Instead, they will suck up all the mindless fluff mainstream culture has to offer and spit back out, colour photocopied and spiral bound.

Admittedly, judging current teen culture on one class assignment makes for a shaky science experiment. But it does raise an alarming question: are the teenage, identity-forming years completely devoid of culture? And if so, who can we blame? A good place to start is with the current offerings commercial culture is serving up–easily digestible images that will sell sell sell. According to Marketing magazine, “In Canada, 2.5 million, nine- to 14-year-olds spend $1.7 billion of their own money each year, and that’s nothing compared to the $20 billion they influence their families to spend.”

When these “tween” and teenage years are defined by cool hunters and marketing companies, we get role models such as Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen, whose lives, eating disorder aside, in no way resemble what it’s like to be a real 18-year-old girl growing up in America today. We get representations of teen life in the form of teen films that portray one-dimensional characters and reinforce tired stereotypes about relationships and gender. Consider the cafeteria scene in the film Mean Girls, where a “popular” girl explains to the new student that ex-boyfriends are totally off limits. As she says, sincerely: “That’s, like, the rules of feminism.”

The drive for profit is dumbing kids’ culture down. In the case of movies, it seems like the dumber the movie, the more money it will make. And if the teen-generated magazine projects from Markham are any indication, teen culture and mainstream offerings are not measuring up to teens’ potential. But it’s no wonder that teens, like adults, turn to entertainment for escape. Look at the frustrations of teen life: there are few places beside the mall to hang out and the threat of a curfew now hangs over your head. There are strict rules about dating and sex, and you are forbidden from drinking and smoking. Since graduated licensing, you can’t drive, can’t vote, and even need permission to get your ears pierced. If you’re stuck in the suburbs with uncreative friends and no cooler older sibling, it’s difficult to tap into alternative literary, music and art scenes, let alone be exposed to political and social ideas that will shake up your worldview. While the Internet promises instant access, it’s hard to know where to look, and finding information online still leaves teens physically isolated.

And no one, especially the news media, takes teenagers seriously. The real story of Julie Bureau and other teens who choose to leave home will not be told on the pages of newspapers such as the Post where the news skews the part about Bureau’s newfound happiness in favour of an emotional appeal to parents. The media–still dominated by old, white men (just hang out in any newsroom after 5 p.m. and you’ll see)–filters stories through the lenses of traditional family values and social mores. Though Julie Bureau is at the centre of the story, she’s just a child who doesn’t know better. She’s basically irrelevant.

Although newspapers are forever trying to reach a teen audience (likely to tap into the lucrative ad market), they continue to alienate teens. Why aren’t newspapers anxious to target this demographic inviting teenagers to work in their newsrooms or sit on their editorial boards?

Leave it to the Guardian, the most progressive English-language paper around, to host a teen day at G2, the paper’s feature section. For one week, ten 16-year olds were invited to the paper’s offices in London, England, to plan, write and edit the section. They included a Q&A with a 16-year-old Iraqi, a spoof on Harry Potter and interviews with Londoners about what they think of teenagers. It’s a safe bet that those teens, who probably commanded more respect in that week than in all of their 16 years, will keep buying and reading the Guardian.

Elsewhere in the UK, schools are teaching kids that oral sex is a great alternative to the sex act that can get them pregnant, and as a result, teen pregnancy rates have dropped.

Much of the way teenagers are treated stems from the fear teens inspire in adults: that teens start trends that make millions, and have the power to make or break a pop star’s career, that they wear weird clothes, have reckless sex and vandalize when they get bored. But these profit-driven, media-fuelled, petty anxieties about teens boozing, sexing and spending are distracting us from the issues seriously threatening teen lives – poverty, domestic violence and funding being drained from their schools.

In reality, many teens today are highly politicized. Urban teens are often active in a variety of movements and activities. While it’s harder for suburban kids to find a group of like-minded people, it’s not impossible, and the media and culture industry should be treating them as such. For the most part, today’s teens are growing up without the racism, sexism and other isms that plagued their parents. Adults, such as movie producers, are in the business of selling dumb culture to teens for profit, and although many teens can see through that, it’s easy for them to become numb to the marketing bombardment. Politicized teens, on the other hand, can become a major force for creative ideas and social change. This past May, a coalition of Toronto teens organized Hungry For Change, a high school activism conference covering heady issues from social justice to environmentalism and anti-oppression. In the recent Federal election, 18-year-old activist Max Silverman ran for the NDP in Toronto’s Eglinton-Lawrence riding. Though he did not win, he has sent the message that youth demand a voice in the political world, too.

These Markham magazine projects are not just products of an isolated suburb. They are examples of what happens when the marketing machine keeps shovelling out trite for teens to mindlessly consume instead of offering up something a little more critical, a little more stimulating. The producers of media–those who have some influence over impressionable teens–need to change the way they think about youth culture. We need more than grown-up versions of Hot Sunday lining newsstand shelves.

Nicole Cohen is co-publisher and co-editor of Shameless Magazine, a magazine for teenage girls that recently released its second issue. For a teen mag that’s different from the rest, visit: www.shamelessmag.com