Seventeen Magazine and Its Sexual Scripts--Literally

Seventeen Magazine has been the soure of information and advice for young teenage adolescent girls for decades--a sort of community where girls can share stories, ask questions, and get the latest advice from everything from manicures to STDs. Ward discusses the impact of magazines as a positive sexual influence in her article entitled "Uncommonly Good"

One way in which media content may serve as a positive influence on sexual health and development is in the sharing of information about sexual health issues. 

 The average age a girl loses her virginity is around 17 years old--exact age of the title of Seventeen Magazine. There is a "Dating/Love" section of every monthy issue, which usually includes articles about flirting, dating, and occasionally sex. Viginity loss is a huge facet of being seventeen years old, and there are a great deal of articles about deciding whether or not one is ready for sex, birth control methods, etc. It is a great source of information for young girls with curiosity about sex, as many find it uncomfortable to talk to their parents about sex.

One article I came across in the Seventeen sexual content archives was an article entitled "Talking To Your Parents About Sex." 

http://www.seventeen.com/health/sex-health/advice/a105/sex-parents-hsp-0404/

This article included ways you can approach talking to your parents about sex. The part that I found the most interesting and somewhat funny about this article was the fact that it discussed a common sexual script in the media of talking to one's parents about sex while literally providing a script from which the reader could memorize and speak. 

Seventeen providing a literal sexual script for the reader has both positive and negative consequences. It acts as a "super peer" to the reader, helping guide her through a situation with which she has no experience. However, is Seventeen's sexual content regarding virginity loss the cause for  girls losing their virginity around age seventeen? Because girls are reading articles regarding how to act in sexual situations, it is possible that they feel pressured to lose their virginity because they believe it is what everyone else is doing. Although Seventeen features articles about abstinence as well, the vast majority of articles about sex are more about engaging in sex and managing behaviors surrounding sex. This raises the age-old question "Does the media reflect societal norms or create them?"

Ward, M. (2015). Uncommonly Good. New Directions for Childhood and Adolescent Development. 56-70.