The Controllers

Warning! Warning! Alarms go off inside your head. You?re at the mall walking around with one of your best buds looking at CDs, when all of a sudden you look up and see this drop dead gorgeous girl, whose looking at CDs in the next aisle. You grasp the CD case you were looking at firmly, and use the reflection quickly to make sure none of your pimples are ready to burst, and that your hair is fixed right. You glance down at you pants making sure they are set right on your shoes to make them look as cool as possible. Then you make sure that your shirt is straightened up. You take a breath and look up. She gives looks at you out of the corner of your eyes and you feel a skip in you chest. She looked at you! You automatically double checked with your eyes to make sure your zipper?s zipped and that she?s not laughing at you, but she?s really smiling at you. Wow, you think, she must really think I look cool!

That was only a brief glimpse into the complicated life of a teenage boy. A boy who reads magazines, wants a car, plays video games, and watches a lot of TV. Every morning he wakes up and picks out his clothes sometimes taking them off and putting on others that match better. His ultimate goal is to look as good and cool as possible, like those guys in the Gap commercials on TV, with their perfect smiles and their arm always around that really hot girl.

Why have we as males become more concerned about our looks and body? It seemed that only twenty years ago it was just the girls really worrying about their make up and nails. Even though we have not come so far as to put on make up and paint out nails weird colors to match our 300 dollar outfit to go to the mall, we have become more aware of looking cool and more attracting to the opposite sex. Yet it seems as if instead of looking to better out grades and get a good job to attract females we?ve started to look more and more at our looks then what we do and who we are.

What we teens don?t realize is that TV has a bigger impact on our daily life then we think it does. It?s become the government?s way of talking to us. It?s also a way of communication and entertainment. Since the 1940?s, when the television really became open to the public, the news and our favorite shows have shown us different parts of the world. It imposed new ideas and little by little, changed society. Because companies started to use the television to advertise and introduce new styles, society has started to desire to be those people on television.

When I was younger and watched more TV, I would usually watch cartoons about superheroes saving the world, like Captain Planet or the Ninja Turtles. A lot of times I would try to imitate their hairstyles to make myself more like them. Now we do the same thing with the serial comedies and action shows, though now we don?t admit that we want to imitate these people as openly.

Most of the men and guys on TV look good or have good bodies. They most likely wear the clothes that are in style. In the movies, these guys often get the girl or are the hero of the picture. As of late, in shows like Friends, The Read World, and Sex in the City, where the relationships are shallow and mostly based on looks, have become more and more popular. A lot of times the reasons that they dump a guy are because his penis is too small or he needs to lose fat around some areas.

Shows like these only make guys more self-conscious about their looks because they think that the girls expect us to be a rippling Arnold Schwarzenegger with a perfect body. A lot of times we also think they want us to look like the guys in the Abercrombie and Fitch ads, with their hands down their crotches and an arm holding a hot girl. What they?re really saying is, ?Hey guys! Look like me even though you probably won?t be able to. If you do though, you?ll get lots of hot girls like this one.? These pictures tend to have a lot of sexual content, and this puts a lot of pressure on having ?in? clothes and being cool.

Another source that has altered the male thinking is the magazine. Because girl magazines like Cosmopolitan encourages women use the power to choose and be ahead of the relationship, it also places stress on guys to look better for girls, and this stress in turn has made other magazines come into existence and feed off of the new male impulse to look better. I looked on the internet and found at allyoucanread.com their list of the top twenty men magazines. Three of them were aimed to help men look better and be fit. A majority of the others included magazines such as Maxim at number one and others that helps guys see the women on TV up close. They also contain ads that promote the idea of having muscles and being cool, which encourages a lot of guys to use steroids and lift weights.

These magazines are read by a majority of the male population in America, and anything that gets published in them is sent out to a couple million males. Their opinions become the public?s opinions. Personally, I was surprised to see so many health and fitness magazines. Both magazines and the television have had a big effect on why we as males are more concerned about our looks now, then fifty years ago. They control the need to look good around the world. The real struggle is to not let these materials conflict with what we really know. When you consider it in the long run, these things do not matter: popularity, money, and what you do. Focus more on what matters, like relationships that are not based on whether your hair looks good, or if your face is clear of acne.

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