The Castaway Files: What teenage girls did before Social Media – Teen mags of the 90’s

When I was clearing out I discovered this blast from the past. There is a moral panic that occurs these days due to the ease of access that impressionable young girls have to the internet. I refuse to believe that this curiosity is a recent phenomenon and this can be confirmed by one thing that I found when I was clearing out the flat prior to a move.

Where teenage girls used to go for inappropriate advice before Yahoo answers

The family member to whom these belonged was about 12-13 and an Irish Twin so it doesn’t take much maths to work out who it was, but even in a Catholic family (where you’re made fully aware of the “facts of life” from a very young age) these were hugely top shelf.

In my mum’s day it was playground tittle tattle that opened people up to this, in my and my sister’s day it was magazines like this that stepped in to fill the void between curiosity and fact. Now, I would say that social media and pornography (incorrectly) fill in most of the blanks.

Having given these magazines a thorough review, one can deduce certain facts. Principally, that 3T are “lish” (they were a short lived band made up of three of Michael Jackson’s nephews) as are 911 but the best was Paul Nicholls. These magazines seem to rave about him. You remember who Paul Nicholls was surely? He played Joe Wicks in Eastenders? Suffered from Schizophrenia? Went properly crazy? Eastenders won huge acclaim for his portrayal. He was quite the teenage pin up.

A closer inspection of what is on the front reveals, far from the moral panic that exploded at the time, these represent what we would describe as tamer influences on a teenage girls life. Sure there is the odd “How to tell if a boy fancies you” but interspersed between that a competition to win one of 300 BT phonecards (remember them? Look at the top of SHOUT magazine) there are stories with sound morals such as “Cocaine messed up my life” and one of these has an exposé on HIV and other diseases to make sure girls know the facts.

I think it shows how vastly contemporary attitudes can change in twenty years. These at the time were seen as horrendously bad influences. Now we would see them as good influences. If I were a parent I would rather my children saw this than half the horrors they’d be exposed to on the internet. I suppose that’s the way the mop flops.