Ok, Vanity Fair did it Justin Bieber on the cover and on the inside of the issue. For some reason this one sits oddly for me. Maybe it is the idea of promoting Justin as a sex symbol for 2011. For me the problem is he is only sixteen years old. Now i am not being a prude because I am sure for many young girls he is a stud, but does that justify a cover for a fashion magazine? Maybe it is my generation growing up with Tigerbeat Magazine. You have to be a certain age to remember Tigerbeat and its photo shoots of all the up and coming hotties and the centerfolds we could hang in our bedrooms of Shawn Cassidy.
But Tigerbeat was geared towards teenagers, about teenagers not Vanity Fair. Maybe I am old fashioned but are we as "general consumers" expected to by into Beiber as a model of sex appeal at sixteen? Granted many others in his age range have been used as sex symbols but I don't believe it was for "mass consumption".
Why do I even bring any of this up? For some it could be a BIG warning sign that we are destined for what is happening already in fashion. That the thirteen to eighteen year old waif model is the ideal for many women the planet over. That no woman can live up to that ideal of the under one hundred pound teen girl fashion model unless she is a teen girl as well.
Could this kind of thing also happen for men? That the teen age boy becomes the role model for men the planet over? What does Justin himself think about any of this? What do his parents think or say about all of it? What affect does being a sixteen year old sex symbol do to your self confidence and ego? Will aging play out a huge part of Justin's emotional undoing? Some say yes, some would say look what fame did to the childhhod of someone like Michael Jackson.
Don't get me wrong I am not saying what has happened is wrong or even right it just seems unusual for a major magazine to promote a sixteen year old as a a sex symbol, or have I missed the others? Well until next time I am so glad we had this time together.
1 comment:
Well, we still have guys like Hugh Jackman, Gerard Butler, Daniel Craig, Russell Crowe, and a few years ago, Bruce Willis, so there is still a focus on masculine adult men being seen as sex symbols too. Thank God.
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