====================================================== CROPDUSTER -- Issue 1 Copyright 1992 by Steven Meece and Chris Woodill ====================================================== This is the ASCII version of the zine. It contains everything you would receive in the real zine except for pictures and the feel of authenticity. If you would like to receive the paper edition, send $1.10 for the United States or 86 cents for Canada to: Cropduster 79 O'Hara Avenue Toronto, Ontario M6K 2R3 All other enquiries should be directed to that office as well. The editors are also available by international e-mail at: ad522@freenet.carleton.ca (Steven Meece) cwoodill@epas.utoronto.ca (Chris Woodill) Naturally permission is granted to distribute Cropduster in any way you would like, but please leave it as it is so that others can see our mistakes as well. If you have a problem, don't take it out on a text file: Tell us. ============== Editor's Words Steven Meece ============== Cropduster was born as a summer make-work project by the editor. Why teeny mags? We have found them to be very entertaining, because they are meant to be. They really try too hard to be constantly entertaining without providing a single break from the action. Maybe this is the way life really is in the United States. Reading one of these magazines is like watching television or eating food. They also let us know of what we are missing because we are not female, and because of the sad-but-true fact that the readers of these magazines would have nothing to do with us. We decided to not critique Sixteen, Tiger Beat, Superteen, Smash Hits, and so on, because they cover the personal lives of Luke Perry and not the personal lives of grade niners. 'Teen magazine was also absent from reviews because it is slipping into this category. We reviewed only American magazines because to our knowledge, there are no Canadian equivalents. Wanting girls in this country will have to borrow their mother's Chatelaine. This issue was electronically produced. The articles were composed on Appleworks v2.0, and the layout and construction was the domain of First Publisher vx.x. The Apple platform was an Apple IIc, and the MS DOS platform was a clone named "COM Micro Computer". The files were transferred using Talk Is Cheap v2.03 on the Apple side and Telix v3.44 on the MS DOS side. Apologies and rights reverted to YM, Sassy, Seventeen, and all others where necessary. The publishers and/or authors are not responsible for any of the content printed within. The concept and most of the writing was undertaken by Steven Meece, while the introduction, layout and dogsbody was the responsibility of Christopher "cw" Woodill. Steven Meece is attending Carleton University in Ottawa in the religion programme, and cw is attending the University of Toronto in the philosophy & semiotics programme. Produced using grants from Gary Woodill and Heather Meece, who are always more than pleased to bankroll the creativity of their children. Comments, questions, anecdotes, lawsuits to: Crop Dusters 79 O'Hara Avenue Toronto Ontario M6K 2R3 This publication is dedicated to the memory of the Neopsychedelic Underground. ========================== Pop Culture: An exposition Chris Woodill ========================== As an issue, pop culture has various definitions. It can be defined by various things, including the clothes people wear, the attitudes they hold, and the music to which they listen. It seems that our generation (everyone born after about 1970) has yet to discover its own pop-culture, for unlike our baby boom parents, we have yet to spread our wings. Cropduster revolves, as perhaps everything does, around the substance that one calls pop-culture. With various jargon thrown around including: post-modernism, nihilism, etc. in an attempt for one generation to understand the next, people forget what the essence of pop-culture really is - a collection of somewhat useless artifacts which are given exceptional value by groups of people. What we hope to show is not the trends but rather the idols of pop-culture. We hope to convey the simplicity of everyday life through the icons which lead generation upon generation onwards. In this way, perhaps one reading this can make a subjective interpretation of the trends of culture; but this is not our own objective. Rather, we hope to portray the post-boomer child as he or she really is, by critically examining the icons in which the child is represented. As member of the post-boom generation, the authors must include themselves in their ridicule, praise and examination. I think that this is perhaps necessary in any endevour, for only self-reflection leads true results. Thus, this journal is not intended to be rigourous, for lack of rigour is one of the characteristics of the pop-culture in which we reside. Many of the articles presented here are true in fact, without any changes in names, places, etc. We make no pretence that we represent our generation, nor do we make any pretence that has any objective value in it at all. For this is not a sociology textbook, nor is it a psychology journal. Rather, this appears at the moment to be a compilation of minor life experiences, which hopefully will give someone value. ====================== Young & Modern / Missy ====================== The dish: YM is supposed to stand for "Young and Modern." Until a few years ago it stood for "Young Miss," but the editors decided that the title was too prissy and waif-like for the gritty reality experienced by young girls today. It is theorized that girls would rather be modern than a miss, which seems to be like two coins with the same side. The pages are quite glossy, and the magazine has a particular smell to it. The pages don't feel like paper. The girlie on page twenty really looks like cw's half-sister Jacoba. The second thing we noticed about this issue and possibly this magazine is that its sole purpose seems to be the promotion of maquillage. The magazine is bulked up by advertisements for various-makeup products, many of the reader inquiries include queries about the proper kind of blush to use, and they themselves find that makeup is the central core of any young and modern girl's existence. Other things are delved into, but they are never treated with the same amount of respect. We tallied 32 of 104 pages consisting of full page singles advertisements, and four doubles (Cover Girl, Maybelline, "Caboodles" and Paul Mitchell Hair Products). BELIEVE IT: When your make-up looks this natural, you know it's Clean. One look says it all. Natural. Believable. Beautiful. That look is Cover Girl Clean Make-up (tm). So good to your skin. So clean. With pure Noxzema (r) ingredients. For healthy colour. Honest coverage. The look of great skin. That's the believable look of Clean Make-up. We found an oxymoron in the term "clean make-up". To be changed from the natural (which is to say, clean) you need to be made up into something different, and therefore you need something called "make-up" to do that. The girls in these advertisements had the particular quality of not resembling human beings at all. There is some heavy airbrushing going on here. They don't even look human anymore, of particular note is the girl squinting eyes, crunching paper and sticking out her tongue in the Maybelline double-ad. The girl for the Tampax one on page four looks like a real person, with a black turtleneck sweater and blue leggings with numbers on them. Doing anything for the first time can be tricky. But trust the makers of Tampax to come up with a tampon that's a total cinch for girls like you to... The curious thing about this girl is that she appears to be falling over backward for no discernible reason. "Say Anything" is a collection of reader-submitted embarrassing experiences and Freudian slips. The staff then rates these harrowing exploits with one to four stars, the four-star ranking being "Ultimate supremo humiliation". This section is in actuality the most titillating thing you'll see in YM. Hold onto your hats, this is heavy chick-talk: The reason you bought the mag, right? The next best thing to Peeping Tom-ing a slumber party. This month yielded three four-stars, the first being about a girl exposing her breasts during a school play, the second about a girl who had her clothes ripped off by a ski-lift, and the third involved a girlie having a tooth fall out during heavy petting and having Prince Charming swallow the thing. There were a few experiences at being ignored by a "guy" despite all intentions, and one about a girl's dad sitting on the crapper. Our favourite, although it was only given three stars, was about a girl who 'accidentally' bought a dildo. She thought it was a curling iron. Dr Freud would love these magazines almost as much as we do. The letter section found Jetha Marek from the Bronx questioning the real value of makeup, which went unanswered by Bonnie and crue. Crosstalk asked, "Should you stay with a boyfriend who pressures you for sex?" and no specific answer was given. Neither of the sides advocated that the victim "do it" with her boyfriend, but Kim Kaan of Tempe Arizona said that you should ignore him. The eponymous Jennifer Wise of Stockton, Kansas (the probable setting of Tony Parker's ^Bird Kansas^, Knopf 1989) "will only have sex when I am ready for it," when-ever that may be. She gets into the Puritan ethic of ^The Cosby Show^ by getting steamed over the inevitable results of sex before the wedding night: "a damaged reputation, an unplanned pregnancy, or a sexually transmitted disease like AIDS". Kaan is in her second year at Arizona State University, but her arguments remain thinly veiled rants lacking in intelligence. The "Body Q&A" is not as erotic as you may hope. They discuss different types of soap (superfatted or emollient, transparent or glycerin, deodorant, french milled, synthetic, acne and cleansing lotion) and publish photographs of the tatoos of Julia Roberts, Jody Watley, Roseanne Barr, Cher, Stephanie Seymour and "Roshumba". The crue hit the beach, photographed nine surfpeople and asked them "If your surfboard were a girl, who would she be?" These questions were answered honestly. Three of the seven dudes picked one of several fashion models. One guy said his mom. Bud Struck wanted his surfboard to be a porno star. This article was a veiled excuse for publishing pictures of surf gods, with little erect boy-nipples. The guy thing continued without another survey, "What's the worst thing you've ever done to a girl?" Answers: three dumpings on prom night, physical assault, yelling derogatory comments from a car window, cheating, raping a drunkard, crank calls, and one guy who puked on a chack. YM also contains the now-obligatory ad for "Teen Spirit" which remains "the Only Anti-perspirant For Teens". This one pictures three happy-go-lucky girls whooping it up at a carnival and presumably stinking up the joint in the process. The girl in the middle looks like Lloyd's mom! The guy I'm going out with broke up with his girlfriend two weeks before we started dating. He swears they're just friends, but they flirt a lot, and he ignores me when she's around. Should I be worried? We took the quiz to see if we were in fact boring. I had long suspected that this was the case and the proof was given when I scored 24 out of a possible high of 30 boringness points. cw, the freak that he is, was only 19. "My stepfather sexually abused me" was an article that seemed to be more geared as entertainment than information. It was presented in a voyeuristic tendency, viz. the first-page oversized sidebar quote "Just about every night, he'd get in bed with me after Mom had gone to sleep." These attempts at titillation belong on ^A Current Affair^, not for in a rag for 'teens. "Twenty-five ways to get a job this summer" was merely a set of guidelines on how one can be a pest to one's neighbours and parents by continually trying to weasel money from them for useless services that enrich neither party in any tangible way. cw was miffed by the bikini photo section, remarking that the girls were skanky little teenagers with little boobs trying to be grown-ups. I had to agree with him on this area. Swimsuits that are $70 US are too expensive for most babysitters anyway. He also found exception with the fat-busters article, which offered up low-fat substitutes for high-fat products. In his typical Newfoundlander common-sense attitude, he suggested that the dieter substitute wind and water for a Haagen Dazs ice-cream binge. "Why doncha just eat nothing?" The Tom Cruise interview was written in such a holy-shit manner that it isn't even worth the energy to type about it. This magazine is truly American trash, but like food fried up by Ronald McDonald, it sometimes gives a curious pleasure. Your best friend recently became part of a twosome, and your life has changed - for the worse. Forget about calling each other two or three times a week and getting together on weekends. These days you're lucky if you can even reach her on the phone, and whenever you see her, she's with him. The horoscopes were uniformly false. I told cw that he would meet "a cool guy with killer looks" on the fourteenth. He did not seem to be too anxious. The magazine is closed by four pages of postage-stamp advertisements for fly-by-night fat camps, modelling societies, correspondence highschools, and photo reprinters. Of all of the magazines reviewed in ^Crop Duster^, YM seems to paint the most pessimistic picture of youth today. YM worships at the trough of animated mannequins, offering up such notorious no-brains such as Linda Evangelista as role models for our sisters and daughters! It appears that being young and modern is not a very good condition for the soul. YM implicitly believes that the acquisition and sustaining of a boyfriend must be the central focus in the goals of a girl, yet YM itself showcases that most boyfriends are albatrosses at best, and eventually only cause trouble. YM does not see the contradiction of instructing its readers to pursue the romantic ideal while admitting that Prince Charming is most likely a goof. Someone who is young and modern must be a clothes horse, willing to apply massive amounts of varying kinds of makeup, able to spend extravagantly on clothes, diet, use the right kind of soap, wear a two-piece bikini and kowtow to a jerk boyfriend who may or may not be stolen by your best friend. If you cannot reach those levels, you are done like a dinner. This magazine portrays female adolescence correctly, as a series of banalities adding up to a tremendous omnipresent burden. They recognize the faults of this value system, but lack the conviction to attempt to bring about changes. Espousing of deviant philosophies (to burn your bra or your rouge) could cause what Jennifer Wise fears more than AIDS, which is "a damaged reputation". Young Miss readers cannot liberate themselves because they are too busy trying to condition themselves for social acceptance. ===== Sassy ===== The dish: If you have a ring through yr nose and believe that The Butthole Surfers speak directly to you, Sassy will be your bag. Witness this from the letters section: Dear Jane: I was going to send you this comic strip way before your "staff hate mail awards" ["Diary," April]. I swear! My purpose was to show you that a way cool cartoonist like Lynda Barry has her comic strip character reading a way cool magazine like Sassy [only one panel shown below]. So I am glad that you're "spreading like the plague"! Complete with spelling errors, this is the handbook of the hippest home slices this side of Seattle. Hip though it may appear to be, the Kurt Cobain-meets-Frankie Avalon article on "Surf Punks" (p 46) features the grunge lady wearing $154 worth of clothes (not even counting those big clunky boots) as she looks nihilistic. Anarchy in the USA? Not when you look like that. However, Sassy may be a victim of its demographic. In the hopes of hitting the mark, they constantly engage in overkill, as if their audience could never accept anything but affirmations of what they already are. Instead of giving the message that information on the cover photograph is on page fourteen, Sassy has to say For a veritable hoedown of info about our cover, fee fi fiddly-i oh-ver to page 14. This gets very boring very fast. Almost every other sentence has to have a few words of teen-lingo inside of it to keep the readers awake. Do the editors of Sassy wish to keep these people sassy forever? Honestly, this stuff sounds as if it is being spoken in the next Bill and Ted sequel. Because of this constant gee-whiz overtone, Sassy is unable to sound sincere when it deals with serious issues. Scorpio (Oct 23 - Nov 21) Partnerships are key to success this mo' (except for hassle-causing bratty sibs on the 10th). Break with routine on the 12th - you need a change. On the 16th you get what you ask for. Hang near water on the 21st for serenity and Esther Williams-y exercise. Day to Savor [sic]: 11th. Scratch Off Your Calendar [sic]: 29th. The "Cute Band Alert" further restricts Sassy readers into this teenage pigeonhole. The Cute Band Alert is just that -- "Alert! Here is a new band with a cute bass player!" and they publish a picture. This kind of narcissism is taken to a further extreme with the "Sassiest Boy in America" contest held every winter, in which readers can nominate their boyfriend or brother as the epitome of sass. Who is the idol figure of Sassy readers? Anyone who has sideburns, Lollapalooza tickets, a backward-turned baseball cap, and calls himself "a feminist". Sassy takes a different slant than the other three mags: It supposedly includes the reader in the personal lives of the editors. Editors and staff contributors refer to themselves in the first person, and the reader is supposed to feel chummy with Jane, Lew, Christina, Margie, Jacinta, Mary, Kim, Mary Kaye, Anne V, Andrea T, Janet, Mary Ann, and a whole slew of others. They're supposed to be as familiar to the readers as their cafeteria mates. Positively, Sassy does contain the most record and book reviews of any of the three mags, but these are limited. The books are always the latest released kid books, the music the latest six-month shelf life stuff, and the "movies" are always what's playing down at the mall. "Stuff You Wrote" is a poetry-and-quip feature that is passable but is slowly shrinking month by month. Most of the poetry is kinda the same, and an attempt at therapy - the desire to get something out of one's system and not so much to create work that transcend the medium and develop relevance on several different planes. Still, the concept is commendable and the neglect of this feature is not so good. Sassy is still the only magazine that mention the words "vagina" and "penis" as if they are related to each other (p 26) but they are very careful when they do it. Sassy does set itself apart from the other two, but this difference is shrinking. The ads in Sassy are largely those of YM, primarily disposable haircare products, and disposable music products. May of the exact same ads appear in all three magazines. Again - the ads, like the magazine itself, never leave the realm of the day to day distractions of a fifteen and a half year old. Was it always like this? This short-sightedness is a new development. Sassy is the newest of the magazines profiled here, having made it's debut in March of 1988 (compared to 1941 for Seventeen and 1952 for the original Young Miss), and therefore determined to take a new approach in order to defeat the giants. This was a very ribald approach indeed -- they mentioned sex honestly and reflected teenage life for what it really is. Someone also once let the cat out of the bag that women, especially young women, actually look better without makeup than with it. A flap arose by the end of the year, and a group of "concerned parents" expressed their outrage that their daughters were being told about dirty subjects. Maybelline and Tampax were scared, expressed their fears to Jane, and Jane buckled under. Sassy now is just as flighty as the other magazines, and it actually spreads lies in order to keep the status quo intact of the legions of daughters that read the magazine. A further slide happened late in 1991 when Sassy changed the physical size -- from an oversized square to a regular notebook size. Soon after, the magazine underwent yet another layout overhaul and now is as active as an MTV commercial with mixed-font headlines and text, and dingbats by the dozen. Weather or not it loses in editorial quality is irrelevant, as long as it can keep a number of girls interested enough to read it. For magazines are essentially trojan horses for getting the reader to look at advertisements, just as the only purpose of commercial television is use the guise of entertainment to round up an audience to sit through the commercials. Why do magazine articles break up after two pages, to be "continued on page 132"? To get the reader to turn through the next sixty pages, all while looking at the ads. It is a well-known marketing maxim that nothing should be changed unless it is not working in its current incarnation. The only thing that matters in the magazine publishing business is to deliver the market to the advertisers. If they are able to do this, everything else will soon fall in line. Sassy needs to get girlies and keep them interested in the product in order to survive. Constant changes in the style of the magazine seem to indicate that Sassy can not seem to get it right. Is Sassy stumbling? It could very well be. The reduction in size was a cost-saving measure, as the copy price did not decrease. Sassy is the shortest of the profiled magazines (88 pages at a cover price of $2.50 equals 2.84c per page) while YM and Seventeen deliver more product at a cheaper price (104 pages, $2.75, 2.64c per page and 120 pages, $2.50, 2.08c per page respectively). Free enterprise keeps the newsstand prices to within twenty-five cents of each other, but Sassy is producing the least amount of magazine for that price -- a full thirty-two pages less than Seventeen. Naturally there is no such thing as frugality, and if Sassy could have sold an extra thirty pages of ads, they would have done it. Sassy has the lowest 12 month subscription cost, at $10, in comparison to $14 for Seventeen and $18 for Young Miss. This translates to less than 50% of the potential newsstand costs. While subscriptions eliminate many of the distribution channels and therefore are cheaper for the reader, this still translates to a net loss in sales revenue for the Sassies. Then why pump up subscriptions? To increase the readerbase to make the magazine more attractive for advertisers. It is hoped that many people will commit to twelve issues at a cheaper price, which provide for a greater circulation figure to present to potential advertisers, which hopefully translates to more advertising funds to offset the loss in sales revenue. Sometimes this method works, and often it doesn't. This ponzi scheme killed the original incarnation of ^Ms^ after it sold a tonne of subscriptions at a dirt cheap price but could not translate those figures into more advertisements. It is a very risky gamble, and is often a last-ditch attempt made in desperation and fear and trembling. It will be interesting and informative to see if the subscription price for Sassy continues to deflate. The Sass-meisters seem to be caught in a delicate circle. Sassy was forced away from its old positions that made it quirky, interesting, daring, and worth looking forward to each month. However, there is no demand for a Young & Modern clone, which is the direction that Sassy may have to drift. Sassy is an entity at sea in search of a demographic, which is a very perilous thing to be. ========= Seventeen ========= The dish: Seventeen is the oldest of the group here, and in both the literal and figurative senses it remains the mother of all teenage mags. It is still the most professional, most entertaining, and most professionally produced of the magazines. But this is a small market, and ^The New Yorker^ it aint. The fashion features of Seventeen are the best photographed, and the ads go beyond the norm a few times. But even Seventeen has seen better days. The June 1992 was weighing in at a rather svelte 120 pages, while as recently as April 1986 it was 216 pages. A perusal of that issue finds several ads for General Motors, Rice-a-roni, "Chadwicks of Boston," and a feature film. This is an indication that Seventeen, at that time, was almost a "general interest" magazine, the two biggest of this genre being Time and People. Certainly that is not the case any longer. There are only a few ads in this category. The remainder of the magazine is bulked up with YM-style ads for Clearsil, Cover Girl, and Caboodles (a neon-coloured makeup lunchbox). One thing hasn't changed, though, and that is the last pages are ripe with postage-size black and white ads for mail-order firms specializing in bust growing schemes, photo enlargement operations, Groucho Marx glasses & moustache ("fool your friends"), and fat camps. There's a send-in application to "The Art Institute of Pittsburgh, Ft Lauderdale Campus." Well. It appears that every girly magazine is suffering in one way or another, and for what reason? The time-frame of six years is too brief to suggest a shrinking age bracket and a smaller supply of young girls interested in beauty and boyfriend tips. It is also too McLuhan to suggest that the magazine concept is becoming obsolete and out-of-date. It is a curious situation. LONG-DISTANCE LASHES: The mascara that lasts as long as you do. Marathon Mascara really goes the distance. Keeping lashes long, dark and beautiful, no matter what you do! So go ahead, put it to the test. Marathon looks just put on, 'til you take it off. MARATHON MASCARA COVER GIRL Renee Jeffus is wearing Soft Black. R E D E F I N I N G B E A U T I F U L But it would be premature to jump the gun and label Seventeen as YM trash. The editorial slant does not suffer from the laugh-track style happiness that infects Sassy. Seventeen, after all, is the rag that published Sylvia Plath in 1950. (She was also published in the Ladies Home Journal and the Pi Delta Gamma Review, but ignore that.) The issue reviews carried a very good fiction piece, actually worthy of reading. It wasn't promoted very much, and appears in the contents page as "FICTION: Leftovers by Cathi Hanauer". You can't have too much, and this is a passing barb at best. She also wrote the "Relating" column, which is an advice column to the lovelorn. The letters page was semi-interesting. Seven of the ten letters were feedback regarding some kind of self-abuse or suffering happening at the hands of the readers. One letter was concerning school-leavers, three about eating disorders, two about the persecution of the small-boobed, and one about being stuck in the wrong corner of a love triangle. Maybe it is only here that these girls are able to admit that they are real people, and that is all they are. Because if the girls can't admit that, they're lying to themselves. Only then will they believe what the advertisers say. The cover girl was Samantha Mathis, which would be reason enough to buy the whole thing. Yet, you don't get what you pay for, because the cover feature translated to two decent-sized pictures and 1/3rd of a page of text. cw (a crack semiotician) called attention to the smaller picture of the girl on a Californian beach. She appears to be crouching down, and the shorts she is wearing have pulled up a bit at the back, exposing a little bit of her ass. cw pointed to the spot on the picture and smirked. The girl on page 17 looks quite a bit like Lisa Habib from Miz Laroche's history class at the Streetsville highschool. That was where all the girls lived. It was the total re-definition of egregiousness for me, I'll tell you that. At lunches I'd go behind the portables with my walkman and listen to Son House's 1965 recording of Death Letter Blues. I'd have to jack up the volume to the deafness range so that the steel-bodied National guitar would drown out the blup-blup-blup of Camaroes tearing through the parking lot. Page 24 finds a page on specialized swimsuits, and how to use them to accentuate your body features. Also included is a group of exercises YOU can use to trim unsightly soft bits. Batter down the hatches for the "Sex & Your Body" column. It's hot stuff. The sub-title is "Are You Experienced?": There's generally a sort of hierarchy of experiences, with hand-holding and kissing at the bottom and intercourse at the top. But in between the list gets pretty blurry. When everyone you know talks about everything they do and grill you about everything you do, you may ot be able to avoid having your sexual experience (or lack of it) be public knowledge... the trick is too respect your body and your beliefs enough to always protect yourself, first and foremost, and to do what's truly right for you. Then they pick four letters dealing with this topic. The first two are of average level, but after that it gets pretty hairy. The final two letters, printed verbatim: I am a virgin and I intend to stay a virgin until I get married. Instead of having sex, my boyfriend and I do everything else. The other night he used his fingers. I know it sounds gross, but I don't know how else to put it. Well, afterward, I started to bleed. Does this mean I'm not a virgin anymore? Did he pop my cherry? and: My best friend Stacy lied to her boyfriend and told him that she wasn't a virgin. Now she's afraid that if she has sex with him he'll know she's a virgin because she'll be tight or it'll hurt. She's afraid to tell him the truth because she thinks he'll hate her for lying. If a guy's experienced, can he tell if a girl is a virgin? Pretty crazy stuff, better not let Mom see it. Seventeen is coming perilously close to reality. The former letter affords an opportunity for moralizing: The Young Lady should take Debra Kent's advice and do some thinking for herself, and maybe then she will shed some of her hypocrisy. She is trapped between two conflicting desires: To "just do it," and to preserve the sanctitude of what she calls "my cherry". The unpoppable cherry has nothing to do with it, because virginity is not a biological label, but a state of mind. This girl is running the gamut of "his fingers" and many Latin terms and what-have-you, and certainly it is stretching it a bit to call her an untouched virgin bride, which is the way she would prefer to exist. She owes honesty to the mythical husband-to-be. If she wants to be a virgin bride, more power to her, but she should see to it that she *is* untouched. Obviously this appears to be beyond her means. If she wants to do these deeds with the boyfriend, more power to her. This girl has to learn that she has to take responsibility for her actions, and that she cannot deliver the goods and still claim her virginity. But again, Seventeen usually redeems itself enough to make it worth the $2.50 cover price. (BTW: North-west Mississaugeans can find the latest copy of Seventeen in the magazine rack of the Streetsville Public Library @ 132 Queen St South.) There was a little bit of truth in this issue, too. It was found in the article by Ann Patchett with the yuk title "How to Survive a Breakup": If this guy is still the centre of every conversation you're having six months after the big B, you've got to ask yourself if you're really trying to get over him. Maybe you think that you'll be closer to him if you live in the past or that he'll see your love as true if you refuse to let go. Calling his house and hanging up, waiting around in the school parking lot to catch a glimpse of him, hounding his friends for information, -- none of this is going to help you get better. Nobody knows the answers to all the questions, but one thing is clear: He would be with you if he wanted to be with you, and he's not. So Seventeen comes through in the end. Ninety-five percent of it is shit, but the other five percent gives the reader a glimpse into what matters in the lives of these girls, beyond the day-to-day distractions. It is also the only magazine that can hold the attention of someone outside of the target group. Unlike the other magazines, Seventeen is worthwhile, and it would be a loss to see it cease to exist. ============= Three Bitches ============= Age of actual audience: YM 13 Sassy 15 (and a half, ha ha) Seventeen 17 Short-term goals: YM Lose ten pounds Sassy Get the latest Chili Peppers CD Seventeen Senior prom If it was a University: YM Western Sassy York Seventeen Ottawa If it was food: YM Quarter pounder and shake Sassy Haagen-dazs with nuts Seventeen Spaghetti and to-mat-oe sauce If it was a philosopher: YM Machiavelli Sassy Ghi-jac or St Augustine Seventeen John Stuart Mill If it had a citizenship: YM American Sassy American Seventeen American If it had an aura: YM Violet Sassy Magenta Seventeen Mental Tan If it was someone that the editors know: YM Coby Sassy Fiona Seventeen JM If it were sodapop: YM Cream soda Sassy Pepsi Seventeen 7-up If it was part of Mississauga: YM Meadowvale Sassy East Cooksville Seventeen Lorne Park In one paragraph: YM Keep cheek colour low key - applying a few strokes of powder blush on the apples of your cheeks is enough to give your face a healthy, sun-kissed glow... (p 75) Sassy Did you know that women hold only 2 of 100 US Senate seats, the same number as in 1971? When I hear things like this, I get so mad I could spit. Enter The Women's Voting Guide. All these totally powerful women (like Pat Schroeder and Gloria Steinem) worked on this book to help you and moi understand that perplexing electoral process we've been hearing so much about... (p 36) Seventeen Before I worked at McDonald's, Collie and I ate White Castles. We'd drive in and order like fifteen - ten or eleven for him, a few for me. I'd feed them to him while he was driving. Then we'd go to Dunkin' Donuts [sic] for chocolate creme-filleds and Munchkins... (p 100) ============= Epilogue Chris Woodill ============= This is the first edition of Cropduster, and it is I suppose a "labour of love," although such a phrase is exactly what would be said in any of the three mags examined. We make no promises in terms of future issues, and as this particular issue took about three months to produce, I wouldn't hold your breath. Future issues may or may not surface as they come down the pike, depending on how busy or lazy the authors get in their real lives. cw - August 30th, 1992. -- roasleen:ac174