Cameron and the media

At the risk of rehashing some old arguments, I thought it might be worth thinking about David Cameron's comments on the impact that the media has on children.

In the article that I stumbled across on Brand Republic, the journalist makes reference to an ongoing feud between the Conservatives and magazines like Nuts and Zoo, although in his most recent comments Cameron hasn't specifically named any individual publication. Reading between the lines it would seem more probable that he is indeed referring to lads mags rather than Management Today or Computer Weekly.

Right/wrong? Good/evil? White/Black? Yes/No?

Goodness it's such an old argument I don't know where to start. The media has long since been blamed for its influence on young people, for triggering mental illnesses like anorexia, for encouraging heroin chic, objectification etc. etc. The liberal view point on this is most commonly: let them get on with it; there's much more at play than just the media; consider your other cultural and social influences e.g. the role of parenting, peers etc. In short: magazines don't appear in a vacuum.

The other side of the coin, to take the most extreme viewpoint, is that lads mags and the like are all just a form a extreme wickedness and the root cause of most social evils today. Use the word evil a lot and you'll just about get there.

I am your classic fence sitter. I don't necessarily like the peddling of nude images and yes I would judge someone over the age of 21 for regularly buying (or at all) the not quite top shelf publications. It's the rule of dad i.e. what would you think if your dad did it? You get what I'm saying. However, much as I don't like them, how damaging/responsible for corrupting young minds do I really hold them to be?

To be quite honest with you, unless things have changed dramatically since I was a girl, most young women aren't all that exposed to these sorts of images anyway, beyond a casual, slightly more than cursory glance in the local newsagent. Unless your dad does buy them of course.

For young men, again, these sorts of magazines do perpetuate a certain type of image and are to some degree responsible for the way that men, especially impressionable young ones, view women. But by the time most men or boys have had any kind of relationship, they soon realise that the reality is quite different. Yes they can desire whatever they want, but as to whether it actually exists is another matter.

This brings me to the more disturbing part of the argument. On the whole the artificial, air brushed, super undersize me images haven't worked - are we not either on the verge of or in the middle of an obesity endemic? But in some ways that's the whole point: we are starting to see a worrying dichotomy emerge, where children especially are either alarmingly thin or morbidly obese. A rather nasty struggle between the reality of an over-fed, consumerist landscape and that same landscape's guilty conscience. Which will it be?

There is much talk in general about the new pressures that children face, which reach much wider than whether they wear a size zero - let's not forget it's not just girls that we're talking about here. Only the other day the Sunday Times ran a feature about the pressure on young people to outdo their peers with their academic performance. 3 As at A-level is no longer the holy grail that it was once cracked up to be.

We see the same thing in business where young people are struggling to be noticed because there are now so many of them vying for the same roles and the problem is that they're all bright, competitive young things. It's no longer enough just to be a nice person with some decent GCSEs and a baden powell award. Ah, them were the days.

So what are we really looking at here? Well, to prevent myself from really going off on some super tangent - as if you weren't lost already... I'll bring it back to the magazines. The magazines and the pushy parents and the high cost of living and capitalism and anything else we'd like to blame it on. I'm keeping my position on the fence: it's not just the magazines we see, although they do play a part. To me it's about a lack of perspective. A submergence in a cauldron of unreality, a lack of faith in our own convictions, even too much social networking, dare I say it.

So it you are a parent, a school teacher, a friend, a politician or a business leader, try and remember the qualities that count. Because being a good scout, girl, boy or otherwise, should count for something.