Magazines, Adolescent Boys'

Little academic research has explored either the content or effects of magazines targeted at adolescent boys. What little research is publicly available is market research; such work largely describes who reads what magazines and suggests that teenage boys in the United States gravitate toward hobby or special-interest magazines rather than male equivalents of the lifestyle magazines popular among adolescent girls. In fact, some researchers have suggested that teenage boys perceive the very idea of lifestyle magazines as essentially feminine, and they reject the idea of such a magazine designed for them.

Most research that asks what magazines teenage boys read has been conducted by Mediamark Research, Inc., for the Magazine Publishers of America (MPA), a trade group. Of magazines MPA describes as “teen interest,” half of the highest circulation titles are primarily of interest to males. These include Boy's Life, the official magazine of the Boy Scouts of America or BSA (with a reported circulation of 1.28 million), three magazines focusing on video games and game play (e.g., Game Informer with a reported circulation of 1.32 million), and Sports Illustrated for Kids (with a reported circulation of 760,000). Of these, the only one clearly produced exclusively for boys, of course, is Boy's Life, and its circulation figures may not reflect the same degree of interest or readership as those of other titles. Many local units of the BSA purchase subscriptions for all boys enrolled in any of their programs, including boys as young as 7 years old.

An alternative indicator of what magazines teenage boys read is the percentage of a given title's readers who are teenage boys. Although this does not indicate in absolute terms how many boys read these magazines, it does suggest the importance of teen audiences to a specific magazine. In 2004, Mediamark Research, Inc., reported that the magazines reporting the highest percentage of teenage boys in their readership are primarily magazines designed for automotive and motor sport enthusiasts. Examples include Dirt Rider (30% of readers are teenage boys), 4 Wheel and Off Road (20% of readers are teen boys), and Popular Hot Rodding (18% of readers are teenage boys). Readers of professional wrestling fan magazines are also disproportionately likely to be teenage boys (e.g., WWE Magazine, with 20% of its readers being teenage boys). It is helpful to compare these figures with those from magazines actually designed for teenage girls—the readership of Seventeen is only 36% teenage girls, and the readership of YM is only 47% teenage girls.

No formal analyses have explored the contents of magazines targeted at or read predominantly by teenage boys in the United States. One such study has been undertaken in the Netherlands, however. Whereas the United States has no prominent lifestyle magazines for teenage boys, in the Netherlands, a lifestyle magazine for teenage boys is published and enjoys a sizable readership. A comparison between its contents and those of a popular, comparable magazine for girls found that the boys' magazine focused more on hobbies (such as motor sports and technology) and celebrities, the girls' more on fashion and beauty. The study's author concludes that the boys' magazine reinforces masculine stereotypes in much the same way girls' magazines reinforce feminine stereotypes.

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