"Look at them." The poem starts with a command, and the reader is pulled into the very act it goes on to accuse: staring at bodies on display. xmermaidbonesx's "The Media" is a short, angry piece about how magazines and the people in them shape the way teenagers see themselves. Its central idea is that an impossible standard of beauty does real damage, enough to kill something in a young person. By the last line, that damage has a body count.
The poem's construction is simple and deliberate. Almost every line is short, and almost all of them pair up in rhyming couplets: walk and talk, complexion and perfection, thin and sin, spite and sight, lies and dies. The bouncy, chant-like rhythm sounds a bit like a playground rhyme or an advertising slogan, which suits a poem about persuasion. Slogans work by being catchy and easy to repeat, and the poem borrows that sound and turns it against the people who use it. The effect is uncomfortable. A tune that light is wrapped around some very dark claims.
The imagery is compact but pointed. "Porcelain complexion" is a flattering phrase on the surface, yet porcelain is also fragile, cold, and doll-like, something to be looked at rather than lived in. The next image, "stick thin," makes the body brittle and lifeless in a similar way. Then comes the poem's sharpest line: "making the average weight seem like a sin." Here "sin" brings in the vocabulary of religion and guilt, as though an ordinary body were a moral failing. The rhyme matters too, because "thin" and "sin" are bound together as if the connection were natural. In effect the rhyme reproduces the media's own logic.
The verbs show how aggressive the speaker thinks this influence is. The media is "taking over the scene," which sounds like an invasion, and then "steering the youth in the wrong direction," as if teenagers were passengers in a car someone else is driving. The poem's logic then turns inward. Teens begin to think of themselves "in spite," becoming "hateful at their own sight." That phrase echoes the opening command. The poem began with the instruction to look, and it now ends up with young people unable to look at themselves without disgust. The poem moves in a circle: looking at others leads to loathing the self.
Not every move is equally smooth. "Getting stuck in the horror section" mixes its metaphors, since one moment the youth are being steered and the next they are stuck, and the rhyme with "direction" feels slightly forced. Yet the image has an odd force. A "horror section" suggests that what looks glamorous on a magazine rack is really a horror story, with teenagers as the victims. The "I" appears only once, in "all I can think is perfection," and that admission matters. The speaker is not standing safely outside the effect but admits to feeling its pull, which makes the anger more convincing.
The ending is the most striking part. "Through their words of lies, / another teenage soul dies." There is no full stop, so the poem seems to stop mid-breath. The word "another" turns one death into a pattern, as if this were a list that keeps growing. The word "soul" is also an interesting choice. A poem so concerned with bodies and weight ends by saying that what is lost is not the body but something inner. The poem never says whether "dies" is literal or figurative, and that ambiguity makes the line more unsettling. The "words of lies" also quietly widen the target. The opening describes how "they" walk and talk, but the final blame falls on the language of the media as a whole.
The poem's significance lies in its directness. It does not hide behind elaborate metaphor, so a teenage reader can recognise the feeling at once: comparing, looking, and quietly deciding you fall short. Its voice, speaking of "teens" and "the youth," sounds like it comes from within that experience, though that is an impression from the text rather than a known fact. The accusation is blunt and leaves little room for nuance, but that bluntness is part of its energy. The poem asks readers to notice how often they are told where to look, and what happens when they believe what they see.