Betsy Chambers was so appalled when she saw the term "wife-beater" very casually applied to a certain style of T-shirt that she wrote to the editors of the magazine Teen Vogue to express her outrage. She never heard back from them.

Chambers, who asked that her real name not be used because she is a beauty products editor, subscribes to a variety of magazines to keep up with current trends and styles. She doesn't have a daughter (she's the parent of a 22-month-old son and is expecting another child), but she's on the leading edge of an increasingly noisy backlash against teen magazines and, indeed, how the media relates to teens in general – particularly to girls.

At the 2001 meeting of The Society for Adolescent Medicine, a study was presented that found symptoms of an eating disorder in one-third of high school girls. The same study found that 12 percent of the high school girls surveyed said they vomited to control their weight. Many experts blame this behavior on unrealistic expectations placed on our society by the media.

From here, it can't be much of a jump in logic to think that children – who can be desensitized to violence by repeatedly seeing violent acts or driven to body image disorders by constant viewings of "perfect people" (unlike themselves) – can also become insensitive to the problem of domestic abuse by hearing domestic abuse terms tossed about so casually.

Enough people believe so that there is a movement afoot to stop the term from being used to describe an article of clothing. Most notably, the Web site Dads and Daughters has started a campaign to shut down a "wife beaters" Web site selling the T-shirts. It's special? Convicted wife beaters get a free shirt.

The best bet for concerned parents is to boycott Web sites and magazines that present these negative images to our children. Teen Vogue is definitely out of fashion on this issue.