Women's Magazines

[Admiral Swagmeister G-Funk]

I've been discussing the nature of women's magazines with my girlfriend as she reads them, and its very frustrating for me to think of how much these magazines inform, reinforce and perpetuate patriarchy in society.

We often talk about 'lad's mags', page 3 and the like but it seems that women's magazines are overlooked in this discussion.

Any articles, opinions and points? Here's one from the Huffington Post which I haven't read.



Women's Magazines: Reinforcing the Patriarchy Using Women to Police Women

Posted: 24/07/2013 14:44

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I read Cosmo once when I was a teenager. It had an article on why swallowing sperm was bad: it's high in calories. Clearly, this is what you should be thinking of when having sex: whether or not you will get "fat". Not thinking about preventing STDs or ensuring that your relationship involves mutual respect and consideration so that both partners are sexually fulfilled without one doing something that makes them uncomfortable. Nope, swallowing is bad because it makes women fat. Of course, that was 15 years ago. Considering the mainstreaming of porn, I'm sure swallowing is mandatory and those pesky calories can be covered by not eating anything else that day.
That is the purpose of women's magazines: to make women realise how imperfect and pathetic they are and then flog them clothes, make-up and other assorted crap to make them feel like "real" women, as if there is a reachable category of "real women". It's capitalism. Yes, some magazines like Marie Claire used to be pro-women including articles on work/life balance, sexual health and family relationships. But, that isn't what they sell now. Women's magazines now sell that same old reductive, constrictive, and boring construction of female sexuality where we need to be sexually available to men at all times and concerned entirely with their orgasms whilst at the same time doing all the childcare, housework, and ensuring that we remain entirely fuckable by being physically perfect.
This is why I wasn't at all shocked by OK Magazine's newest cover story: "Kate's Post-Baby Weight Loss Regime". Body-shaming a woman less than 48 hours after they gave birth is entirely keeping within the normative behaviour of women's magazines. OK Magazine might have been the first of the women's magazines to publish diet tips for the Duchess of Cambridge but they won't be the last. They certainly weren't the only magazine body-shaming the Duchess of Cambridge during her pregnancy. Not a week goes by without a woman's magazine body-shaming other women for being too fat, too thin, too orange, too pale, for having "cankles" or cellulite. Nothing women do is ever right and this without addressing the media who've congratulated the Duchess of Cambridge on giving birth to a boy as if she should [and could] have sent a girl back to the stork for exchange. Equally perplexing are those who have congratulated the Duchess of Cambridge for not hiding her "post-baby belly" as if she could have misplaced it for the ten-minute walk from the hospital entrance to the car.
The body-shaming of women isn't the only harm that women's magazines cause: they shame women for having sex too often whilst excusing men for having affairs. They publish articles attacking women so we can laugh at Kerry Katona or Britney Spears and buy make-up at the same time. The fact that both Kerry Katona and Britney Spears had very public breakdowns because they were ill is irrelevant. They are lambasted for being what "good" women shouldn't be and we get to make ourselves feel better about failing the Patriarchal Fuckability Test by humiliating other women.
Women's magazines reinforce the Patriarchy by using women to police other women. We become our own jailers: judging other women for not shaving their legs, having grey hair, or being overweight. Women buy magazines that call women who have literally just given birth fat. Women buy magazines that tell them they are frigid for not wanting to have anal sex, as if consent is irrelevant. Women buy magazines that tell them to shut up in order to get a man. Women buy magazines that tell them that they can only be one of two things: fuckable or invisible.
Personally, I will dance in the streets at the demise of women's magazines. I am glad that women are choosing to use blogs and twitter to talk with other women. Collaborative blogs like Jezebel, F-Word and Vagenda are replacing Cosmo and OK Magazine. These online magazines aren't without their own problems but they are a start. Teenage girls, who are surrounded by a pornified culture that devalues and denigrates them, can access Scarleteen for information on sexuality and birth control. The Internet might be responsible for the explosion in violent pornography but it's also the place of a deeply subversive underground of brilliant women writers who are fighting back; refusing to police the behaviour of other women in order to receive some crumbs from the Patriarchy's Table of Plenty.
Women loving and supporting each other is what will destroy the Patriarchy. We need to stop financially supporting media, from magazines to television, which is built on body-shaming and humiliating other women. We need to remember what sisterhood actually means and stop buying into capitalist, patriarchal rhetoric on the "good " woman and remember that we are all beautiful.
Otherwise, we are doomed to see magazine cover after magazine cover calling a new mother fat.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pgjl3ux-xs4

[Halert]

Why do you post a video of a "Man falling over crash barrier" along with this article?

[Admiral Swagmeister G-Funk]

wow, i didn't know i did that. i pasted it accidentally as i was gonna upload it to youve been framed, which is a tv show that plays funny home videos and gives out £250 for yours if its selected. i noticed that they were playing a lot of vids i've seen on youtube so i thought i'd download one off of youtube and send it to see if i could get £250 haha.

dunno if that's funny but anyway the link i was meant to paste is http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/louise-pennington/womens-magazines_b_3644003.html

[GiantMonkeyMan]

The media in general is an industry like any other and when it's in the hands of the bourgeoisie it is utilised purely for profit margins and to provide short periods of satisfaction in order to ensure continuous purchasing. Unlike other industries, however, it can also function as part of the ideological apparatus of the state to enforce bourgeois cultural hegemony. In this way, womens/mens magazines don't offer anything that would require its readership to question the status quo but at the same time give a pretense at providing answers to some of the problems of capitalist society, chiefly alienation.


wow, i didn't know i did that. i pasted it accidentally as i was gonna upload it to youve been framed, which is a tv show that plays funny home videos and gives out £250 for yours if its selected. i noticed that they were playing a lot of vids i've seen on youtube so i thought i'd download one off of youtube and send it to see if i could get £250 haha.
That's class, hope you get your £250. :laugh:

[Admiral Swagmeister G-Funk]

The media in general is an industry like any other and when it's in the hands of the bourgeoisie it is utilised purely for profit margins and to provide short periods of satisfaction in order to ensure continuous purchasing. Unlike other industries, however, it can also function as part of the ideological apparatus of the state to enforce bourgeois cultural hegemony. In this way, womens/mens magazines don't offer anything that would require its readership to question the status quo but at the same time give a pretense at providing answers to some of the problems of capitalist society, chiefly alienation.


That's class, hope you get your £250. :laugh:
totally agree. and thanks, i'll donate £30 to revleft ha :wub:

[Radio Spartacus]

I couldn't agree more. My girlfriend is doing some scholarly work on Cosmo right now, found an interesting quote in which a Cosmo editor said that the only way women can have power is by being sex objects. Fucking disgusting, we'll see these magazines in a bonfire during any revolutionary situation.

[GiantMonkeyMan]

Been thinking about this a little bit. I imagine that popularising critique of women's magazines is more difficult than men's/lad's. Lad's mags are so obviously patriarchal, going as far as using rape language as the norm, whereas women's magazines operate in this weird paradigm of already being considered trashy but 'harmless' like stupid irrelevant horoscope stuff. I know a lot of my collegues at work read this sort of thing at lunch breaks etc but I couldn't exactly critique them in the same way as I could critique lad's mags or The Sun.

[human strike]

Semen is actually incredibly low in calories. Just saying.

What stands out for me about these magazines is the contradictions they present. Magazines like gossip and fashion magazines are confusing anxiety-inducing operations that seem deliberately designed to instigate consumerist frenzy. With impossible to follow fashion trends and impossibly photoshopped half-naked women staring at you - it's unclear whether these women are meant to be envied or admired (or simply consumed) - and then those who haven't been photoshopped, merely snapped with a super-zoom lens when they momentarily let their guard down on a beach on their holiday being shamed for it; how could this not result in feelings of inadequacy? And the cure is presented to you as buy these clothes, buy these shoes, buys this handbag, buy this, buy that; or you'll be shamed too! Only the rich could possibly follow this lunacy with any success, with the essential guide of the magazine itself, of course, always being necessary.

It's not only about consumerism though, it's also about social control. It's the virgin-whore dichotomy brought to its logical conclusion. You are to be both and neither. You are to enjoy chocolate whilst simultaneously shunning it. It's ok to be a 'slut', if you buy this vibrator, but actually it isn't ok. A tawdry, tarty, cartoonlike version of female sexuality, popularised on these pages, has become dominant. The idealised form of womanhood presented is impossible to achieve; you're not supposed to be able to achieve it, you're supposed to struggle your whole life to reach unreachable standards of beauty and femininity, which ultimately translates as subjugation to men and capital. It's an operation in misogyny and male-supremacy.

EDIT: And actually, it's a lot worse than all that. They're racist, homophobic and ableist too.

[Flying Purple People Eater]

I remember reading this trash in the waiting room while waiting for something - swimming lessons, the clinic, the hospital, pathologists, job interviews, you name it. I always got a kick out of the ridiculously melodramatic obsessions over obscure actors I had never heard of, and people's stories about how their partner turned out to be their long lost cousin or something.

Outside of waiting rooms, I know not of a single human being, female or otherwise, who spares this dribble a glance.

I totally agree though about the sexist garbage in those magazines. One of the early ones over here were actually made by feminists, had all of these anti gender role stuff in it and was a realistic magazine about political and social troubles for women. The magazine got bought out a few decades later by this rich guy who subsequently turned it into "be a good house-slave and sex object weekly".

[Dennis the 'Bloody Peasant']

Find those mags infuriating..practically very woman at my work reads them and discusses the 'stories' in them at length.
Also one of my favourite people, my eldest sister, reads them regularly.

It's a trashy, mean, shallow form of rubber-necking, mixed in with a confusing mantra of 'Get thin quick' and 'Ew, look how thin she is'.

Just awful stuff *heavy sigh* :(

[Danielle Ni Dhighe]

They're part of the ideological apparatus of bourgeois sexism.

[goalkeeper]

I'd rather read cosmo than the socialist worker.

But seriously, I think you guys are sort of underestimating women who read this stuff (and enjoy some of it) to use their head and see through a lot of the bullshit for what it is. Stuff like saying it reinforces bourgeois cultural hegemony or whatever words you picked up from a module at undergrad assumes that the women who read this stuff are just passive receivers of whatever cosmo writers put out there.

[Flying Purple People Eater]

But seriously, I think you guys are sort of underestimating women who read this stuff (and enjoy some of it) to use their head and see through a lot of the bullshit for what it is. Stuff like saying it reinforces bourgeois cultural hegemony or whatever words you picked up from a module at undergrad assumes that the women who read this stuff are just passive receivers of whatever cosmo writers put out there.

It's not just because it's a sexist magazine. It's because it's complete and utter brainless trash. Ridiculous socialite garbage.

They are nothing but knee-jerk attacks on social differences, and utterly fucking pointless stories about someone having their child develop an addiction to Bench Cleaner or something. You can't just deny all that by dropping a few vague bundles of personal attacks about people attending an undergraduate course.

[Danielle Ni Dhighe]

Stuff like saying it reinforces bourgeois cultural hegemony or whatever words you picked up from a module at undergrad assumes that the women who read this stuff are just passive receivers of whatever cosmo writers put out there.
I'm a woman, and never went to college. I still say it's part of the ideological apparatus of bourgeois sexism.

[Quail]

I think there are two types of women's magazines which are problematic in different ways.

First, we have cheap magazines with "real life" stories in them which, to me, seem a bit like freak show type things. The stories aren't written in a way that makes you understand about the various situations the people who submit them are in. Let's take eating disorders as an example, because it's something I know about. The focus is always on stuff like the weight of the sufferer, how many times a day they binged/purged, the number of laxatives they took, shocking pictures of their lowest weight, etc. They don't focus on the things which I think are most important to understanding the mind of someone with an eating disorder and empathising with them - stuff like what might have caused it, the kind of mental processes you go through, etc. It's all just like, "Whoa, this woman starved herself and was this skinny! Look at her bones! She fasted for ages!" So not only are these stories incredibly dehumanising, but they're also pretty triggering to people who currently have eating disorders. More generally, these magazines take vulnerable women and turn them into "others" to be gawped at.

Secondly, there's stuff like Cosmo and Glamour, which I think are a little more subtle. They often contain articles which are kind of vaguely feminist, at least in a wishy-washy kind of way (a couple of times I've even seen articles in there and felt pretty surprised and impressed with the content, for women's magazines). But, at the same time they also send out a load of really terrible messages, and in many cases disguise sexist ideas as somehow feminist. For example, a lot of the sex tips and stuff (which are often hilarious) are all about pleasing men. "How to please your man" and variations on that theme is an article that appears on the front of pretty much every issue. There is an over-emphasis on pleasing other people. Likewise, there will often be an article about loving your body as it is, being more confident in yourself, etc., and then a few pages later an article about getting the "perfect bikini body" or other nonsense. So yeah this is a somewhat long-winded way of saying that these magazines pretend to be vaguely feminist while still promoting the same old bullshit sexism.

[human strike]

I think there are two types of women's magazines which are problematic in different ways.

First, we have cheap magazines with "real life" stories in them which, to me, seem a bit like freak show type things. The stories aren't written in a way that makes you understand about the various situations the people who submit them are in. Let's take eating disorders as an example, because it's something I know about. The focus is always on stuff like the weight of the sufferer, how many times a day they binged/purged, the number of laxatives they took, shocking pictures of their lowest weight, etc. They don't focus on the things which I think are most important to understanding the mind of someone with an eating disorder and empathising with them - stuff like what might have caused it, the kind of mental processes you go through, etc. It's all just like, "Whoa, this woman starved herself and was this skinny! Look at her bones! She fasted for ages!" So not only are these stories incredibly dehumanising, but they're also pretty triggering to people who currently have eating disorders. More generally, these magazines take vulnerable women and turn them into "others" to be gawped at.

Secondly, there's stuff like Cosmo and Glamour, which I think are a little more subtle. They often contain articles which are kind of vaguely feminist, at least in a wishy-washy kind of way (a couple of times I've even seen articles in there and felt pretty surprised and impressed with the content, for women's magazines). But, at the same time they also send out a load of really terrible messages, and in many cases disguise sexist ideas as somehow feminist. For example, a lot of the sex tips and stuff (which are often hilarious) are all about pleasing men. "How to please your man" and variations on that theme is an article that appears on the front of pretty much every issue. There is an over-emphasis on pleasing other people. Likewise, there will often be an article about loving your body as it is, being more confident in yourself, etc., and then a few pages later an article about getting the "perfect bikini body" or other nonsense. So yeah this is a somewhat long-winded way of saying that these magazines pretend to be vaguely feminist while still promoting the same old bullshit sexism.

At the same time, sections of the feminist movement have become like these magazines. In the United States especially, but also in the UK, a feminism probably best represented by people like Jessica Valenti has evolved that is essentially a form of consumerist lifestylism. There's the same emphasis on having good (where "good" is really a specific type of) sex, raunch, confidence building through consumerism, a sort of self-help feminism where seemingly almost anything can be feminism; shopping, pole-dancing, eating chocolate. Liberating feminism, a collective political movement against sexism, has been translated into a liberating individualist capitalism. Feminism as the latest must-have accessory.

Whilst these magazines body and slut-shame from one direction, there's a tendency, perhaps among a different type of contemporary feminist, to body and slut-shame too; we see this fairly regularly in the campaign to ban 'Lads' Mags' and page 3.