The Bloggomist: Three Times a Trend
Fashion Opinion

I’ve always had a love affair with magazines. Since I was a little girl I’ve been captivated by the thrill of a fresh glossy and all the magic entangled in it’s pages. Growing up in a fairly removed midwestern town, the selection of publications was a tight web of popular favorites and conservative titles directed at the family oriented mindset of small-town America. For someone growing up with dreams of masterfully executed design and razor sharp styling, I had to make do with what was at hand. Usually my needs were sustained between the likes of Vogue, Bazaar and Elle.
Archive Cosmo covers via Cosmopolitan.com

However sometimes three magazines a month wasn’t enough to satiate my cravings, causing an impromptu stray towards the likes of Marie Claire, Glamour or Cosmopolitan. It was in the pages of these backup publications that I first started to truly understand what it meant to be a “girl”, or at least what it meant to be a girl in the world of women’s interest publishing.

“1001 Ways to Make Him Beg”, “I Was A Teenage Streetwalker”, “Angelina Brows in Three Easy Steps”; all too popular front page headlines screaming in bold face type from across the aisles, tempting both burgeoning and matured women alike with the promises of a better life. Filled with rules, tips and strategies, these so-called women’s interest magazines have never failed to simultaneously fill us up with unneeded information and the sinking feeling that we’re doing everything wrong. From the time we’re little girls there are certain things planted in our heads that we are told will one day make us “a good wife”, “a good mother” etc. As we grow older we learn from friends, from other mothers and from wiser women the ups and downs of the female gender and how to navigate the land mine of growing older. Yet how much of it do we really need and how much is really just anxiety producing bullshit? Although I was blessed with a very forward thinking and open minded mother who instilled in me the importance of self-fulfillment and personal happiness above all else, I’ve observed that it’s a tricky world out there for girls unsteady about what their true purpose as a woman entails.

Headlines from Marie Claire’s daily blogs. Via MarieClaire.com

Contrary to popular belief (or the editors at Cosmo) sexual prowess and a loaded beauty bag are not in fact the keys to successfully evolving as a woman. While it does us all good to be knowledgeable of such affairs, women’s magazines make it appear as though these are the ONLY things troubling our minds, or the only things that should be troubling our minds. Apparently finding new ways to satisfy our man, keeping our lipstick from bleeding and test running the latest cellulite zappers are about as complicated as it gets for us. It all creates a very double sided world for girls as we are pushed to be not only self-sufficient and strong but totally vulnerable and utterly accommodating all at the same time. As an avid consumer of men’s culture as well, one glaring difference between the way men and women are approached by their respective media and advertising outlets is that men are often told of ways to boost themselves while women are told of ways to improve themselves for other people. One flip through a women’s oriented magazine is a quick lesson in convoluted self improvement.

As human beings we are on a constant quest for personal betterment, so it’s understandable that a certain amount of all of this is simply fulfilling a need. However, when directed at women what should be simple, helpful tools are instead modified into lifestyle and mindset altering “rules” designed to create the illusion that the perfect life is a mere lipstick change away. It’s a perpetual cycle of never ending math equations, a constant reminder that you can’t have A without B. The key to getting a man is shiny, luxurious hair, a successful career can be attained with the right pair of shoes and your relationship with your mother will be vastly improved if you carve out a day filled with mother/daughter Botox injections. Considering all the guides and how-tos and this-way-is-the-best-way manifestos it’s no wonder we’re all on the verge of neurosis.

It’s sad to think that after all the years women have spent working toward equality and fairness that it only takes something like a Marie Claire article about why men cheat to make it seem as though we haven’t made much progress at all. It’s thoroughly insulting that the entire scope of women’s interests has been whittled down to this sort of idiocy and the fact that so many girls spend so much money buying into the mindset is as upsetting as it is scary. It’s a nasty world of self-comparison and body image consciousness that we live in and there are a lot of people making a lot of money off of manufactured insecurities. I appreciate a good hair tip as much as the next girl, but in the scope of “women’s interest” it never is as cut and dry as that. There is always an underlying message, the feeling that not only is the perfect life out there and you must be doing something wrong because you don’t have it, but that it’s attainment is as easy as the proper application of self tanner.

The fact of the matter is that women have much more dynamic and varied interests than what is feebly portrayed by so called target publications. Is it too much to ask that the things for women by women be more intelligent and positive than the crap shoveled at us now? It isn’t even that I’m necessarily angry at the magazines themselves, after all they are giving an audience what it wants. Rather my fear lies in the fact that maybe we women have only fooled ourselves into believing in our gender-wide evolution past these ridiculous stereotypes, and the magazines simply exist as tangible evidence of such. I would like to think that as women living in one of the most free countries in the world that our requirements for happiness would be more aligned with all the possibilities we are privy to. Rather it seems we’re still stuck believing all it takes is a man with a fat bank account and the top 10 celebrity make up tricks to get happiness in the bag. Hell, it worked for Carrie Bradshaw at the end of Sex and the City, right? And what better role model could women ask for than that.

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Published on 11 December 2009 | 3 |