Cosmo Whirl
By Marni Soupcoff
It's not exactly a revelation that women's magazines tend to be less than scintillating forms of literature. They're packed with fluffy articles about peeling off the pounds and purchasing your way to happiness through designer duds. Even a quick gander at the current issues on the stands confirms the stereotype.
The latest contribution of Marie Claire to the oeuvre: "Hair cuts to make you look thinner."
April's Cosmo, meanwhile, boasts the magazine's usual parade of explicitly sexual pieces ("Inside his dirty mind" and "Make sex hotter"), but also offers up the intriguing and subtle "I was abducted and stuffed in a trunk."
The cover of the latest Elle gives the illusion of some substance by promising an interview with Tucker Carlson. But any hope of weighty commentary is quickly shattered if you turn to the interview itself, which proves to be an embarrassing string of stupid questions, like "Are liberal or conservative women better in bed?" and "Do women ever get hot at the sight of that bowtie?"
Clearly, the usual digs at women's magazines for being shallow and sex-obsessed, not to mention making women feel inadequate (and fat), continue to have some merit.
Why, then, the controversy over former Ladies Home Journal editor Myrna Blyth's new book Spin Sisters: How the Women of the Media Sell Unhappiness and Liberalism to the Women of America?
Since the book came out in early March, everyone from fashion mag editors (Cosmo editor-in-chief Kate White called the book "truly pathetic" and "boring," while Glamour editor Cindi Lieve termed it "an act of arson") to the Columbia Journalism Review has savaged Blyth's work.
Is it the suggestion that women's magazines are creating scared and dissatisfied women that is upsetting the critics?
Or could it be the liberalism part of the book that is getting everyone in a flap?
Best guest is the former. With Sisters, Blyth has dared to point out the liberal messages inherent (and sometimes explicit) in so many women's magazines and espoused by so many female media types. She has articulated the way in which women's media is run by an elite group of very rich, liberal, celebrity-worshipping females whose values have little in common with those of the majority of real women. And for this, the media have come rather viciously after Blyth.
This is unfortunate given the truth of her message.
Women's magazines do lean heavily to the left without having the guts to admit that this is their perspective. They are frequently peppered with politically leftward pieces (whether they be pro-abortion or anti-Bush) written in a tone that implies that the author speaks for all women (who surely must agree simply by virtue of their possessing two X chromosomes). The women's glossies are yet another sad example of an unspoken liberal media bias, and Blyth has done a service in pointing it out. It's about time somebody mentioned this fashionably dressed elephant in the room.
On the other hand, believing that women are so stupid as to be duped into swallowing every piece of garbage they read in Vogue is giving the female members of the race way too little credit. Intelligent individualist women have the fortitude to pick up a fluff-filled women's mag with a "think-piece" on how Bush is an evil man out to kill Iraqi babies and see it for what it is without rushing out to register as a Democrat.
I have faith that most women can form their own views without being overly swayed by the political opinions they read in the same magazines that equate flat tummies and great hair days with success. And those women who can't do so are surely more to blame than the magazines or female media celebrities who sway them. I mean, most females have the good sense to realize that just because Barbara Walters delivers a great "If you were a hatha yoga position, which hatha yoga position would you be?" line doesn't mean she knows what she's talking about when it comes to foreign policy or defense. At least, I'd like to think they do.
That's why I can't get myself quite as alarmed or exercised as Blyth seems to be about the havoc the spin sisters are wreaking. Nonetheless she has done a brave and useful thing by pointing it out.
Marni Soupcoff's column appears on Monday at TAEmag.com.
