... and ain't i a woman?: Still the same formula
There's nothing like being away for a year to make you see familiar things with fresh eyes.
After a year in Eastern Europe, where advertising is only now being retrieved and dusted off after languishing for 40 years in history's wastepaper basket, the sensory bombardment of capitalism in full swing (albeit a downward swing) is taking a little getting used to.
In Eastern Europe, the objectification of women is still new and crude. Pornography is being imported, created and distributed for its own sake, not in order to sell other products. The sort of stuff that might be kept under newsagents' counters here is proudly displayed in the streets by Prague's fledgling, freedom-loving entrepreneurs.
It was very noticeable and very offensive. But it was still restricted to isolated pockets: the stalls themselves, the walls of the boys' corridors in the student colleges.
Here, the objectification of women is so all-pervasive that we just accept it as a normal backdrop for our lives. Everywhere we look, the perfect features of glossy young female models look back at us.
Unlike the pornography on the streets of Prague, much of this is designed to appeal to women, inviting them to fantasise about being that beautiful, that confident, that well dressed, that slim ... and then offering something they can buy to help them get there.
The banks of faces smiling out from behind wire-mesh stands at newsagencies attest to the variety of choices available to women who want to follow the fantasy trail to its final conclusion: the world of the women's magazine.
Partly in the interests of research, and partly because I am as capable of being sucked in as the next person (especially seeing it's been a year since my last "hit" of this kind of mass culture), I bought a copy of the latest Cosmopolitan and caught up on this sophisticated little universe of market and ideology.
The formula begun by Helen Gurley Brown in the US in 1962 — daring enough to be exciting, feminist enough to be modern without seeming nasty, and obsessed with love and looks enough to sell mountains of cosmetics and generate pages of agony columns — appears to be entering its 28th year entirely intact.
All the contradictions inherent such a formula are manifest in the April issue:
A very good and rather angry piece on pap smears does not simply encourage women to have them regularly, but warns that they are sometimes botched, and suggests questions women can ask to ensure proper treatment from their doctors. No shades of a passive "doctor knows best" here. But then there's this bit of reactionary nonsense in an article about falling in love: "Back in prehistoric times, the 'selfish gene' programmed woman to fall for a tall, strong man who'd excel as hunter and provider. He, in turn, desired a fertile breeding mate. Some echo of that primitive pattern may still resonate — most women prefer men 10 to 15 cm taller than themselves ..."
Perhaps the most refreshing bit came right at the end, in the letters column: a new generation of readers is now hip to what's going on. Two wrote to complain about the context of an article on ageism and sexism. The article itself was very good, they said, but didn't the magazine reinforce and perpetuate the very myths (of youth and beauty) it was criticising?
"Your models are generally in their teens and early 20s", wrote one, "and yet your male calendar in the January issue displayed half the male models in their mid- to late-30s."
By Tracy Sorensen