Not a road, but an avenue.
written by Julie R. Neidlinger 4 comments link this post
I get a magazine called Women's Health. My nephew was selling magazines. I thought such a magazine would apply, since I am a woman, and I would like to take care of my health.
This magazine is nothing more than a kind of Maxim for women with a few articles about vitamins and health tips thrown in for good measure. It is even worse than Glamour or Cosmopolitan -- it sells itself as a magazine about health when it really is about selling women some kind of lie.
Beauty tips? Filled with lists of products that are overpriced from every company imaginable, leaving me to wonder at the kind of payola going on in the background for these companies to get their $45 makeup brush featured in a magazine that purports to be about keeping women healthy and fit.
Every other issue seems to be filled with toy-related articles (toys not found in children's toy stores, let's say), whether rating or joking or suggesting them. The latest issue featured some lame article on when guys reveal secrets and what to do if your guy reveals he has herpes. The answer? Something really great like "make sure the relationship is series before sleeping with him."
Every photo of every woman is of a woman tight, taut, muscled, lean, toned, and airbrushed to beauty perfection. I commented on a friend's blog about how I enjoyed Richard Simmons' exercise tapes because he used real people of all sizes and abilities; instead of discouraging, the entire experience was encouraging. He wasn't selling perfection.
This magazine does nothing to make me feel healthy. It makes me feel pretty awful about myself, mainly. It makes me feel fat and tally up the zits on my skin. It stirs me into a panic about what I am and am not eating, and what kind of exercise I'd better try. It tells me to focus on myself and myself only. It tells me it's healthy to forever continue to improve myself to a point of obsession -- there'd be no more magazine if the need for continuous improving stopped! -- subtly suggesting I'm not OK as I am, helping me feel guilty about things out of my control by coming up with new lists and exercises and faddish over-priced exercise gear that I need to pursue for that month in order to be that mythical active, "healthy" woman.
As I flipped through the latest issue, the ad you see at the top of this post caught my eye. What a horrible message!
The road to hell may be paved with good intentions, but the road to selfishness and endless pursuit of meaningless and impossible and empty physical perfection isn't a road at all. It's an avenue. Fifth Avenue.
As long as someone can get me to focus entirely upon myself, I will be entirely unhappy and always a consumer ever needing to buy something to fix all these problems I see. Happiness doesn't sell beauty products the way unhappiness does. Focusing on others doesn't sell much product, either. The push to get us to think only of ourselves has a strong consumerist, market-driven benefit behind it. If there's room to improve, there's someone to sell it to me.
Women's Health cares little about women or about their health. It does care, however, about Fifth Avenue, and any avenue available to get me to buy something out of dissatisfaction with who I am.
Labels: health, media, product placement, women
Copyright (c) Julie R. Neidlinger 3/15/2008 07:11:00 PM
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4 Comments:
I'm missing something here. I understand your purchasing magazines from your nephew (I can't tell you how many Girl Scout cookies we've bought from our granddaughter). But why put yourself through all of that misery by actually paging through, much less reading, that magazine?
In your place I would make a direct line from the mailbox to the recycle bin. It would seem that even this would be more than such garbage deserves.
By 
Rey, at
15/3/08 20:45
One of the most popular mags at the lib. Just so you know...
By Sarah Regan Snavely, at
15/3/08 21:03
Rey: Because I'm a masochist.
Sarah: Huh. Go figure.
By Julie R. Neidlinger, at
15/3/08 22:03
Frankly, the manufactured women in those magazines aren't even attractive. Give me a woman who is satisfied to shower and brush her hair and call that good -- and isn't afraid to eat a donut. No, don't. One is enough.
By ThirstyDavid, at
16/3/08 10:07
