Maegan Carberry Carberry is a third-year
political science and English student. You can e-mail her at
[email protected].
Click Here for more articles by Maegan Carberry
Perhaps in this age of personal cultivation, women’s
fashion magazines can be called the Bible of female self-help
seekers everywhere. Well, almost. Not everything in the magazine is
there to keep you at your best.
Without ads, there are no magazines. Publishers capitalize off
of making you feel inadequate with their gorgeous models and then
provide you with 200-plus pages of products that can help you rise
above your own ugliness to be a hip and attractive woman of the
world. The magazine makes money, the products sell and women
everywhere look better. Supposedly. But do they feel better?
There’s something deeply contradicting in reading a story
about a woman who has survived an eating disorder and negative body
image only to flip the page and see an ad for jeans that an average
person couldn’t fit half a leg into. It’s not even the
ads alone projecting this image ““ the magazine’s own
choice of a cover model and a feature on fab abs for summer work
just as nicely at making you feel like crawling back under the
covers of your bed.
This is sad because magazines have so many good things to say.
When you’re a teenager and you don’t know how to kiss a
boy and are certainly not about to ask mom or dad, a magazine can
help. When you are looking for a cute haircut, or the latest trends
in fashion, there is no better hour wasted than one curled up on
the couch with a good ‘zine and some snacks. It’s just
frustrating to have to constantly remind yourself that you can fit
into that awesome outfit and look good without having to flip to
page 71 and read the seven-day meal plan that leads to thinner
thighs.
Magazines would benefit from a change in focus. Some have made
steps in the right direction by including articles on how to excel
in the workplace or, for the younger readers, how to plan for
college. Features like this are very helpful for women because they
are substantive and encouraging.
Perhaps seeing more articles about work, assertiveness,
goal-setting and success stories would help women think about
something other than the usual sex, men, fashion and weight loss
that calls out to you from the check-out lines at the grocery
store. Maybe if these were the headlines in super-font, extra-bold
type on the cover they would seem like a priority.
As women get older, there are more magazines of a positive
nature available to women such as Ladies Home Journal, O,
McCall’s and Good Housekeeping. What I’m more concerned
with are the magazines like Teen, YM, Seventeen and Teen People
that graduate frustrated young girls into frustrated adult women
reading Mademoiselle, Marie Claire, Vogue, Shape and Cosmo. Those
magazines hook women in at a young age and teach them how to be in
style at a time when image is so important.
 Illustration by ERICA PINTO/Daily Bruin
Amidst the folds of advertising, these magazines are shaping so
much of how many girls see themselves fitting in. Some girls are
able to ignore the messages that start insecurities, but too many
are not.
I work with high school-age girls and they are constantly
telling me about how they have many friends with eating disorders
or who are on diets. There are enough things to be confused about
in your teen years, you don’t need to go around worrying
about the size of your butt or a little bit of stomach flab.
Many avenues are open for exploration when redirecting the focus
of magazines. Some have tried to do it through sports. Conde-Naste
has published a female form of Sports Illustrated where women
athletes are featured as strong role models. This is a good start,
even though it is limited in a more athletically focused audience.
Yet I still think that a magazine with a broader readership is
necessary.
I think one of the best ways to go about creating that is to
involve more girls in the process. Hiring them as feature writers,
using them as models (for both cover and inside stories) and
listening to their ideas will result in something constructive that
is still “cool” enough for them to want to read. You
can still have all the columns about boys, fashion and even weight
loss, but these issues would just be presented differently.
And, instead of flipping the page to find a contradictory image,
you’d see a girl who is on the staff of the magazine, or
maybe even someone from your high school. It would be by the girls,
about them and for them.
This same media makeover also applies to women’s
magazines. Adults also need positive reinforcement and deserve a
shift in the focus of their reading. The idea of using real people
as cover models is still alive in the adult realm. You could seek
out women of different organizations and associations, putting
women from other countries, of different heritage and of different
ages throughout the magazine.
Women are so interesting, there is no reason to limit who we
learn about to celebrities or women with sexually appealing
figures.
All of these features would be reinforced by advertisements. I
know of several companies who have stopped using models in their
publicity campaigns. Wal-Mart catalogues only display photos of
company employees or their relatives. Several fashion designers are
using their own people to model clothes.
A new age of advertising is dawning because people are sick of
being told how to look and what to buy. We are more complicated
than that. If we demand something different, we just might get
it.
What better place to start encouraging women to look and feel
normal than in magazines? There is something so inherently female
in propping yourself up in bed with a bowl of popcorn, painting
your toe nails red and reading the latest issue of your favorite
magazine. How great would it be if reading it wasn’t always
underlined with the feeling that you have to start running again
tomorrow? Tomorrow you’ll do those sit-ups on page 23.
But, you don’t have to feel guilty. You haven’t done
anything wrong. The people who have are the ones who won’t
stop bombarding us with contradictory images and products in hopes
that we’ll feel insecure. If we’re going to celebrate
women we should find some more representative models and loose the
damaging ads in favor of a real magazine … with real women.