This Product Is Harmful To Your Health

Most of us are familiar with the mandate of women’s magazines to build us up on one page and tear us down on the next through the cult of the body, the aspirational advertorializing of products and celebrity, and the usage of stereotyped gender roles. While men’s magazines may be culpable of these offenses to some degree, they are fundamentally different. They are based on interest and experience and doing rather than shopping and adorning and being and are defined less by guilt, caution, and anxiety than by an enthusiasm for subjects like music, biking, design, naked women, business, or literature.

Of course, it is not accurate to say magazines like Rolling Stone, Wallpaper, Bicycling, Juxtapoz, Foreign Affairs, Discover, or Business Week are for men. Women read them too. But most media is intended for a white male audience unless it pronounces otherwise. Why do women need a such large airless body of literature devoted to consuming femininity? Why aren’t parallel glossies for men successful (Men’s Vogue, anyone?)

Unfortunately, this is duplicated for children’s and teen magazines and the makeup and dieting frenzy has been filtered down to children and teens, changing bodies and minds that need play and flexibility more than they need withholding and narrowness. In a public library, the available magazines for young people include CosmoGIRL, Teen Vogue, Lucky, Girls’ Life, Cheerleader, Boys’ Life, Spin, Hype Hair, and various gaming mags. This reading material is a small part of the heterosexist, classist, gendered climate in which kids are reared. Early on, children learn that the life of boys is devoted to fun while girls require regimens and advice, paeans to perfection. Aside from New Moon, I see no alternatives to the monoculture that prescribes The Way to Be for Girls and Boys.

Where are the alternatives? Where is the young adult Bitch, Believer, Adbusters, Arthur, Maximum Rock’n'Roll, Venus Zine, Utne Reader? Why aren’t these magazines in YA rooms? Sure, they have their faults, but they attempt to be sources of knowledge and criticism and enlightenment, whereas more mainstream magazines are devoted to checklists and manuals and rules. Media consolidation is locking us out of alternative choices. There is no more Punk Planet or Stay Free or Sassy or Black Girl. We are depending on conglomerates to teach us about ourselves and our culture.

If we decide to buy these titles for children and teens, we should at least provide them with alternatives. If we can’t buy indie magazines, we should encourage kids to make their own zines in the absence of counterculture print material and check out others on the Web

P.S. What do you think about Adbusters’ proposed CosmoGIRL ads?