Cosmonauts

...An even more standard feature is stress which, though it exists, is "wildly oversold...

...Similar hyperbole elevates everyday aggravations and minor inconveniences to the level of gross injustices and extreme oppression...

...Vogue, W, Bazaar, Elle, Glamour, In Style, Marie Claire, JUNE 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 61 BOOKS IN REVIEW Cosmopolitan, Allure, Self Shape, Fitness—the list is so legion I've lost count...

...And after months or even years of Saturdays, when are we getting married...

...Magazines like Cosmopolitan and Glamour "constantly send the message that narcissism is an advanced evolutionary stage of female liberation...

...Will he call after Saturday...

...Will he call to ask me out on Saturday...

...So when Myrna Blyth's Spin Sisters: How the Women of the Media Sell Unhappiness and Liberalism to the Women of America arrived, I was intrigued—and skeptical...

...Whether the failure to tell this story contributed to victim feminism—or whether the dogma of victim feminism dictated the downplaying of women's gains—the result is the same...

...The book was "born out of anger," according to editor Cathi Hanauer, even though she muses that she has "two healthy children, a nice home, an interesting job...what could I be mad at...

...Yet I was mad...

...By "selling women this notion that somehow ordinary life—having kids, working...even chaperoning the junior high sleepover—is so damn difficult," women's media do their readers and viewers a disservice by encouraging "them to think if they are not actively `nurturing themselves,' they are somehow failing...

...The sex victims vs...

...Danger Signals You Might Miss" (June 1997...

...In one of the funnier passages of Blyth's book, she contrasts one single issue of Cosmopolitan's four cover lines promising to teach readers how to "Read His Dirty Mind," discover "What His Favorite Mattress Move Reveals about His Feelings," learn "40 Secrets of Women Who Are Great in the Sack," and more in the same vein, with the same issue's "special Cosmo Report on 'The Surprising Thing That Can Make You a Target for Rape...

...The backlog gets the better of my best efforts to keep up: Even exercising 40 minutes a day I'm still reading about last fall's fashions long after spring has come and gone...

...I would have also liked to hear more from Blyth on how such magazines sell unhappiness, not explicitly, but inevitably, in their relentless promotion of promiscuity...

...Pointing out that Americans have actually gained an hour of leisure time since 1965, according to a definitive University of Maryland study, Blyth says we only feel as if we are more pressed because (a) increased leisure time is spent in front of the television and (b) "we are told over and over again that...our lack of free time explains the increased levels of stress we are all assumed to feel," and so "we believe only what we have been taught to believe...

...To illustrate, Blyth turns to The Bitch in the House, a collection of personal essays by "women writers and editors who share an amazing ability to BOOKS IN REVIEW whine endlessly about the state of their generally upscale, interesting lives...

...Not that I questioned the author's bona fides or the basic accuracy of her premise: As the longtime editor-in-chief of Ladies' Home Journal and a "media queen" in her own right, Blyth provides an honest, rare, and frequently funny look at the insular world of "the female media elite...

...She points out, for example, how Glamour has run some variation on the theme of male stalkers every couple of years: "Stalked, Why No Woman Is Safe...

...If anything, Blyth's own observation that women's "political opinions and attitudes about social issues are far more diverse than the media portrays" proves that, while the media may be selling liberalism, many of us just aren't buying...

...Baloney—and far more dangerous to your health than the cold cut variety...

...August 1992), "He's Going to Kill Me...

...By overplaying stress, by pandering to self-pity, by reflexively depicting women as victims, Blyth argues, "the sheer volume of these self-defeating messages" has unhealthy consequences, for women as individuals, as well as for the American polity...

...Me, me, me means you're finally free, free, free...

...She's right, they aren't, and I would be eager to hear Blyth's take on these issues from her vantage as a veteran editor...

...While part of this interest is professional (all of these magazines contain diet and fitness news relevant to nutrition education), the truth is I just find the mix of beauty, materialism, and unrepentant girlishness atavistically satisfying and effortlessly absorbing...

...Though the editors and producers of women's media hardly have a monopoly when it comes to exaggerating risks and sensationalizing stories to grab their readers' and viewers' attention, Blyth points out how they prey on women's particular insecurities...

...From burning bras to push-up bras: either way, you've come a long way, baby...

...Her insider's account of her fellow media mavens' sneering contempt for conservatives, reflexive scorn for Republicans, and slavish devotion to the left-wing celebrities and female politicians makes for entertaining and infuriating reading...

...Are we getting married...

...Rather than being congratulated on strides made in health, education, and income, women's media in general and magazines in particular constantly warn women that they are on the verge of being dragged back into the political stone age by Paleolithic politicians, or as one Glamour article on the Supreme Court asked ominously: "Are You One Robe Away from Losing a Century's Worth of Civil Rights...

...These decidedly `nonliberated' questions are never addressed directly in women's magazines today...

...glossy images of the gloriously thin Giselle Bundchen before me, beckoning like an alluring yet elusive Holy Grail...

...Or at least distracting—enough, in any case, to keep my mind off the painful buildup of lactic acid in my quadriceps as I keep climbing...

...B LYTH BLAMES MEDIA aimed at younger women in particular for "promot [ing] a self-centered lifestyle as the key to becoming a fulfilled and happy woman...

...Finally, I was disappointed to see the author stumble into the much-traveled and sadly misguided path of fat acceptance whose ultimate destination is despair, disease, and early death...

...Ironically, what originally inspired her to enter the women's magazine world was the opportunity to "tell the best and most interesting story of our time—the improvement in the lives of women—to those who were benefiting from these enormous gains...

...Totally forgotten or ignored" in the propagandizing of promiscuity, observes Blyth, are all the traditional concerns women have always had about men...

...As she elaborates, unhappiness comes in many fashionable hues: fear, 62 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 2004 stress, self-pity, unrealistic expectations with regard to physical appearance, and, most pervasively, the idea that "because we are women, we remain victims in our private lives, at work, in society as a whole...

...In a chapter entitled Jennifer Grossman is director of the Dole Nutrition Institute...

...Blyth's guess: "Maybe reading Cosmo...

...Is Anybody Listening...

...sex vultures contradiction is interesting, yet I think ultimately less relevant to women than a more glaring omission to which she makes only passing reference...

...So obvious and ham-fisted is the bias in women's media that I'd always assumed that most readers and viewers compensate unconsciously, flipping the page or turning the channel...

...Articles encourage young women to mimic men sexually, as if being predatory is the most important step in their personal liberation...

...She points out the schizophrenia inherent in running scare-stories of women as sexual victims of omnipresent male predators next to articles that "encourage young women to mimic men sexually, as if being predatory is the most important step in their personal liberation...

...Martin's, 342 pages, $24.95) Reviewed by Jennifer Grossman T HOME I HAVE A STACK of glossies that at times grows so mountainous, that scaling it might 1 rovide as good a workout as the stair-master next to which it sits...

...The reason is that I'm a compulsive subscriber to women's magazines...

...While the question of media bias has been amply mined in Ann Coulter's Slander, Bernie Goldberg's Bias, and most recently John Stossel's excellent Give Me a Break, Blyth makes a more original, and though more subtle I think far more significant, argument for how "the women of the media sell unhappiness...

...I would have liked to know whether Blythbelieves feminism has been hijacked or simply reached the decadence at the end of its dialectic...

...The dramatization of life's little annoyances—epitomized by a recent line in Good Housekeeping, "just making it to midnight without a disaster is an accomplishment"—is more than a harmless pity-party wedged in between recipes and make-up tips, says Blyth...

...September 1994), and "Could He Be a Stalker...

...It's hard to believe that women voters would be swayed by which candidate Glamour endorses...

...Blyth admits she is "partly to blame" for encouraging this culture of petulance by "creating the negative messages of victimization and unhappiness that bombard women today...

...It's a distortion that, once internalized, breeds entitlement, resentment, and the debilitating belief that our lives are at the mercy of forces beyond our control...

...JUNE 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 63 BOOKS IN REVIEW "The Feminine Physique," Blyth echoes the hoary arguments first made by Susie Orback in her 1978 Fat Is a Feminist Issue: Women are oppressed by unrealistic media images into hating their bodies when in fact they have little control over how much they weigh...