How To Pick Up a Woman's Magazine
Decter, Naomi
"How To Pick Up a Woman's Magazine" their selves, their husbands, their recipes. Women's magazines are the Scripture of fulfillment: Their creed is happiness; their...
...We are still more likely than men to abandon academia for suburbia...
...Right is just around the corner, if only we have the patience to wait for him...
...Both the Ladies' Home Journal and McCall's, for example, have instituted regular features on the working womanMcCall's offers $1,000 for "stories that reflect the special problems, conflicts, and opportunities that confront women who have jobs outside their homes...
...One might, in fact, conclude that most women who work do so out of financial necessity—or for some other private purpose...
...This unabashed preoccupation with sexual mechanics is accompanied by what can only be termed liberal views on pre- and extramarital sex...
...Almost without exception, this literature is romantic fiction in its purest form...
...At the same time, marital infidelity, which used to be grounds for divorce—or at least the threat of it—no longer seems to merit even anger...
...In fact, quite the opposite is true...
...Cramped for space...
...Neither the slow pace of social change nor the vagaries of science, however, have been allowed by sympathetic interpreters of cultural trends to obscure the essential psychological victory of the women's liberation movement...
...Naomi Decter How To Pick Up a Woman's Magazine Their bodies, their selves, their husbands, their recipes...
...All the evidence there suggests that women are still more interested in knowing how to get married than in how to get into Congress, in how to cure diaper rash than in how to make a killing on the stock market...
...In Friedan's scenario, women readers in the fifties were helpless victims, innocents worked upon by a campaign of oppression...
...As sex has become more and more an issue for public discussion and clinical study, however, it has moved out of the fiction pages and into the feature pages...
...Theodore Rubin sees the trauma of discovered infidelity as a device for greater self-awareness, which "often can help both partners achieve a deeper relationship...
...Put up a shelf above the kitchen sink and your basement two-bedroom can be a luxury penthouse...
...Pretty Good, Considering...
...Right—and that when we do find him he may be only Mr...
...The fact is, however, that this new woman striking the fear of God into the hearts of the Harvard Law School and the Reader's Digest is simply not to be found in the pages of Cosmo, Redbook, McCall's, or the Ladies' Home Journal...
...bells ring and birds twitter...
...Cosmopolitan came forth with advice to those unencumbered by fetus: "Shape Up for Super Sex" advised, among other things, stretching "those ever-important hips" to avoid embarrassing muscle spasms...
...We have, so they tell us, finally had our consciousness raised...
...While we may not have gotten everything we deserve, at least now we know we deserve everything we can get...
...and that loving and being loved by him (and, probably, his children) will be our central concern and chief satisfaction...
...We know only too well that it takes a lot more than a trip to the vegetable market to find Mr...
...are on the increase...
...It is awfully nice, though, to hear otherwise every so often...
...Practical and imaginative solutions to women's problems are a specialty of the magazines...
...The trend it mirrors, however, began long before Betty Friedan discovered the conspiracy to keep women in pink ribbons...
...But everyone keeps telling me how pretty I am, so I can't be one...
...That the case is weighted very heavily on the husband's side (staying, he stands to lose a chance for more interesting and rewarding work...
...There is, to be sure, a certain amount of lip service paid to the notion that women seek from the world exactly what men seek from it, and that they live in the world exactly as men do...
...We women—housewives and newscasters, mothers and firefighters alike—still seek, and find, our ultimate satisfaction in love and marriage...
...Evidence of such an ideological battle does not, to put it mildly, abound in the traditional magazines...
...All the penthouses and Stroganoff in the world are meaningless without a passionate and compassionate man to share them...
...Even puzzled skeptics, who pore over mental lists searching in vain for a female acquaintance who might be included in the ranks of the liberated, begin to mistrust the evidence of their own senses in the face of the public onslaught...
...they might inquire, "Have no fear...
...In McCall's, Marcia Lasswell and Norman Lobsenz laud those who "instead of concentrating on their own feelings of pain...try to find out Why did this happen?' " The frank and casual treatment of sex attests to the sensitivity of today's women's magazines—and of their readers—to the barometer of cultural fashion...
...The importance of love to the good life is expressed not only in the practical instruction of the magazines, but also in the literature that fills their back pages...
...Of course, we're a long way from the sexlessness wished on us by some of our more militant sisters...
...One would expect that this change in the criteria of fulfillment would be registered in the women's magazines—if nowhere else...
...Without explicit references, and primarily within the fiction pages, it was made clear that happily married couples enjoyed passionate and satisfying sexual relations...
...Sex was by no means taboo in the magazines twenty years ago...
...There, along with instructive hints on surviving those first devastating months of motherhood and giving new zest to that tired old meatloaf recipe, we now find helpful tidbits from sex counsellors...
...throw a party and invite everyone you know...
...And it would be foolish to accept Mrs...
...Not a single hint on pushing a bill through the legislature, nor a single clue as to replacing a dead spark plug, is to be found...
...A case in point is the recent Ladies' Home Journal story about a family faced with a move from the west to the east coast...
...Right in the vegetable market...
...Cultural fashion is as important to them as cosmetic fashion, and there have unquestionably been adjustments made to keep up with developments in both...
...This otherwise charming tale of a little girl and her imaginary playmates is interrupted every few paragraphs by an utterly gratuitous aunt, the sole purpose of whose existence —in life as well as in the story—seems to be to intone mournfully, "I always wanted to be a nurse...
...The sets and props have been modified somewhat, but the drama remains the same...
...we are clearly not intended to devour our hamburger Stroganoff in the solitary splendor of our basement penthouse...
...But women are supposed to have changed...
...after a serious quarrel, the couple is reunited to live happily ever after...
...All this in the interest of helping others like them to enjoy "what can be the most exciting and tenderest time in any couple's sexual life...
...While the deeper questions of woman's identity are glossed over lightly, the increase in the number of women at work has clearly had some effect on editorial policy...
...A new woman, it is asserted, has emerged from the struggle for equality...
...Friedan's patronizing view that those of us who read the traditional magazines are their victims—led blindly, like so many sheep, into the trap set for us by a malevolent society...
...advice from professionals—doctors, decorators, and beauticians, among others—is a staple...
...Don't despair...
...That the motivating conflict of the plot is the wife's refusal to pick up and move in the interests of her husband's career bespeaks somedegree of concern with current "women's issues...
...They, she claimed, were among the chief propagators of the "feminine mystique...
...The American Spectator August/ September 1978 19...
...Nowhere, however, is the women's magazines' attention to social trends more strikingly demonstrated than in their new, "modern" attitude toward sex...
...Sexual intercourse is no longer confined largely to the conjugal bed, although not even Cosmopolitan, the most daring of the magazines, goes so far as to condone loveless sex...
...The Ladies' Home Journal's Dr...
...Try a little powder blue in the corners of the eyes...
...No date for Saturday night...
...A lonely woman comes across Mr...
...This is not to say that these journals alone have remained unaffected by the dicta of our cultural jet set...
...Needless to say, such "sex: how to do it and like it" features entail a degree of explicitness foreign to the magazines of yesteryear...
...If, indeed, any revolution has occurred in women's understanding of their needs from the world, it remains unacknowledged by the magazines that cater to them...
...That we choose to hear it is amply demonstrated by the fate of several new magazines that ignored our preference: One folded rather quickly, another has gone bankrupt, yet a third never made it past the preliminary test-marketing...
...with a stitch here and a can of mushroom soup there, Rayon can look like silk, hamburger can taste like beef Stroganoff...
...A further instance of the obligatory obeisance to women's lib is to be found in the McCall's story of a child acquiring a talent for generosity...
...Read the newspaper, watch television, and there we are: eager to step out of the delivery room and into the boardroom, longing to give up PTA work for ERA work, itching to hop off the sexual pedestal and into bed...
...There is absolutely no indication that women in the marketplace constitute the vanguard of a revolution...
...Coping with the small difficulties of daily life is, of course, essential to the pursuit of fulfillment...
...The course of true love, which might once have been disrupted by a cruel or careless word, may nowadays be interfered with by a woman's qualms about relinquishing her selfhood...
...No one could ever accuse them of being behind the times...
...Unattractive...
...We have learned at last that to think of happiness as contingent upon anyone outside ourself is a denial of our own "personhood," and thus certain to bring emptiness and despair...
...Some scientists even seem—to their horror—to have discovered in us a "chemical imbalance" that interferes with our aspiration to absolute undifferentiated equality with men...
...In fact we've even fallen short of more modest goals sought by the less extreme...
...their lesson, that its attainment is a matter of the right recipe...
...The variations are endless, but the theme is unchanging: that Mr...
...It is quite taken for granted by the women's magazines that our Rayons are turned to silk not for our own well-being alone...
...We are still treated as high-risk ventures by employers and creditors...
...Conspicuously absent, however, are the sorts of features that might be seen as practical guidelines for the liberated woman...
...This notion is relegated, as was sex two decades ago, to the fiction pages...
...18 The American Spectator August/September 1978 it was, simply, taken for granted...
...In a remarkable display of un-self-consciousness, several young couples discussed the inhibitions imposed on their sex lives by pregnancy, and the delights of "experimenting with different non-vaginal methods" during which one couple "found a mutual masturbation technique that accomplished something of what [we) were after...
...We are no longer, it seems, dupes of the myth that true happiness is to be found in the Naomi Decter is a researcher at Newsweek.arms of a man, in the bosom of a family...
...We still constitute only a tiny percentage of the upper echelons in business, politics, and the professions in general...
...A recent Redbook offering, for example, promised "Plain Talk About Sex and Pregnancy," and very plain talk it was...
...Only the extravagantly fanciful among us actually believe that chopped chuck can be anything other than what it is...
...The rest of us are quite aware that blue eyeshadow does not a Sophia Loren make...
...Right survives some great tragedy with his loving and steadfast support...
...It was this theme that brought down the wrath of Betty Friedan upon the women's magazines fifteen years ago...
...The so-called revolution in sexual attitude that has led to the scientific approach was not perpetrated upon us by the Sisters and bears no relation to the much-touted struggle for political, economic, and psychological independence...
...But it is hardly the key ingredient in the recipe for happiness...
...Energy and consumerism, for example, are all the rage nowadays, and articles like "How Young Couples Can Save Energy" and "Is Your Doctor Overcharging You...
...moving, she would give up only her cherished lemon tree and the lovely California climate), and that his wife eventually "comes to her senses" and gives in, is an indication of the value accorded to those issues...
...They, for sinister and unexplained reasons of their own, helped create the image of woman as one who finds fulfillment not within herself, or even in the world outside, but within the confines of her own home, as nothing more than her husband's adjunct...
...Anyone who gets his sociology from the mass news media will have reached the inescapable conclusion that women simply are not going to put up with it anymore...
...The others now devote a certain amount of space, that would once have been the exclusive preserve of movie stars, to women pursuing less glamorous callings...
...There is even an occasional recipe for "interesting lunches to take to work...
...That we choose Redbook over WomenSports is primarily, however, proof that things in the world of women are pretty much as usual...
...Or, a woman who has found Mr...
...Strapped for cash...
...Indeed, the formulae for self-improvement are simply weapons in the struggle to find or to keep love...
...The teaching of magazines like -Cosmopolitan, Redbook, McCall's, and the Ladies' Home Journal is and always has been—that life's miseries, large and small, can be overcome through practicality, perseverance, and faith...
Vol. 11 • August 1978 • No. 9
