Beyond irony

Why do women’s magazines make their readers miserable? Last week, Women in Journalism highlighted how the websites of magazines aimed at girls as young as 10 were using “lads’ mags tactics” by encouraging readers to upload photos of themselves in order to rate their own and others bodies.

The campaign group pointed to Bliss magazine, whose website ran a feature encouraging teenagers to rate their own thighs, legs and breasts with the options “happy”, “hate ‘em” and “ewwww”.

The tactic is nothing new. It’s been 17 years since Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth convinced us that the cosmetics industry’s relationship with women’s magazines was symbiotic. The magazines hack away at their readers’ self-confidence in order to create a market for the “solutions” – the products their advertisers sell. Most women's magazine readers know this and accept it for the ludicrous exchange that it is, but such sophistication is a lot to ask of 10 year-olds.

What is new is the casual acceptance of body rating, among both readers and editorial staff. A whole generation of young journalists working on Bliss and its clones presumably regard such features as acceptable. And why wouldn’t they, given that they have grown up with lads’ mag “irony” and a belief that feminism is not of use to them.

Words fail

Kate Nash’s Foundations is an irksome song, not only because of its faux-naive, chipper delivery, but also because despite being heavy on lyrics, it has absolutely nothing to say.

Nash is not afraid to use plenty of words to describe a fraught and possibly violent relationship. We learn how her boyfriend calls her a “bitch” in front of friends; how he gets “aggressive” and makes her “scared” when she winds him up; how she prays she’s not stuck with him. We also get bafflingly useless kitchen-sink detail about trainers, sick and the central heating (clunkily, the promotional video even opens on a shot of a sink). But what we don’t get – and what the song is crying out for – is an explanation of why she stays with him.

All we get is Nash whimpering: “And I know that I should let go,
but I can't”. Why not? If you’re scared, or broke, or dependent on him in some other way, then fine, just tell us. Even if you’re unable to explain why, tell us that so we can listen and learn. But for crying out loud, articulate something.

This feeble-mindedness bothers me not because I care about what happens to the dismal couple in the song. It would be easy enough to claim that none of this matters, but the song’s failings are important because Nash owes her audience – mostly awe-struck young women – a more articulate explanation for why she “can’t” flee a life of disappointment. She owes us because she's chosen a violent relationship as her subject matter. Without it, she lets her audience down, expecially young women with aggressive boyfriends.

Knocked back

The makers of Knocked Up must be surprised to find themselves accused of misogyny.

The film, a gentle slacker rom-com movie by Judd Apatow, began its third week at the top of the UK box office last week. Its premise - an accidental pregnancy turning out all right in the end despite the odds - is confounding liberals and feminists - and for all the wrong reasons.

Commentators got themselves caught up in dissecting the film’s stance on abortion. Libby Brooks described it as “the longest pro-life propaganda movie ever to make it into the mainstream”. Which, the film’s makers might argue, is a stretch given that the word “abortion” doesn’t even feature in the dialogue. But its detractors believe hapless heroine Alison (icy beauty, poised, ambitious, successful) should have got rid and focused on her fledgling television journalism career - arguably the most sensible option for Alison, but a turgid plot. Instead Knocked Up sees Alison choose to keep her baby and commit to an uncertain future with a fat and unreliable former dope head.

But Knocked Up’s most serious problem is not that it balks at tackling the abortion issue head-on; it is that it fails to challenge Alison’s employers’ lackadaisical approach to the rights of their pregnant employees.

After deciding to go ahead with her pregnancy, Alison is so terrified of being fired by the E! Entertainment television channel that she conceals her pregnancy for months. She tries, but she can’t find the courage to tell her bosses she is pregnant, so she makes the crazy decision not to tell them at all. She knows she has employment rights in theory, but she also suspects her employers will show no regard for her rights. Alison is under such pressure that she believes it preferable to procrastinate than assert her rights, because she knows her livelihood is precarious.

When they eventually notice Alison’s pregnancy, her employers magnanimously decide to keep her on, but not before they’ve lectured her on “lying”. Her pregnancy is accommodated, as she is assigned to interview pregnant celebrities, but we have the sense that – had that role not been found for her – she would have been out on her ear.

At the heart of all this is a disturbingly casual acceptance of the ideas that pregnancy means “fired”, and that a pregnant employee is still, after all this time and legislation, at the mercy of individual bosses’ prejudices. It’s not the job of Knocked Up to manipulate its plot to fix this – the film simply and very gently reflects workplace reality for a generation of young women like Alison.

Tube strike

Some believe wholesome role models are all it takes to correct errant teenagers of the lower orders. Suitable paragons, the theory goes, should be drawn from the professions to kick down limited horizons.

But even as they propose it, this theory’s supporters must know the idea is doomed, because young adults choose their own heroes and heroines, usually selecting figures of dubious morality.

As an insecure teen living in North Wales in the early 1980s, my heroine, and that of all my friends, was Paula Yates. Paula presented the breathtakingly hip Channel 4 television music show, The Tube, a riot of colour and excitement at the end of a bleak, steely week. Thrillingly, she came from our home town. She had even, some 15 years before me, slogged through the teeth-grinding boredom of life at our comprehensive school, but that wasn’t why we admired her so much.

Paula was fabulously stylish, articulate and funny, but what blew us away - and what made her a first on British television - was her unabashed confidence with men. Irresistibly, the pop star-men she interviewed each week were not repulsed by this confident woman, as I had been led to believe they would be, but the opposite – they loved her brio.

This was something my 14-year-old self – and thousands of girls like me - had never seen any woman do before. Even more impressively, Paula pulled this off without the usual advantages of beauty, or even straightforward prettiness. Her looks, like mine, were just okay - but it didn’t matter. Paula had confidence.

But as she aged, my heroine let me down. I fancied becoming an anarcho feminist. Paula, meanwhile, seemed fixated on a disturbing, 1950s-style domesticity. She started writing books urging mothers of school-aged children to stay at home rather than go out to work. How could she advocate such guff, I wondered, when she could do whatever she wanted? I hated her contradictions, and found it hard to like her. Now, knowing of her awful lonely upbringing in that rainy town in Wales and, later, her miserable death, I can forgive her.

Julie Burchill once wrote that Paula, because she was blonde and fluffy, expected to be given an easy ride through life. An informed book by Paula’s former friend, Gerry Agar, would suggest Burchill was right. Perhaps if Paula had been less dependent on those men she was so confident around, or even to be the feminist I so badly wanted her to be, she would still be around. Who knows? I will always be grateful to her, despite her faults.