Women's mag drivel: part 1 in an occasional series.

Readers of last week’s Grazia magazine learned that one of four exciting things to do that are SO NOW is“drunk shopping”. No really. “Shoes are just so much prettier and credit card bills far less scary after a few glasses of vino!” it slurred.

Elsewhere, the useless rag gave up on personal finance and tackled the weighty world of politics. Laura Craik knocked off a crashingly sycophantic profile of Tory wife Samantha Cameron. “David might be getting excited about the inheritance tax threshold,” she twittered, “but the naughty truth is that women aren’t half as interested in party policy as they are in Samantha’s clothes.”

Probably fair. Given that any legacies Grazia readers get their mits on will go straight towards paying off those un-scary credit card bills, how much they inherit is probably neither here nor there.

But Craik presses on: “If he (David) wants to swing the female vote, Sam Cameron in a yellow Topshop coat is a far bigger draw than any NHS reform.”

Here’s hoping Grazia readers’ livers hold out.

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.