September 2007

Women under siege

By Words of Colour co-founder Joy Francis

Why are women allowing themselves to be used as cheap fodder for magazines? No matter what your professional status, acclaim, wealth or achievements may be, our value all appears to boil down to one thing: how you look.

A quick scan at the magazine shelves at my local supermarket makes me nauseous. Despite the highest number of magazines on sale at any time in history, you would think that we would be spoilt for choice for content as women’s lives are so rich and diverse.

Not so. Our lives, according the ‘magazines hysterical cover lines’, make shallow look deep. The evidence? Well not a week goes by without minor celebrities or wannbes talking about How I lost my baby weight in three weeks, Keeping cellulite at bay, Looking like Victoria Beckham on a budget, or Being a WAG for a day. It is hard to find something meaningful to read as pictures are the new text.

How dare you be flawed, they suggest, by circling our ‘defects’ in pictures taken while eating, on the beach, putting out the rubbish or going shopping. Hey, look at her stretch marks, chipped nail polish, hair out of place and the spinach between her teeth, they squeal.

Once a year there is some respite when they trot out the Why curvy women are best storyline, only to then call last week’s Curvy Goddess next week’s overeater. Where are the male equivalents? Why not be equal in our disdain of the human form’s imperfection? Keeping with the magazine’s spirit of scathing criticism, Jude Law looks like he eats one meal a week while Eammon Holmes’ waistline seems to be growing faster than the national debt.

Is it any wonder that women in the UK are topping the European obesity tables for failing to ‘make the mark’, not realising that the goalposts change every week as it is about sales not reality. At a time when up to four women a week are killed by a violent partner, successful prosecutions for rape are at a historical low, and we are earning up to 23 percent less than our male counterparts for doing the same job, this lazy and misogynistic form of journalism isn’t good enough.

It’s an insult to the original principles of good journalism (chiefly impartiality and telling the truth) and women generally. Meanwhile women, young and old, black and white, gorge themselves on two or more of these magazines a week. Their justification? It’s not about me.

Instead of moving forwards, cheap titillation at women’s expense is now the acceptable face of publishing. Only this month a mother discovered that a topless picture of her 14-year-old daughter was being seen by 400,000 male readers of a consumer ’lads ‘ magazines in a babes gallery. Not only did the girl not know that the picture had been submitted, the editor shrugged it off by saying she looked older.

The fact that The Sun, which has a female editor (Rebekah Wade), is parading a naked woman with two ten pence pieces covering her breasts to advertise their price cut on the side of London buses is making my nausea rise. So I don’t think my feeling of queasiness is going anywhere soon.

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