As I feel it’s necessary to claw my way out of the academic/geek cocoon I seem to have weaved around myself,  from time to time I venture into the world of the mass media. Since starting my degree I found that I hardly watch T.V (I don’t think Cbeebies counts) and I never buy ‘womens’ magazines. It wasn’t due to studying commitments, it was due to the repetition-  this is how you should look/dress/feel/D.N.A tests/cook/parent your child and what you should aspire to be (apparently the aspiration is happiness,which obviously can’t be achieved without at least four of the afore mentioned).  It never really occurred to me that these t.v programmes and magazines were actually reinforcing gender and class stereotypes, I just thought they were just thought they were crap.

For some unknown reason I bought ‘That’s life!’  magazine, maybe because of the sensationalist headline “Mum sold me for a bottle of Gin!”, but mostly because that’s the sort of magazine that were knocking around my Grans house when I was growing up. For 78p I had fifteen minutes of other peoples lives, saw photos of cute kids dressed up, read how daft ‘Men’ are, fashion on a budget, health/relationship problem pages and survival stories. What I took from the magazine was that maybe this cut-price magazine and the others of its ilk, are  a space for working class women to express their lives. OK they were paid for their stories and the stories were polished up by proof readers,but the kernel of the stories were issues affecting women.

During a particularly boring lecture  I asked Suzi what she thought of these particular magazines and  the conversation went like this:

(A) ” Do working class women’s magazines such as ‘That’s Life!’ empower or keep working class women in their place?”

(S) “They keep them in their place. Also the mags reinforce dominant social discourse- weight loss, cookery and cosmetic surgery”.

(A)” On balance though,do you think these magazines are better than , Marie Claire, Grazia and the like?”.

(S) ” All the women’s magazines are exactly the same just aimed at different classes of women, however, Marie Claire magazine runs many feminist stories . All in all the women’s mag market is generally designed to re-inforce gendered roles and dominant discourse”.

I decided to buy Marie Claire (for the first time) and see for myself . For the sum of £3.30 and a reassuring glossy heavy magazine with non-descript headliners ‘Perfect trousers to suit your shape’. Seven adverts for the top end fashion and cosmetic industry and then onto the contents page, more adverts, editors blurb, rundown of contributors and then at last first articles which were the letters page. More adverts then an article by Katherine Fleet (ala The Observer). I’ll confess now, I do read The Observer but tend not to read the columns about ‘nothing’ . Fleets piece was entitled ‘Superwoman:who needs her?` Who indeed I thought to myself.

More adverts , fashion news, eco news, adverts, fashion news, adverts, Celeb interview more adverts, wheres the feminism? I think to myself.

An article on women sex professionals was sort of on the right track,women’s attitude to drinking,child bride divorce in Afghanistan (why wasn`t this the front cover?) and then the life changing experience story or as I like to call it the  ‘I went to a poor country and talked to poor hungry black children and now I realise how lucky I am, my life is going to change for the better,hurray!’ story.

So , like ‘That’s Life’ the kernel was there, but for me there was more sharing of female stories in ‘That’s life!’. The survival of domestic violence, birth stories , rape, betrayal, consumer rights. But hold up, I thought to myself, aren’t these stories used for fodder on shows such as Jeremy Kyle,Trisha and like? Women and men being paid to tell their story on national t.v, shows such as This Morning dispensing consumer advice and how to make the most of yourself cosmetically wise.

Where is the Marie Claire T.V crossover? It’s with programmes like Ten years younger, Come Dine with me and Location, Location, Location. OK its easy to see the class differences even if you just took at look at the advertising in both magazines, when you look at the barriers of price and style of magazine it brazenly states that the working class are cheap, throw away and a bit tatty, whilst the middle classes are aesthetically pleasing, substantial and seemingly valuable.

Whats does this tell me about feminism in the mass printed media? Everyday survival stories of the working class woman is a readily available commodity, because lets face it ,whatever the world throws at the working class woman she can handle it as long as she can get a few quid for the retelling of said horrid event. Pretty clothes, cosmetics and lifestyle aspirations , ohh! and with the odd ‘lets find oppressed women /girls abroad’  stories to show us how good our lives really are,  are the fodder of Marie Claire.

These magazines have sat on the newsagents shelves for nearly fifty years now.  Have you ever noticed that you never see Marie Claire magazine on the same shelf as That’s Life? If we live in a meritocracy why isn’t the mass media portraying the fact,  instead of keeping us all in our boxes?

I love to end this article with a statement about what I’d put in a magazine if I had the chance, but I don’t have a clue. I can’t believe in either magazine though. One tells me how I should look , what clothes I should buy and that I’ll just never find shoes fabulous enough, punctuated by adverts from luxury brands (which I find contradictory to the post materialistic statements of the sustainability of the making of the magazine). The other tells me that shit happens, the adverts tell me that the government is watching and that I need to be reminded not to feed my kids whisky and deep fried mars-bars and that post-materialism is just a posh word for sharing money saving tips.

This post is my response to a part of Suzi`s post  `The Mummy Myth`and also  expresses my thoughts on female competitiveness.

To begin with lets look at the two -sided coin which is the mainstream media…..

Can anyone remember any obviously pregnant women presenting the weather, reading the news or presenting breakfast T.V in the eighties? The only woman I can remember is Janet Ellis who presented Blue Peter and was subjected to complaints from outraged viewers because she was a)pregnant and b) shock horror, also unmarried.

Fast forward to the here and now, and pregnant TV presenters are  commonplace,a good thing wouldn`t you say? Pregnant women can be seen, heard and are generally considered capable  enough to carrying on working in their high profile jobs. Of course, the maternity leave ,pay and birthing plan are all held in the public eye, and  maybe the expectant mother will do an interview with various magazines saying how wonderful she feels and how she now, inexplicably  likes eating raw marrow with ice-cream.

After she’s had the baby, done the OK photo shoot and obligingly shown off said precious bundle it all goes downhill and becomes  a media free-for-all.Why hasn`t she lost that baby weight yet? Why’s she depressed when she`s got lots of money and round the clock nannies? Should she be going back to work so soon? Does she breast feed?

All these questions in some shape or another have been asked for millenia at the water well,over washing lines and in recent times, at the coffee shop. The only thing is, now these questions are amplified through the media, and so the stereotype of the Yummy Mummy in upper/middle class circles or MILF in working class circles has appeared, demonstrating that women’s only true commodity is to be fuckable. Crude but more to the point.
These stereotypes trickle down into society, and,  in my experience the ‘Yummy Mummies’ at my kid`s school (by the by, I live in social housing in a very desirable area and professional families frequently relocate from London to get into the schools catchment area)always look fantastic have the latest bicycle and trailer sets,talk play dates, eat organic food and about the marvelous kids boutique in town.There is one middle class mum there who talks to her child, doesn’t give a crap about her appearance and seems to do lots of volunteer work for the school ,but it doesn’t matter how marvelous she is, the nasty whispers are still there `Why doesn`t she lose some weight/Get some new clothes ? / Put some make-up on?’ (n.b I`m a semi goth skinny person who can look slightly scary to the untrained eye).
Of course this happens at school gates throughout the land and in also media land,  but why does it happen? Consider the facts -the media is controlled and bankrolled by men and what do men do when the empowerment of women is seeped into the national consciouness? Give us what we want thats, what,the gossip. How else do the media get away with giving meek reports about women sacked for being pregnant, or for asserting their right to extended maternity leave which in short costs money, money that most important commodity of all.  This all  shortly followed by hiring an attractive younger woman to read the news, in order to attract male viewers.
It seems now (sadly) that even after we`ve competed with each other in order to secure said Mr Wonderful (I realise this statement is heteronormative, but lesbian motherhood does tend to be ignored by the media at large unless it’s being reported in a negative way and I have no experience of being a lesbian mother and so am basing this on my  personal experience of motherhood and competition) that competition is  nothing compared to pursuing the crown of `perfect woman`- it’s the perfect housewife amplified with new and improved features .Marvel at her organizational skills! She`s still fuckable after four kids! She makes her own organic baby food and brings home the bacon too!

The point is is that the media amplified and commodified women’s competitiveness, packaged it,sold it back to us in glossy form and we’ve brought it in every sense