Glamour, May 2008.
Where do I begin? I guess this all kicked off on an unassuming plane journey to Ibiza to be re-united with my anti-Plastik co-founder Cila. (Something to do with the air pressure led to a light bulb shaped moment at 30,000 feet.) There are some things we accept in this throwaway life as simply an unfathomable “given”: Michael Jackson’s skin colour, Britney Spear’s balding head, James Blunt’s chart success…
One “given” I’ve always accepted is the dominating presence of womens magazines in my life. It’s kind of like the horoscope page in the London Lite – I don’t believe an iota of what the “astrologer” is whittering on about, yet I still flick to it every day and somehow attribute what it has to say as comparable to what is happening in my life. The fact is, the world of womens glossies is just about as redundant as that horoscope page I robotically glance at each morning: it paints an unrealistic and fanciful image of what it is to be a “woman” in 2008, creating the same myth as my Aries prediction which talks about my planet’s alignment with Venus. When did I start to read these magazines as fact?
The article that kicked this all off for me was in this month’s edition of Glamour: ‘DOS AND DON’TS’. Check out those capitals. Authoritative, eh? Glancing down, I nearly spat out my complimentary almond nuts when I read the following header: ‘DO PUT A BUN IN THE OVEN.’ I actually did manage to choke on my free complimentary almond nuts when I came face to face with Satan’s commandment…bear with me…it’s a corker…I’m going to have to upgrade this to it’s own line altogether:
‘APRONS ON LADIES’
Now…I like to think of myself as a fairly accepting kind of person, but in all honesty I’ve never read anything so fundamentally patronising in all my days. The shocking aspect in all of this is that it wasn’t even written by FHM. This was written by women for women. I mean, surely this is a comment designated to a Stepford Wives film. At least there it would be granted some degree of satire. Cause there sure as hell ain’t any at Glamour magazine…
…If there were, they firstly wouldn’t have handpicked pictures of each celebrity in 50s floral dresses for starters. Aprons on ladies. Oven mitts at the ready. And make sure your Laura Ashley is ironed.
My personal favourite quote is by Southern belle Jessica Simpson. Now, forgive me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this the very same southern belle who couldn’t cook a batch of southern fried chicken for her husband in ‘Newlyweds’? What a transformation, because it seems that overnight, Simpson has turned into a regular Fanny Craddock. She gushes, “I make cup cakes here and there. I love to bake.”
So here we are. It’s only taken us a hundred years to battle for the right to get ourselves out of the kitchen, only to have publications supposedly written for the progression of womens’ individualities instructing us to get back in there quick smart and bake our man a cake.
Right on sisters…
Kat Plastik
1 Comment
May 15, 2008 at 11:15 am
[...] riddles their pages. To stop airbrushing but carry on publishing features advising women to “Put A Bun In The Oven“; or to criticise size zero models while running photo spreads whooping about some poor [...]