Whatever the drive is that keeps thousands of women –including myself – buying magazines like Cosmopolitan every month, it has more to do with improvement than entertainment. Why else should one curl up after a hard day at work with a publication which tells you to ‘Shape up for summer – NOW’, ‘Tune into that TOP job’, ‘WORK off that extra weight’ and ‘Don’t daydream, dare to SUCCEED’? This pep-talk format is a key feature of selling the magazine even before it is opened. ‘Change your face in a day, Slip into a loose T-Shirt, Learn a language this summer’, insists just one corner of a recent Cosmo cover, and every month brings still more pressing ways for the Cosmo Girl to improve her Health, her Wealth and her Self.
However urgent and immediate these exhortations may sound, the subject-matter of the articles they refer to changes very little over any stretch of time. Features may appear contradictory – ‘Face up to the New Sexual Freedom’, ‘Chastity – the New Challenge’ – but fundamentally they revolve around the same issues of work, sex, emotional life, and feminism. Many of the articles are interesting and informative, and the overall suggestion that women take their working lives seriously is very valuable, as is much of the advice on relationships and emotional problems. But whatever the content, the mode of address is the same: check this, aim for that, start this, stop that – the omnipresent imperative.
The flip-side of this is the searching question: How do YOU look at work? Are you capable of a normal relationship? Are you fit for sex? Can your marriage survive a baby? Are you as liberated as you think? These basic structures of question and command offer to reveal, on the one hand, what you are like, and on the other, how to be better. There are plenty of quizzes to help you find what kind of person you are before embarking on the royal road to improvement: ‘How inhibited are you?’ ‘Is your relationship on the rocks?’ ‘Are you programmed for success?’ ‘Are you serious about sex?’ and ‘Check your happiness quotient’. Underlying all this are two somewhat confused premises: first, that you can find out your true nature (are you a dreamer or an achiever? Do you prefer your sex friendly or funky?) – second, that you can change it if you try hard enough. The fuel that keeps these magazines selling, when their material is so fundamentally repetitive, is partly the appetite to discover the self (primarily through sexuality) and simultaneously, the search for a new self; both quests which are inherently unending. Specific articles, of course, often do give precise and concrete help or understanding; it is the drive that keeps one reading (and buying) which is so insatiable. Fulfilment, for modern woman, seems to be fixed just around the corner, always an article away, on the other side of some giant ‘SHOULD’.
In this feminine world of deferred gratification, where people slim their way to fitness and plan their way to the top, Miss Piggy’s Guide to Life is most refreshing: for here you can have your discipline and eat it too. Miss Piggy, for example, snacks her way to slimness: ‘The trouble with so many diets is that they ignore a very simple fact: people eat because they are hungry, and they overeat because they are extremely hungry.’ The obvious solution is to ‘snack your way to the weight you desire by nipping hunger in the bud whenever it appears.’ Thus diet of the day for Wednesday runs, … and so on. And the total calorie count comes to merely ‘a fraction of your usual dinner intake!’.
| 3.34 | Two cookies | ||
| 4.14 | One more cookie | ||
| 4.51 | Small handful of peanuts | ||
| 5.17 | Slightly larger handful of peanuts | ||
| 5.44 | The rest of the peanuts | ||
| 6.11 | Crackers with cheese dip | ||
| 6.32 | Breadstick with cheese dip | ||
| 6.45 | Cheese chips with cheese dip | ||
| 7.10 | Small slice of cake from piece left in icebox | ||
| 7.26 | Remainder of cake (really, it is silly to have such a small piece of cake on a big plate taking up so much room) … |
Within precisely the Cosmo format of rules, lists and tasks, Miss Piggy lets the desire for immediate gratification run riot. From Fashion to Finance, she challenges all the prudent wisdom of the Cosmo Girl: ‘Many people think money is something to be set aside for a rainy day. But honestly, how much money do you really need for a dozen or so hours of inclement weather?’ Her Beauty hints are unique in their understanding of the essential nutrients one’s body needs, as in this special Style-and-Smile Hair Conditioning Recipe:
- Heat the milk, sugar, and chocolate, beat in the yolks, then whip in the vanilla and the egg whites. Place in the oven on very low heat.
- Go out and have your hair done.
- Come home, remove mixture from oven, cover lightly with whipped cream, and eat.
On the other hand, her dinner recipes involve a step-by-step guide to phoning the nearest take-away.
Miss Piggy’s style of advice, based on following her own footsteps to fame and success, is extremely close to that of Helen Gurley Brown, author of Sex and the Single Girl and founder of Cosmopolitan. If Miss Piggy’s focus on food seems a little excessive, it might be seen in the light of this quote from Helen Gurley Brown’s latest guide to everything, Having It All: ‘After someone has made love to you with skill and grace, having an orgasm is a way of saying you enjoyed yourself, even as you compliment a host on a wonderful spinach quiche.’ It is no coincidence that food finds its way to the ‘Sex’ section of Having It All, it is so conspicuously absent from its own section – called, pointedly, ‘Diet’ – where fighting back the urge to indulge oneself is the major theme. (Ditto for ‘Exercise’, ‘Face’ and ‘Body’.) No wonder the poor suppressed quiche pops up in the orgasm department.
But even in sex, you are still not to follow your own whims: what do you do ‘When He Wants To Make Love and You Don’t?’ – ‘Do it anyway’. ‘Sometimes The Scene Makes Up For The Man’: ‘ultradiscriminating girls’ fail to realize that one can ‘have a nice sexual experience just because the scene is magical and the man acceptable.’ ‘Should You Do Anything You Don’t Like During Sex?’ Yes, provided it isn’t actually ‘perverted’. The ultimate aim of all this putting up with things in bed, is a good relationship with your man, and a well-stocked store of experience for yourself.
What Miss Piggy subverts is exactly this notion of investment – a feature of capitalism which pervades all women’s magazines. What you put in, you will one day get out; starving yourself/working hard/not letting HIM know how you feel, and so on, will pay off dividends in the long run, or at least, later. Miss Piggy’s attack on this most bourgeois – and protestant – of principles, extends far beyond her acute observation that money can rot with time if not used, and that too much money staying in your purse can be a fire hazard. Her etiquette guide is most expressive:
What do you do if a man you like, and who likes you, still wants to see other women?
– Although this is by definition a somewhat emotional matter, you should approach it in a calm, reasonable, mature way. What I would do is calmly, reasonably, and maturely explain to him that if he values his life, he should change his behaviour.
Her calculation of the calories burnt by lifting candies to the mouth, picking up heavy cups of hot chocolate, and other daily tasks, seems to make all other exercise plans redundant. And no longer need anyone feel a failure at that most crucial of modern female accomplishments, lightweight travelling; Miss Piggy’s basic rule is: ‘When in doubt, pack it:’
In Miss Piggy’s world, the present makes absolutely no sacrifices to the future. There is no reason to deny oneself anything. Comic though it is, the effect of reading her Guide is liberating in a way reminiscent of passages in Susie Orbach’s Fat is a Feminist Issue, where suggested therapy for overeaters is to fantasize buying large quantities of their favourite food, and then to be told that they can have any of it, in any amount, anytime they want. Fat is a Feminist Issue is a deadly serious book; and not just about food, which is merely the symbol of need and denial for many women. Miss Piggy’s Guide to Life, by contrast, is uproariously funny, because total indulgence is couched in the language of strictness. It simultaneously fulfils that peculiar desire for someone to tell us what to do and how to do it, while justifying, through complex twists of logic, doing whatever you would most feel like anyway.
But what is so interesting is the wish to be ‘told’ in the first place; which brings us back to Cosmo. Why is it that women respond so readily to the idea that we ought to do anything? The flip-side of this ‘ought’ is, precisely, the ‘naughty’; a phenomenon ruthlessly exploited by food advertisements of every kind. Behind every enjoyment lurks an all-purpose guilt – until guilt itself becomes a form of enjoyment. But Miss Piggy has the number of female masochism, even in its most literary forms (where it often appears today under the guise of feminism, even from the ‘feminist’ press). So the last word on her Guide to Life must go to my heroine herself. ‘If an ill-informed bookseller attempted to convince me to substitute for it some flossy novel about sad people in big houses by a woman with three names, I would reject it politely but without hesitation. “Take back your flossy novel about sad people in big houses by a woman with three names” I would insist, indicating with a quick movement of my hand in what contempt I held such trash. And then, helping him from the floor, I would ask him in the nicest possible way to wrap up my Guide in some pretty gift paper’.
If only Miss Piggy would start a magazine.