Back in February 2012, a pair of impoverished graduates launched a blog dedicated to humorously lambasting women’s magazines. We called it ‘The Vagenda’, a term we stole from a broadsheet article about women in the workplace with a hidden agenda. Of all the stupid portmanteau terms we had come across while reading magazines – manthropology, shoemageddon, hiberdating – ‘vagenda’ was the most ridiculous. And we found not only that the amalgamation of ‘vagina’ and ‘agenda’ was pleasing to the ear, but that the word perfectly encapsulated the aims of the blog: to expose the silly, manipulative and sometimes damaging ulterior motives of women’s magazines.
We were experts only insofar as we had consumed an awful lot of glossy trash over the years – glossy trash that had been telling us how to look, think and behave since we first left the local newsagent’s clutching a copy of Mizz in our sweaty little sherbet-covered fingers. Women buy thousands upon thousands of magazines each year, and, despite the advent of the internet and, for some publications, tanking circulation figures, they remain extremely popular. It’s said that women look at between 400 and 600 adverts a day, and with the ratio of advertorial to editorial in magazines rapidly increasing, that number is likely to rise. Magazines’ editorial content and the adverts that target you with age-specific products alongside it (lip gloss for tweens, padded bras for teenagers, plastic surgery for twentysomethings, overpriced ‘shabby-chic’ sideboards and Le Creuset kitchen paraphernalia for the middle-aged cohort) have been an unavoidable part of the female consciousness for most women raised in the Western world since the 1930s.
Even publications that used to celebrate women’s liberation in the seventies and eighties have been increasingly watered down and replaced with easily recycled, oversexed content pandering to an advertising team who’ve got your money on their mind. Nowadays, it can feel as if their index fingers are pointing accusingly at you from behind the page, primed to deliver you a hefty shot of insecurity to complement your morning Botox.
As tweenagers, we graduated from the romance comics, spooky stories and ‘I kissed a boy during my first period, am I pregnant?’ problem pages in Shout, Mizz, Sugar or Jackie, dependent on your age, to those with a more mature demographic such as Just Seventeen (later rebranded as J-17). For our own generation, J-17 (which everyone knows you read when you were 13 and hid from your scandalised mother, lest she find the bit about 69ing) was the go-to magazine for sex advice, trading as it did primarily in information and revelations about boys in the same way that Jackie traded in romance and engagement stories in the 1970s. But these sorts of stories have a sell-by date, and by the time you’re a teenager, you’re being steered headlong into Cosmopolitan, Company and Grazia. An addiction that lasts a lifetime is born. We haven’t got past our twenties yet, but we’re looking forward to the terrifying content of ‘mature’ magazines such as Red and Easy Living (‘Do his sperm hate your vagina?’ ‘Will your consumption of guacamole affect your fertility?’ ‘Is off-white a suitably calming colour for the nursery of a baby with “unconventional sleeping patterns”’) Alongside all this, the celebrity magazine grew to gargantuan proportions throughout the noughties. Where once Hello! and OK! stood slightly shamefacedly in the corner of the news racks, heat, Closer and a variety of other younger sisters now jostle for room, emanating a combination of disjointed newzac and bilious body snark like the cidered-up drunk on your corner. ‘Is it a baby or a burrito? Our experts decide!’ scream headlines next to a magnified image of Celebrity X’s stomach. ‘Celebrity Y breaks down over unbearable pressure from paparazzi!’ proclaims the next headline, with a blurry picture of said celeb’s hand across a lens as ironic illustration. On the face of it, you wouldn’t think that that sort of banal content would reel in a substantial audience – yet we fall for it again and again.
If Page Three is the sexist builder hollering at you in the street, then Grazia and Cosmo are the frenemies who smile to your face and bitch behind your back. It worried us that women such as us, reared on a diet beginning with problem-page questions about tampons in Bliss magazine and graduating on to Company, weren’t being offered any of the necessary critical tools to deal with increasingly sinister content. There comes a certain point (probably around the time that you’ve picked up your tenth issue of Cosmopolitan) when your brain is encased in such a large volume of fluffy bullshit that you switch off and start thinking, ‘My elbows are fat. You’re right, Cosmo, they are really bloody fat,’ as you stare at the latest photoshopped model. Open up one of these rags and you’ll be confronted with a tirade of mixed messages: an article about women having a lower sex drive than men, followed by a problem page in which a man complains that his girlfriend is always gagging for it, for example. In the case of the latter, the agony aunt’s response to the gentleman in question is naturally that his missus is definitely, definitely a nymphomaniac and needs therapy as a matter of urgency. Such contradictory material is enough to drive a woman to drink. One minute you’re being told to love your body and embrace it as the imperfect vessel that it is, and the next you’re manically rubbing coffee granules into your arse cellulite instead of drinking them in your morning latte (which, by the way, makes you fat).
You’ll also face a constant deluge of articles which supposedly question what it is, and isn’t, OK to do (Can I sleep around? Can I eat carbs? Can I shave my pubes and still believe in feminism/world peace/string theory?) Rather than reassure you that you can do all these things and that you should stop worrying about them, the editorial staff continue to busy themselves setting up fictitious taboos (‘Proposing – his job or yours?’) which just serve to make you even more worried about your already hellishly hectic life. Many of you will be familiar with the ‘Hey, it’s OK’ section of Glamour magazine, which features ‘jokey’ reassurances related to modes of behaviour deemed typical of all females. Yet rather than saying, ‘Hey, it’s OK that you don’t want a baby,’ or, ‘Hey, it’s OK that you don’t have the time or inclination to shave your legs between October and April, if at all,’ or even (God forbid) ‘Hey, it’s OK to eat carbs,’ they rely instead on crass, deliberately uncontroversial generalisation. So it’s ‘Hey, it’s OK to dish the dirt on your sex life to all of your friends but convince yourself he’d never do the same to his,’ or ‘Hey, it’s OK to browse the babywear section even if you don’t have a baby’ (both real-life examples from April 2013). What’s a girl to do?
It was high time, we felt, that we took it on. The Vagenda aimed to shine a critical light on women’s media, moving from piss-takes of the most ridiculous sex tips in Cosmopolitan, to why the female celebrity is always painted in the same way by tabloids, to the ongoing media obsession with female diet and beauty. As our readership grew, we began to address much broader issues affecting women’s lives, from maternity leave to the under-representation of women editors in the media and the depressing prevalence of ultra-violent porn. Our starting point was the magazine world, but as we dug deeper we saw that the dysfunctional habits of Glamour and Grazia were reflected and repeated in film and TV, on billboards and in advertising, throughout newspapers and across mainstream websites. That is why this book predominantly criticises women’s magazines, but also makes mention of the surrounding media that influence them, and vice versa.
Almost as soon as we launched, hordes of women, from the age of 13 right up to 85, were getting in touch and wanting to add their voices. The Vagenda has now covered everything from the weave to the vajazzle, miscarriage to motherhood, the position of women in the workplace to the position of the fortnight. We’ve done this with the help and contributions of women (and men) from all over the world. They got in touch to point and laugh and rant and rave at the ridiculous media stereotypes that surrounded them, whether they were university freshers, new mothers, or engineers at the start of their career, and the response was humbling. It made us realise that we weren’t the only ones who felt like crap when we read women’s magazines or watched MTV.
A study by Bradley University in Illinois in 2012 found that just three minutes spent looking at a fashion magazine led to 70% of women feeling ‘guilty, depressed, and shameful’. Similarly, the University of Missouri– Columbia conducted a survey involving 81 women and found that, after three minutes of looking at images of fashion models, all of them felt worse about themselves, regardless of size, weight, age or height.1 When Seventeen magazine was first published in 1944, the average model was around 5 ft 7 in. and weighed 130 lb (9 stone 3). These days, the average model is 5 ft 11 in. and weighs 115 lb (8 stone 2). It’s a pretty drastic change. Since the mid-twentieth century, the bikini-body ideal has done a complete 180, with women then being implored to ‘gain 10 to 25 lb the easy way’ in the same way that they are now being told to lose it. Looking at an advertisement from that period really hammers things home. ‘How do you look in a bathing suit?’ it demands, illustrating its message with two female figures. The very slender woman looks demonstrably unhappy, while the smiling Monroe-esque ‘ideal’ woman of the age is well pleased with herself. Yet, looking at such images now, it’s the former type which would be lauded as the ultimate ideal, while the latter would be consigned to the plus-size section. In other words, the goalposts are always shifting, and women are continually expected to live up to some form of arbitrarily decided ‘ideal body’.
There’s no doubt that all this obsessive body monitoring is having a negative impact on our self-esteem, but it’s not just our physical appearance that is under scrutiny. This book looks at how the media attempt to dictate everything from your bikini wax to your body language, your diet to your ‘sex moves’, your pants to your personality, and we hope that you come to see it as something of a survival guide. Because it’s high time we all called bullshit.