Goodbye to cigarette ads where poems should be.
Goodbye to celebrity covers and too little space.
Goodbye to cleaning up language so Ms. advertisers won’t be boycotted by the Moral Majority.
In fact, goodbye to advertisers and the Moral Majority.
Goodbye to short articles and short thinking.
Goodbye to “post-feminism” from people who never say “post-democracy.”
Goodbye to national boundaries and hello to the world.
Welcome to the magazine of the post-patriarchal age.
The turn of the century is our turn!
THAT WAS MY CELEBRATORY mood in the summer of 1990 when I finished the original version of the exposé you are about to read. I felt as if I’d been released from a personal, portable Bastille. At least I’d put on paper the ad policies that had been punishing Ms. for all the years of its nonconforming life and still were turning more conventional media, especially (but not only) those directed at women, into a dumping ground for fluff.
Those goodbyes were part of a letter inviting readers to try a new, ad-free version of Ms. and were also a homage to “Goodbye to All That,” a witty and lethal essay in which Robin Morgan bade farewell to the pre-feminist male Left of twenty years before.1 It seemed the right tone for the birth of a brand-new, reader-supported, more international form of Ms., which Robin was heading as editor in chief, and I was serving as consulting editor. Besides, I had a very personal kind of mantra running through my head: I’ll never have to sell another ad as long as I live.
So I sent the letter off, watched the premiere issue containing my exposé go to press, and then began to have second thoughts: Were ad policies too much of an “inside” concern? Did women readers already know that magazines directed at them were filled with editorial extensions of ads—and not care? Had this deceptive system been in place too long for anyone to have faith in changing it? In other words: Would anybody give a damn?
After almost four years of listening to responses and watching the ripples spread out from this pebble cast upon the waters, I can tell you that, yes, readers do care; and no, most of them were not aware of advertising’s control over the words and images around it. Though most people in the publishing industry think this is a practice too deeply embedded ever to be uprooted, a lot of readers are willing to give it a try—even though that’s likely to mean paying more for their publications. In any case, as they point out, understanding the nitty-gritty of ad influence has two immediate uses. It strengthens healthy skepticism about what we read, and it keeps us from assuming that other women must want this glamorous, saccharine, unrealistic stuff.
Perhaps that’s the worst punishment ad influence has inflicted upon us. It’s made us feel contemptuous of other women. We know we don’t need those endless little editorial diagrams of where to put our lipstick or blush—we don’t identify with all those airbrushed photos of skeletal women with everything about them credited, even their perfume (can you imagine a man’s photo airbrushed to perfection, with his shaving lotion credited?)—but we assume there must be women out there somewhere who do love it; otherwise, why would it be there?
Well, many don’t. Given the sameness of women’s magazines resulting from the demands made by makers of women’s products that advertise in all of them, we probably don’t know yet what a wide variety of women readers want. In any case, we do know it’s the advertisers who are determining what women are getting now.
The first wave of response to this exposé came not from readers but from writers and editors for other women’s magazines. They phoned to say the pall cast by anticipated or real advertising demands was even more widespread than rebellious Ms. had been allowed to know. They told me how brave I was to “burn my bridges” (no critic of advertising would ever be hired as an editor of any of the women’s magazines, they said) and generally treated me as if I’d written about organized crime instead of practices that may be unethical but are perfectly legal. After making me promise not to use their names, they offered enough additional horror stories to fill a book, a movie, and maybe a television series. Here is a typical one: When the freelance author of an article on moisturizers observed in print that such products might be less necessary for young women—whose skin tends to be not dry but oily—the article’s editor was called on the carpet and denounced by her bosses as “anti-moisturizer.” Or how about this: The film critic for a women’s magazine asked its top editor, a woman who makes millions for her parent company, whether movies could finally be reviewed critically, since she had so much clout. No, said the editor; if you can’t praise a movie, just don’t include it; otherwise we’ll jeopardize our movie ads. This may sound like surrealism in everyday life, or like our grandmothers advising, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything,” but such are the forces that control much of our information.
I got few negative responses from insiders, but the ones I did get were bitter. Two editors at women’s magazines felt I had demeaned them by writing the article. They loved their work, they said, and didn’t feel restricted by ads at all. So I would like to make clear in advance that my purpose was and is to change the system, not to blame the people struggling within it. As someone who has written for most women’s magazines, I know that many editors work hard to get worthwhile articles into the few pages left over after providing all the “complementary copy” (that is, articles related to and supportive of advertised products). I also know there are editors who sincerely want exactly what the advertisers want, which is why they’re so good at their jobs. Nonetheless, criticizing this ad-dominant system is no different from criticizing male-dominant marriage. Both institutions make some people happy, and both seem free as long as your wishes happen to fall within their traditional boundaries. But just as making more equal marital laws alleviates the suffering of many, breaking the link between editorial and advertising will help all media become more honest and diverse.
A second wave of reaction came from advertising executives who were asked to respond by reporters. They attributed all problems to Ms. We must have been too controversial or otherwise inappropriate for ads. I saw no stories that asked the next questions: Why had non-women’s companies from Johnson & Johnson to IBM found our “controversial” pages fine for their ads? Why did desirable and otherwise unreachable customers read something so “inappropriate”? What were ad policies doing to other women’s media? To continue my marriage parallel, however, I should note that these executives seemed only mildly annoyed. Just as many women are more dependent than men on the institution of marriage and so are more threatened and angry when it’s questioned, editors of women’s magazines tended to be more upset than advertisers when questioned about their alliance.
The one exception was Leonard Lauder, scion of the Estée Lauder cosmetics empire. As you read about him later, keep in mind that he insisted to reporters—as well as in his responses to women readers who wrote letters threatening to boycott his products—that my account was “absolutely untrue.” This hurt my journalistic feelings (I’d made notes and reported the conversation to my colleagues “contemporaneously,” as lawyers say), but at least it was rational. After all, he and I had been the only participants in the lunch I describe. What amazed me was his further insistence that the “conversation never took place,” though we had lunch at The Four Seasons, a fancy New York restaurant where we were on public display. I’ve included another part of our conversation there that was cut for space in the Ms. version of this exposé—to refresh his memory.
Then came the third wave—reader letters which were smart, thoughtful, innovative, and numbered in the hundreds. Their dominant themes were anger and relief: relief because those vast uncritical oceans of food/fashion/beauty articles in other women’s magazines weren’t necessarily what women wanted after all, and also relief because Ms. wasn’t going to take ads anymore, even those that were accompanied by fewer editorial demands; anger because consumer information, diverse articles, essays, fiction, and poetry could have used the space instead of all those oceans of articles about ad categories that had taken up most of women’s magazines for years. Many also reported various actions: (1) complaining directly to presidents of companies whose ads were surrounded by editorial payoffs, as well as praising those that supported worthwhile articles or any unrelated editorial; and (2) sending copies of those complaining or praising letters to corporate owners of women’s magazines, with cover notes explaining that they were willing to pay more for magazines whose editorial content wasn’t just an extension of ads, but nothing for catalogs. Some readers had tried such innovative techniques as returning ad-heavy issues of magazines to the publisher, postage due, with a request that advertisers pay the postage; or scrawling Advertising across all editorial extensions of ads in several issues, and then returning them with a request for a subscription refund. One woman said she was planning to sue for consumer fraud—on the grounds of paying for a magazine and receiving a catalog.
At a professional lunch where I was asked to address editors from a wide variety of magazines, the discussion yielded another tactic: asking one major publisher to be the leader of a long-term staged shift from mostly ad income to income mostly from readers. They identified Si Newhouse of Condé Nast as best placed to influence the industry. Not only had he allowed two of his smaller magazines, Condé Nast Traveler and Allure, to be slightly more independent of ad influence, but he was also the hereditary owner of a dozen more publications, from Glamour to Vanity Fair. By asking readers to pay a greater percentage of what magazines cost, as they do in some other countries, and by changing ad policy—that is, selling access to readers according to the usual demographic and psychographic information but not offering any particular editorial surroundings or ad placement as part of the deal—he could do a great deal to improve what we read. Of course, nobody offered to go see Newhouse—but they did suggest readers write to him. They also agreed that an impenetrable wall between advertising and editorial would benefit advertisers in the long run. Their ads’ credibility would increase, with more credible surroundings, and they would be off the hot seat of haggling for ever more influence and “extras.”
Last and most rewarding was the response that started in the fall. Teachers of journalism, advertising, communications, women’s studies, and other contemporary courses asked permission to reprint the exposé as a supplementary text. That’s another reason why I’ve restored cuts, updated information, and added new examples—including this introduction. Getting subversive ideas into classrooms could change the next generation running the media.
The following pages are mostly about women’s magazines, but that doesn’t mean other media are immune.
Take General Electric, for instance. Its happy ad jingle, “We Bring Good Things to Life,” doesn’t tell you that GE has been (1) a major maker of nuclear weapons parts, (2) a source of major environmental danger due to radiation and asbestos hazards from its plants as well as other toxic wastes, and according to the Environmental Protection Agency, potentially responsible for more Superfund hazardous waste sites than any other corporation in the U.S., (3) a major beneficiary of the real estate sales that resulted from the savings and loan scandals, and (4) the subject of a national consumer boycott coordinated by INFACT2 for GE’s role in the arms race. To discourage GE from making more items like guidance systems for nuclear warheads, INFACT suggested refusing to buy anything, from its smallest light bulb to its biggest piece of medical equipment. Yet the Today show on NBC, the network owned by GE, refused to let Todd Putnam of the National Boycott News3 discuss the GE boycott, or to otherwise cover this obvious example in a report on boycotts.
That’s a serious accusation. It was seriously reported by sources as diverse as the National Catholic Reporter4 and FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), a media watchdog group, together with an NBC producer’s statement that this had been “an independent news judgment.”5 If there was censorship, it’s possible that everyone concerned will think twice next time. If there wasn’t, both viewpoints were aired.
But if GE were a major advertiser in a woman’s magazine and the situation were the same as above, it is not only unlikely that you would read about GE’s nuclear weapons, radiation, asbestos, toxic wastes, savings and loan scandals, or consumer boycott. Instead, it’s likely that GE light bulbs would turn up in a story about, say, new mood lighting, GE designer refrigerators would be featured in an article on remodeling kitchens, GE medical equipment would be hailed as a breast-cancer breakthrough, and fashion models would be seductively posed against a backdrop of one of GE’s more questionable hazardous waste sites. Furthermore, I doubt that the rest of the media would care.
In order to get ads, women’s media are not only expected to squelch criticism, but to deliver praise. That’s a big difference. As the readers whose image, seriousness, and information are being distorted, it’s up to us.
Suppose archaeologists of the future were to dig up women’s magazines and use them to judge American women. What would they think of us—and what can we do about it?