IF WE’RE GOING TO have diverse and free sources of information, we have to understand how deep this tradition of ad influence goes, and how wide it spreads.
Ever since Ladies’ Magazine debuted in Boston in 1828, editorial copy directed to women has been informed by something other than their interests. There were no ads then, but in an age when married women were legal minors, with no right to their own money to pay for subscriptions, there was another controlling revenue source: husbands. “Husbands may rest assured,” wrote editor Sarah Josepha Hale, “that nothing found in these pages shall cause [their wives] to be less assiduous in preparing for his reception or encourage her to ‘usurp station’ or encroach upon prerogatives of men.”
Hale went on to become the editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, a magazine featuring “fashion plates”; engravings of dresses to be copied by one’s seamstress or by readers themselves. Gradually, Hale added the “how to” articles that were to set the social tone of women’s service magazines—how to write politely, how to avoid sunburn of one’s ladylike skin, and, in no fewer than 1,200 words, how to maintain a goose quill pen. She also advocated women’s education, but not to the point of controversy. Just as most women’s magazines now praise socially approved ways of living, suggest individual solutions to what really are political problems, and avoid taking editorial stands on controversial issues like abortion (even if their own polls show that an overwhelming majority of their readers support them), Hale made sure that Godey’s avoided the hot topics of its day: slavery, abolition, and female suffrage.
What turned women’s magazines into catalogs, however, were two events: Ellen Butterick’s invention of the clothing pattern in 1863, and the mass manufacture of patent medicines that contained anything from harmless colored water to small amounts of cocaine. For the first time, readers could purchase what a magazine had encouraged them to want. As the sale of such products made these magazines more profitable and they were able to pay better salaries, they also began to attract male editors. (Indeed, men continued to be the top editors of most women’s magazines until the current feminist revolt launched protests like the 1970 sit-in at Ladies’ Home Journal.) Edward Bok, who became the Ladies’ Home Journal editor in 1889, inadvertently discovered the power of advertisers when he rejected patent medicines as useless or worse, and other advertisers canceled their ads in retribution. By the early twentieth century, Good Housekeeping had started a special institute to “test and approve” products. Its Seal of Approval became the grandfather of all “value-added” programs that offer public relations and merchandising to advertisers.
Generations of suffragist struggle finally won women the vote in 1920, but women’s magazines were in no position to help them use it. The magazines’ main function was to create a desire for products, instruct in the use of products, and make products a crucial part of gaining social approval, catching a husband, pleasing a husband, and performing as a homemaker. A few short stories and unrelated articles might be included to persuade women to buy what otherwise would have been given away as a catalog—and some of them offered women a voice and sense of community within these pages that came into their own homes. But even those articles were rarely critical from a consumerist point of view or rebellious in other ways. Fiction, too, usually had a formula: if a woman had an affair outside marriage, she must come to a bad end. If she hadn’t been chaste before marriage, she could only hope to find an unusually glamorous man who would forgive her—and to whom she would be forever grateful.
Helen Gurley Brown at Cosmopolitan began to change that formula in the 1960s by bringing the “sexual revolution” into a women’s magazine—but in an ad-oriented way. Sex outside marriage became OK for women too, which was a major and welcome departure. Nonetheless, as the “Cosmo Girl” made clear, attracting multiple men required even more products.
In response to women who flooded the workforce in the 1970s, traditional women’s magazines—that is, trade magazines for women who work at home (or, as antifeminists would say, “women who don’t work”)—were joined by New Woman (then a collection of reprints), Savvy, Working Woman, and other trade magazines for women who work outside the home (though they mostly portrayed these jobs as white-collar; since advertisers weren’t interested in low-salaried blue-collar workers, or lower-salaried pink-collar ones in fields where most women work, neither were these magazines). By continuing to publish the fashion/beauty/entertaining articles necessary to get traditional ads and then adding a few career articles on top of that, these new magazines inadvertently helped to create the antifeminist stereotype of Superwoman. (They may also have contributed to their own demise in some cases, for Superwoman made women tired just to read about her.) This male-imitative, dress-for-success woman carrying a briefcase—as well as raising perfect children, cooking gourmet meals, having multiple orgasms, and entertaining beautifully—became the media image of a woman worker. Though women at a real briefcase-carrying level are statistically rare and the glorified secretarial jobs that occupy most women in offices pay less than blue-collar women often earn, advertisers continued to believe that a prime female target must be like her male executive counterpart—only cook, have children, and be sexy besides. Needless to say, dress-for-success women were also thin, white, and beautiful. The majority of women in the workforce might see their family work in traditional women’s magazines, but they rarely see their paid work as secretaries, salesclerks, teachers, and nurses.
Do you think, as I once did, that advertisers make decisions based on rational and uniform criteria? Well, think again. There is clearly a double standard. The same food companies that insist on recipes in women’s magazines place ads in People where there are no recipes. Cosmetics companies support The New Yorker, which has no regular beauty columns, and newspaper pages that have no “beauty atmosphere.”
Meanwhile, advertisers’ control over the editorial content of women’s magazines has become so institutionalized that it is sometimes written into “insertion orders” or dictated to ad salespeople as official policy—whether by the agency, the client, or both. The following are orders given to women’s magazines effective in 1990. Try to imagine them being applied to Time or Newsweek.
• Dow’s Cleaning Products stipulated that ads for its Vivid and Spray ’n Wash products should be adjacent to “children or fashion editorial”; ads for Bathroom Cleaner should be next to “home furnishing/family” features; with similar requirements for other brands. “If a magazine fails for ½ the brands or more,” the Dow order warned, “it will be omitted from further consideration.”
• Bristol-Myers, the parent of Clairol, Windex, Drano, Bufferin, and much more, stipulated that ads be placed next to “a full page of compatible editorial.”
• S. C. Johnson & Son, makers of Johnson Wax, lawn and laundry products, insect sprays, hair sprays, and so on, insisted that its ads “should not be opposite extremely controversial features or material antithetical to the nature/copy of the advertised product.” (Italics theirs.)
• Maidenform, manufacturer of bras and other women’s apparel, left a blank for the particular product and stated in its instructions:
“The creative concept of the ______ campaign, and the very nature of the product itself appeal to the positive emotions of the reader/consumer. Therefore, it is imperative that all editorial adjacencies reflect that same positive tone. The editorial must not be negative in content or lend itself contrary to the ______ product imagery/message (e.g., editorial relating to illness, disillusionment, large size fashion, etc.).” (Italics mine.)
• The De Beers diamond company, a big seller of engagement rings, prohibited magazines from placing its ads with “adjacencies to hard news or anti-love/romance themed editorial.”
• Procter & Gamble, one of this country’s most powerful and diversified advertisers, stood out in the memory of Anne Summers and Sandra Yates (no mean feat in this context) because its products were not to be placed in any issue that included any material on gun control, abortion, the occult, cults, or the disparagement of religion. Caution was also demanded in any issue that included articles on sex or drugs, even for educational purposes.
When I went back to see if these orders were still in effect, my ad agency source said that giving out such information would “breach our contract” with clients, so you’ll have to make your own judgment by looking at those ads and their surroundings in current magazines. But here are three insertion orders given to a national women’s magazine in 1993.
• Kraft/General Foods, a giant with many brands, sent this message with an Instant Pudding ad: “urgently request upbeat parent/child activity editorial, mandatory positioning requirements—opposite full page of positive editorial—right hand page essential for creative—minimum 6 page competitive separation (i.e. all sugar based or sugar free gelatins, puddings, mousses, creames [sic] and pie filling)—Do not back with clippable material. Avoid: controversial/negative topics and any narrow targeted subjects.”
• An American Tobacco Company order for a Misty Slims ad noted that the U.S. government warning must be included, but also that there must be: “no adjacency to editorial relating to health, medicine, religion or death.”
• Lorillard’s Newport cigarette ad came with similar instructions, plus: “Please be aware that the Nicotine Patch products are competitors. The minimum six page separation is required.”
Quite apart from anything else, you can imagine the logistical nightmare this creates when putting a women’s magazine together, but the greatest casualty is editorial freedom. Though the ratio of advertising to editorial pages in women’s magazines is only about 5 percent more than in Time or Newsweek, that nothing-to-read feeling comes from all the supposedly editorial pages that are extensions of ads. To find out what we’re really getting when we pay our money, I picked up a variety of women’s magazines for February 1994, and counted the number of pages in each one (even including table of contents, letters to the editors, horoscopes, and the like) that were not ads and/or copy complementary to ads. Then I compared that number to the total pages. Out of 184 pages, McCall’s had 49 that were non-ad or ad-related. Of 202, Elle gave readers 48. Seventeen provided its young readers with only 51 non-ad or ad-related pages out of 226. Vogue had 62 out of 292. Mirabella offered readers 45 pages out of a total of 158. Good Housekeeping came out on top, though only at about a third, with 60 out of 176 pages. Martha Stewart Living offered the least. Even counting her letter to readers, a page devoted to her personal calendar, and another one to a turnip, only seven out of 136 pages had no ads, products, or product mentions.
Those are only the most obvious chains around women’s magazines. There are also rules so understood that they don’t have to be written down: for instance, an overall “look” compatible with beauty and fashion ads; no fat, grubby, or otherwise unacceptable women (except perhaps if she is a “before” in a beauty makeover, or someone very famous); a minimum of bad news, war, violence, illustrations of unsuccessful plastic surgery, or other insults to an illusion of a marzipan world. Even “real,” nonmodel women photographed for a woman’s magazine are usually made up, dressed in credited clothes, and their photos are retouched. When conscientious editors do include articles on less-than-cheerful subjects (for instance, domestic violence or surviving breast cancer), they often have to keep them short and unillustrated, or use photogenic, upscale examples. (Grace Mirabella, in the magazine that bears her last name, often profiles achieving women, and sponsored a 1993 Washington conference and fund-raiser for breast cancer. But as it appeared in the August issue, you would have thought only beautiful women got breast cancer, and the Armani public relations director was in a modelesque photo at the conference—a couple of pages away from an Armani ad.) The point is to be “upbeat.” Just as women in the street are asked, “Why don’t you smile, honey?” women’s magazines are expected to have an institutional smile.
Within the supposedly editorial text itself, praise for advertisers’ products has become so ritualized that fields like “beauty writing” have been invented. One of its practitioners explained to me seriously that “It’s a difficult art. How many new adjectives can you find? How much greater can you make a lipstick sound? The FDA restricts what companies can say on labels, but we create illusion. And ad agencies are on the phone all the time pushing you to get their product in. A lot of them keep the business based on how many editorial clippings they produce every month. The worst are products [whose manufacturers have] their own name involved. It’s all ego.”
Often, editorial becomes one giant ad. An issue of Lear’s featured an elegant woman executive on the cover. On the contents page, we learn she is wearing Guerlain makeup and Samsara, a new fragrance by Guerlain. Inside, there just happen to be full-page ads for Samsara, plus a Guerlain antiwrinkle skin cream. In the article about the cover subject, we discover she is Guerlain’s director of public relations and is responsible for launching, you guessed it, the new Samsara.
When the Columbia Journalism Review cited this example in one of the few articles to include women’s magazines in a critique of ad influence, Frances Lear, editor of Lear’s, was quoted at first saying this was a mistake, and then shifting to the defense that “this kind of thing is done all the time.”6
She’s right. Here’s an example with a few more turns of the screw. Martha Stewart, Family Circle’s contributing editor, was also “lifestyle and entertaining consultant” for Kmart, the retail chain, which helped to underwrite the renovation of Stewart’s country house, using Kmart products; Family Circle covered the process in three articles not marked as ads; Kmart bought $4 million worth of ad pages in Family Circle, including “advertorials” to introduce a line of Martha Stewart products to be distributed by Kmart; and finally, the “advertorials,” which at least are marked and only look like editorial pages, were reproduced and distributed in Kmart stores, thus publicizing Family Circle (owned by the New York Times Company, which would be unlikely to do this kind of thing in its own news pages) to Kmart customers.7 This was so lucrative that Martha Stewart now has her own magazine, Martha Stewart Living (owned by Time Warner) complete with a television version. Both offer a happy world of cooking, entertaining, and decorating in which nothing critical or negative ever seems to happen.
I don’t mean to be a spoilsport, but there are many articles we’re very unlikely to get from that or any other women’s magazine dependent on food ads. According to Senator Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio, more than half of the chickens we eat (from ConAgra, Tyson, Perdue, and other companies) are contaminated with dangerous bacteria; yet labels haven’t yet begun to tell us to scrub the meat and everything it touches—which is our best chance of not getting sick. Nor are we likely to learn about the frequent working conditions of this mostly female work force, standing in water, cutting chickens apart with such repetitive speed that carpal tunnel syndrome is an occupational hazard. Then there’s Dole Food, often cited as a company that keeps women in low-level jobs and a target of a lawsuit by Costa Rican workers who were sterilized by contact with pesticides used by Dole—even though Dole must have known these pesticides had been banned in the U.S.
The consumerist reporting we’re missing sometimes sounds familiar. Remember the Ms. episode with Clairol and the article about potential carcinogens in hair dye? Well, a similar saga took place with L’Oréal and Mademoiselle in 1992, according to an editor at Condé Nast. Now, editors there are supposed to warn publishers of any criticism in advance, a requirement that might well have a chilling effect.
Other penalties are increasing. As older readers will remember, women’s magazines used to be a place where new young poets and short story writers could be published. Now, that’s very rare. It isn’t that advertisers of women’s products dislike poetry or fiction, if s just that they pay to be adjacent to articles and features more directly compatible with their products.
Sometimes, advertisers invade editorial pages—literally—by plunging odd-shaped ads into the text, no matter how that increases the difficulty of reading. When Ellen Levine was editor of Woman’s Day, for instance, a magazine originally founded by a supermarket chain, she admitted, “The day the copy had to rag around a chicken leg was not a happy one.”
The question of ad positioning is also decided by important advertisers, a rule that’s ignored at a magazine’s peril. When Revlon wasn’t given the place of the first beauty ad in one Hearst magazine, for instance, it pulled its ads from all Hearst magazines. In 1990 Ruth Whitney, editor in chief of Glamour, attributed some of this pushiness to “ad agencies wanting to prove to a client that they’ve squeezed the last drop of blood out of a magazine.” She was also “sick and tired of hearing that women’s magazines are controlled by cigarette ads.” Relatively speaking, she was right. To be as controlling as most advertisers of women’s products, tobacco companies would have to demand articles in flat-out praise of smoking, and editorial photos of models smoking a credited brand. As it is, they ask only to be forewarned so they don’t advertise in the same issue with an article about the dangers of smoking. But for a magazine like Essence, the only national magazine for African American women, even taking them out of one issue may be financially difficult, because other advertisers might neglect its readers. In 1993, a group called Women and Girls Against Tobacco, funded by the California Department of Health Services, prepared an ad headlined “Cigarettes Made Them History.” It pictured three black singers––Mary Wells, Eddie Kendricks, and Sarah Vaughan—who died of tobacco-related diseases. Essence president Clarence Smith didn’t turn the ad down, but he didn’t accept it either. When I talked with him in 1994, he said with pain, “the black female market just isn’t considered at parity with the white female market; there are too many other categories we don’t get.” That’s in spite of the fact that Essence does all the traditional food-fashion-beauty editorial expected by advertisers. According to California statistics, African American women are more addicted to smoking than the female population at large, with all the attendant health problems.8
Alexandra Penney, editor of Self magazine, feels she has been able to include smoking facts in health articles by warning cigarette advertisers in advance (though smoking is still being advertised in this fitness magazine). On the other hand, up to this writing in 1994, no advertiser has been willing to appear opposite a single-page feature called “Outrage,” which is reserved for important controversies, and is very popular with readers. Another women’s magazine publisher told me that to this day Campbell’s Soup refuses to advertise because of an article that unfavorably compared the nutritional value of canned food to that of fresh food—fifteen years ago.
I don’t mean to imply that the editors I quote here share my objections to ad demands and/or expectations. Many assume that the women’s magazines at which they work have to be the way they are. Others are justifiably proud of getting an independent article in under the advertising radar, for instance, articles on family violence in Family Circle or a series on child sexual abuse and the family courts in McCall’s. A few insist they would publish exactly the same editorial, even if there were no ads. But it’s also true that it’s hard to be honest while you’re still in the job. “Most of the pressure came in the form of direct product mentions,” explained Sey Chassler, who was editor in chief of Redbook from the sixties to the eighties and is now out of the game. “We got threats from the big guys, the Revlons, blackmail threats. They wouldn’t run ads unless we credited them.
“But it’s not fair to single out the beauty advertisers, because these pressures came from everybody. Advertisers want to know two things: What are you going to charge me? What else are you going to do for me? It’s a holdup. For instance, management felt that fiction took up too much space. They couldn’t put any advertising in that. Over the last years, the number of fiction entries into the National Magazine Awards has declined.
“And pressures are getting worse. More magazines are more bottom-line oriented, because they have been taken over by companies with no interest in publishing.
“I also think advertisers do this to women’s magazines specially,” he concluded, “because of the general disrespect they have for women.”
Even media experts who don’t give a damn about women’s magazines are alarmed by the spread of this ad-edit linkage to other media. As The Wall Street Journal headlined: “Hurt by Ad Downturn, More Magazines Use Favorable Articles to Woo Sponsors.”9 Women’s products are increasingly able to take their practices with them wherever they go. For instance, newsweeklies publish uncritical stories on fashion and fitness to court ads. Vanity Fair published a profile of Ralph Lauren, a major advertiser, illustrated by the same photographer who does his ads, and turned the lifestyle of another, Calvin Klein, into a cover story. At Longevity, the editor-in-chief quit because publisher Bob Guccione (who invented Penthouse) insisted on running a Nuprin ad featuring tennis star Jimmy Connors right next to a Connors interview, with a photo a lot like the ad.10 Even the outrageous Spy has got tamer since it began to seek fashion ads.
Newspapers seem to give in more often, too. The New York Times Magazine recently ran an article on “firming creams,” complete with mentions of advertisers. Toward the end of 1993, it ran an eight-page article and fashion spread photographed in Vietnam—the same crowded streets and poor countryside we remember from the war. Only now, the Vietnamese were modeling $3,000 Chanel dresses, or clothes from Ralph Lauren, Armani, and other advertisers, all available in New York department stores. (“Eastern dress is subtly sexy,” we are told, “Indo-chic” clothes and “frog closures are like erotic flash points.”)11 As for women’s pages in general, now often called the “Style” or “Living” section, they were originally invented to report on social events given by wives of prominent citizens, often the president of the local supermarket chain or other advertisers. Even now, the commercialism on some of those pages might cause a scandal if transferred to the front page.
Some advertisers of “people products” are also feeling emboldened even when dealing with serious media. Columbia Pictures (part of the Sony empire) recently threatened to withhold ads from the Los Angeles Times as punishment for a scathing review of a Schwarzenegger movie (though it’s rumored that the Times got even by reporting a prostitution scandal involving Columbia executives). Graef Crystal, a former columnist for Financial World who did investigative reporting that helped make excessive corporate salaries a national issue, feels he was fired because of pressure from corporate advertisers; and NBC offered to feature advertisers in a sports program if they would purchase commercials during its breaks.12 “Many journalists, who are paid to see trends,” reported The Wall Street Journal, “think they see an alarming one in their own industry. With newspapers facing tough times financially, they see an increase in the tendency of newspapers to cater to advertisers or pull their punches when it comes to criticizing advertisers in print.”13
And just to make us really worry, films and books, the last media to go directly to the public without having to pass through the minds of advertisers first, are seeing some inroads, too. Producers are beginning to depend on fees paid for displaying products in movies. Books, the chief refuge of in-depth investigative reporting, have been commissioned by companies like Federal Express.
But women’s products—in or out of women’s magazines—have never been the subjects of much serious reporting anyway. Even news and general-interest publications write about food and clothing as “cooking” and “fashion,” though male-oriented banking and financial services wouldn’t be reported with such a cheerful and uncritical eye. Food products are almost never evaluated by brand name, and rarely by category. Though chemical additives, pesticides, and animal fats are major health risks in the United States (for instance, as contributors to the one-in-eight incidence of breast cancer, and one-in-three rate for all cancers combined), they don’t get a fraction of the investigative attention lavished on one political campaign. Clothes take up more of our consumer dollars than cars, but their shoddiness, sweatshop production, and durability are mostly ignored in favor of uncritical fashion stories that would be a Ralph Nader–level scandal if applied to Detroit. The ingredients in beauty products are usually overlooked, too, though they’re absorbed into our bodies through our skins, and also have profit margins that would make a loan shark blush.
The truth is that individuals are fair game for the media and corporations are not—individuals don’t advertise.