Yesterday, while I was skimming through the November 2009 issue of Cosmopolitan, I noticed a few things. Though the magazine is catered towards women, four out of 10 of the headlines had to do with pleasing men or figuring out how their minds worked. As I researched further, 17 of the 58 articles in the issue concerned men in someway. This may not seem like a lot, but after I read those articles (and the 18 other articles about fashion), I noticed that they were all trying to create the perfect woman for a man. Despite the magazine’s tagline of “Fun. Fearless. Female,” the magazine is garnered toward making the reader “better” but for a man, not necessarily for herself.
The November 2009 magazine them was “Bad Girl Issue: For Sexy Bitches Only.” Who would want a bad girl, you ask? According to Cosmopolitan, every single guy out there. In the “Bad Girl” section of this issue, we see famous bad girls, like Kate Moss and Lil’Kim. We also learn how to “Collect as Many Men as You Can Handle,” “Tell a White Lie,” and “Turn Him Into Your Love Slave.”
There’s even a pull-out section where women can “Size Him Up in a Single Glance.” In this handy little pullout, women learn how to “Spot a Man Who Want to Be Approached,” “Decode How He Handles His Drink,” “Read His Lips,” and “His Secret Sign Language.” The magazine, consistently I might add, has only one “important” article per issue. For this issue, it was “Killer Cocktail: How a Popular Drink Could Kill You in Your Sleep,” which is an issue that we should be made aware of, but to only have one per issue, while having several pages of fashion and men, is something that should be changed.
I use the word “learn” on purpose. The magazine is literally teaching women how to act and behave. Some women probably consider this magazine the guide to life in the “real world” where guys and fashion are the focus. The magazine offers an unrealistic view of what women and men want, and even though the view is unrealistic, it gradually becomes real because of all the people reading this magazine. It is a feedback loop: as the magazine offers an idea, the people see it as truth (not realizing that the people behind the magazine are simply people like them and not gods), and begin to act and dress the way the magazine told them to. This then encourages the magazine to start from the beginning. The cycle is never-ending, and none of us are above it. As I sit here with my “Tousled Hair,” wearing my “Hot New Party Dress,” trying to discover what “Men Crave.”
Posted in Feminism in the wider world | No Comments »
I first heard of Rachel Simmons through a profile in Time magazine.
We’ve all heard the stereotype that girls treat each other with greater underhanded cruelty than boys treat each other, à la Mean Girls. Instead of attributing such behavior to biological differences, Rachel Simmons makes the interesting argument that this actually results from girls facing greater social pressure to be nice than boys face. She seems to suggest that because the repressed hostilities need to have expression somewhere, they come out in the manipulative and catty behavior that we recognize.
She writes:
“the pressure girls face to be nice all the time leads them to repress some of their most powerful emotions and deprives them of skills to express those feelings. As a result, a lot of anger gets expressed indirectly, like online or behind someone’s back, earning girls a reputation for being sneaky and cruel. Again, that’s not about girls themselves but about the culture that they’re growing up in.”
While we’ve all noticed that girls can partake in those rituals, I am not sure myself whether I would agree that it is culturally conditioned—or maybe I just never noticed it myself. In my elementary school (and for me, elementary school in Chicago is 1st-8th grade) girls did place indirect social pressure on each other to be nice. I heard my peers say, “Laura is the nicest girl in the class… Michelle is the second-nicest,” as if it were some competition. It did make it seem like niceness was something to aspire to.
On the other hand, I didn’t interpret it as something girls had to aspire to more than boys, but I guess the boys weren’t standing around trying to compare who was nicest (maybe because women are expected to be more nurturing?). I suppose teachers may have been complicit in the stereotype that girls are the nice, well-behaved ones, and there’s a greater expectation that boys will misbehave, but those descriptions never seemed prescriptive to me. I am personally wary of the suggestion that the social pressure pre-exists the stereotype, because I never felt that I had to try to be nice BECAUSE I was a girl. It just seemed like the basic human-being way to behave. Even if boys were thought of as the troublemakers in class, I didn’t feel as if teachers were more lenient towards them when they misbehaved; I didn’t sense a different standard for behavior between boys and girls. Then again, there are limitations in drawing conclusions from personal anecdotes.
Simmons’ generalization about Asian girls and families in the last paragraph also makes me uncomfortable, especially since I find it untrue of my extended family. Furthermore, Asia is such a large continent that such a sweeping generalization cannot accommodate either the subtle or pronounced cultural variations that occur (besides, when I think of Asia, I think of Uzbekistan). It is not clear to me why she thinks she has the authority to make the statement in the last paragraph either, since on her web site she doesn’t seem to have any specialization in Asia-related matters. Even if she had restricted her writing to a particular region of Asia, such as East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, or Asia Minor specifically, I think there is still considerable variation within those subregions. I have found that other journalism about psychological or social attributes about Asians also neglects to take into account noteworthy variations in Asian cultures.
However, I was still curious about her other writings, so I decided to look up her book, Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls. She writes about girls’ underhanded forms of aggression towards each other, the result of societal pressure to be “nice.” I don’t find the prose or the content especially engaging, but I thought these lines were interesting:
“Annie was so afraid of isolation that tolerating abuse seemed like her only option” (61).
“Annie tried to please her friend at any cost, wanting only to save the relationship. Her unremitting focus on staying friends with Samantha allowed abuse to take over the relationship” (61).
“With meanness so intermixed with the relationship, Annie lost the capacity to tell the difference” (61).
Simmons suggests that girls are under a lot of pressure to be nice, regardless of how they are treated. Is the relationship she describes above true of girls? If so, are girls afraid of isolation because it is intrinsically unpleasant, or because they feel social pressure not to be isolated? Is the stigma of isolation worse than the intrinsic negative effects? Which is the greater motivating factor that keeps girls in abusive friendships with each other?
Posted in This is what a feminist looks like | No Comments »
When I first read The Fword I was not sure what the magazine meant by the “feminist void” on Penn’s campus.
But this week, when I was representing the Fword table during the NSO Student Activities Fair and the Kelly Writers’ Open House, a student came up to us and challenged us with the idea of a male advancement group, under the assumption that feminism inherently implies a desire to advance female interests over male interests. Other passersby also seemed to have similar reactions to The Fword without having read the magazine first or asked what, if any, position the members of Fword had on feminism.
I realized that the adverse reaction of some members of the Penn community towards Fword’s existence is proof itself that there is a feminist void– that people challenge the beliefs of feminists without finding out what those beliefs even are. There is an assumption that all feminist thinking falls within a more constrained and narrow-minded framework than it actually does, when in fact Fword defines its objective as the opposite of that. And I realized that this is in fact the feminist void: the discrepancy between what others assume The Fword to be and what it actually is. The goal of The Fword board in the past has been to attempt to unpack and remedy the misconceptions out there about feminism.
It made me think of an article I read in Psychology Today, which seemed to summarize the ideas held by some Fword board members in the past.
More importantly, however, The Fword serves a function beyond feminism, per se. It’s also about learning more about the role that gender plays in our lives, sometimes in ways that we may even take for granted– and I think unpacking those questions does turn out to be a worthy investigation, regardless of whether you call yourself a ‘feminist’ or what your ideological position is. Sex and gender continue to be relevant issues in the news, as we these recent test results suggest.
Just because there are now women serving in high political offices and attending Ivy League institutions doesn’t mean these other issues don’t matter. It doesn’t mean that feminism is past its period of relevance. We continue to publish pieces ranging from creative prose exploring a physically abusive relationship to an academic essay about depression in incarcerated women. So that is my answer to students who turn away from the Fword table just because they think they’re not feminists.
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