Passive Consumers vs. Insidious Messages

This post has to be quick because I need to keep working on my paper, but I was reading one of my sources and found something that made me kind of angry. I'm reading a book on women's magazines by Amy Beth Aronson (and I'm only in the introduction so it's possible that I'm jumping the gun here). In the intro, she writes, "Most scholarship has seen the women's magazine as capable of perfect domination, and its popular women readers as phantasmagorically 'feminine': passive, dependent, and witless in the extreme" (Taking Liberties, p. 3).

I don't think this is true. Now, I can't speak for "most scholarship," but I've spent the semester in two sociology courses (one on gender and one on popular culture) and in one English class (on feminism and literature). In none of these classes did we discuss the female readers of women's magazines as passively dominated by the magazines and their messages. That's far too easy (and lazy); the relationship between reader and writer, between the consumer and producer, is much more complicated than that.

The problem with women's magazines, as I see it, is not that women feel the need to blindly take in and emulate the images they find within the pages. The problem is that the images are consistently narrow; the women presented are all the same. Yes, many magazines today present the single, working woman as legitimate (maybe even ideal, at least for a significant time of her life); however, the single working woman is also white, upper middle-class, and thin. The ideal image that women are presented with excludes most of the American population. And even though women tend to look at these magazines knowing that they do not represent reality, we are still left feeling inadequate. If we told, over and over again, that we are not good enough, not thin enough, not pretty enough, not in shape enough, not working enough, not motherly enough, not anything else that these images present enough, we start to believe it, even as we fight not to. How many women have you met who feel guilty for having career ambition? How many women have you met who are against rape, but feel they personally can't say no to unwanted advances? How many women are struggling with body-image issues even when they know that their bodies are healthy, average and sexy?

I haven't finished Aronson's book, so this post may end up being unfair to her writing. Even so, I think this more complicated view of women's magazines (and our culture) is necessary; we have to look at the overwhelming amount of images presenting American women with an impossible ideal (as well as look at the millions of other ways in which women are discriminated against and told they are not enough) in order to effectively understand the effects these magazines may (or may not) have.