Today Fairfax Magazines relaunched Sunday Life, one of the colour supplements distributed with The Sunday Age and Sun-Herald. According to Marketing Magazine the relaunch strategy “includes a new design, larger format and a fresh editorial direction aimed at intelligent women. Featuring in-depth coverage of issues that impact on busy women’s lives, the magazine will also cover relationships and wellbeing.” Well, I’m a woman and after reading Sunday Life this morning I felt bored, condescended to and just plain insulted. Maybe it’s because I’m a humourless feminist but obviously I’m not intelligent, busy or heterosexual enough to truly appreciate what women want.
Here’s a brief synopsis
Mia Freedman, former Editor-In-Chief of Cosmopolitan, Cleo and Dolly asks “How do you tell someone they’re too fat?” (if you are or have ever been fat you know that most people don’t need an invitation to tell you) while columnist Grant Smithies dedicates a whole page to why he finds gap-toothed women so attractive. According to him we should all be lauding Brigitte Bardot, Judy Garland and Jane Birkin as “pioneers” because they “refused to accept Western culture’s narrowly prescribed ideals of female beauty, rejecting cosmetic dentistry and holding on to something that made them look distinctive in a world awash with uniformly tight, white smiles.” Smithies notes in passing that in western Nigeria diastema (being gap-toothed) is considered so attractive that many women have cosmetic dentistry to create the gap, rather than get rid of it. WTF?
Let me remind you again that the target readership of this magazine is intelligent women. Maybe it’s just me but reading some man pontificate for 1000 words or so about his diastema fetish doesn’t strike me as a particularly weighty issue. But then again this is women we’re talking about here; we don’t want to overwhelm them with anything too heavy. So Julia Baird writes about motherhood in Manhattan , Natalie Reilly reviews anti-ageing creams and morning television presenter Melissa Doyle has her dietary habits dissected by nutritionist Dr. Joanna MacMillan. After your friends/boss/partner have told you you’re too fat there’s also tips from Biggest Loser trainer Michelle Bridges on how to tone flabby arms and an article about Chinese medicine and weight loss.
Then there are the feature articles. Perhaps the worst offender is Lisa Pyror’s article “Maid to Order” in which she asks men “What makes the ideal wife? Brains, beauty or child-bearing hips?” The latter two, at least according to “nightclub impresario” Nicholas Atgemis. Atgemis is “fine with the idea of a wife with a career, so long as she stays home with the children for the first seven years or so; years he considers crucial to a child’s development.” (Presumably during this time Atgemis will just carry on being an ” nightclub impresario” while his wife slaves away barefoot, pregnant and probably thankless). According to Atgemis, “a woman’s financial independence is emasculating” but something that “you just have to deal with it.” Tough break! Physical appearance is a factor, too, but less important to him than it once was. “”"It used to be all about beauty when I was younger,” he says. “It was, ‘I want her to be hot; I want all my friends to want her’.”"” Atgemis is also averse to dating women from Sydney, his hometown- a previous girlfriend was Danish and his current girlfriend (he has a girlfriend?!) is Mexican. This is because he finds Sydney to be “like a village”; “[r]eputation follows you around”. He doesn’t want to walk into a party with his girlfriend knowing five of his friends and acquaintances have already dated her. And they say the property paradigm is dead!
Fellow interviewees Justin Moffatt and Luke Keller aren’t much better. Keller admits that in contemplating whether someone is marrying material, he is also contemplating whether they are mothering material and what their future progeny will look like. He’s not as obnoxious as Atgemis but clearly, from the way he describes his current girlfriend, they both have a similar agenda: “Just for the record, she’s a glamour, all right.” Moffatt, an Anglican minister, is perhaps the least offensive but can’t help bringing God and dead theologians into the discussion. Marriage isn’t critically examined at all and gay and lesbian relationships are given the short shrift. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.
The cover story, “First Wives Club”, by Susan Chenery, is about the “new breed of first lady” epitomized by Michelle Obama and Carla Bruni; women who are “redefining ‘wife power’ and even eclipsing their husbands on the world stage.” Imagine that! Inexplicably, Chenery also includes Britain’s Susan Brown and Australia’s Therese Rein into the equation, women who bare more than a striking resemblance to “the helmet-haired Janette Howard and… the meekly librarian Laura Bush” that we “languished with” in the dull 90’s. I guess a “phenomenon” needs more than two women to get it off the ground. Here’s some choice quotes for your perusal:
On Carla Bruni
“No wonder Sarzoky, nastily divorced by his wife, took one look at Carla- they met at a dinner party in November 2007- and married her, all within three efficient months while supposedly single-handedly steering France forward.”
Bitch! Hellcat! How dare she divorce her husband!
“To put it another way, she sure has sexed up the Elysee Palace.”
“Recent footage of Carla tenderly stroking her husband as if he were an indulged lapdog- calling him “chou chou” (little darling)- while he valiantly tried, and failed, to remain looking statesmenlike, left us in no doubt that his sexual thrall in his wife easily rivals Napoleon’s famous ardour for Josephine.”
“The reappearance of the old Carla, topless and biting into a red, ripe fig, its juices dribbling carnally down her chin, would probably guarantee re-election. But, the, the old Carla would probably have devoured Nicolas Sarkozy, spat him out and moved on to the next conquest by then.”
On Michelle Obama:
“And that such an intelligent, high-achieving woman could be as girly and real as the rest of us was a highlight of the campaign, when Michelle defiantly went off-message and confided that, like any ordinary bloke, Barack drove her crazy because he didn’t put his socks in the washing basket, was “snorey and stinky” at night, that her six year old daughter was better at making her bed and that, even after all these years, he had never got the hang of putting the butter in the fridge after he made his own breakfast. Could it be he was pussy-whipped by a woman with obvious upper-body strength? But Michelle admonished, “Do you really think anyone could emasculate Barack Obama? Really, now.”"”
“…the truth is that she has always said that her children were her priority and that her job was essentially “Mom-in-Chief.”
On Sarah Brown
“Sarah flies economy, blogs and Twitters, is low maintenance, not pushy, and, most importantly, is not Cherie Blair.”
“Forced to give up her business when she married a man of overweening ambition in 2000, Sarah has concerned herself with her two small boys, one of whom has cystic fibrosis.”
“Described as “kind” and “thoughtful” by those who know her, Sarah’s lack of personal vanity, her self-deprecating sense of humour, non-whingy (Cherie) and non-grabby (Cherie again) ways, and her lack of interest in trivialities such as shoes, has resonated with the public because she embodies qualities that are so terribly British.”
Viva la revolution!
The magazine is also peppered with advertising that targets (white, middle-class) women. Chocolate, Dubai jewellers, sulfate and paraben-free beauty products, Brisbane fashion week and European kitchen appliances all get run. So do bank ads with buffed gym-junkies, high-end fashion, cage-free eggs (“Every night’s a hen’s night when you’re cage free.” Cue visual of egg in a bridal veil) and Audrey Tautou’s new film. In the end I felt angry and depressed. Anyone who’s prepared to gloat at 1950’s women’s journals or their old teen magazines should think again. Sexism is alive and well, only it’s repackaged as “lifestyle and well-being”. The impression I get from Sunday Life is that women are still valued only as sex-objects and baby-incubators. Intelligent and high-achieving women are but an aberration. Fortunately, most of them like make-up and shoes just as much as “the rest of us” and all of them are happily prepared give up work and devote themselves to producing genetically superior heirs instead.
It frightens me that we’re immune to this kind of casual sexism.In many cases, we actively consume it. Fairfax, this women is not impressed.
Edit: Forgot to mention the back page interview with novelist Nikki Gemmell entitled “What I Know About Men”.
2 Comments
July 3, 2009 at 11:56 am
Hi. I’m not out to comment on the whole package of the Sunday Life magazine. I’ve never read or looked at it until this weekend. And I won’t comment on Atgemis’ views. Clearly they were placed first up because they were the most bizaare.
But, naturally, I’m interested in this:
Moffatt, an Anglican minister, is perhaps the least offensive but can’t help bringing God and dead theologians into the discussion.
Thanks for the comment that I am least offensive (I think…)! But I’m interested to know why ‘bringing God and dead theologians’ is a ‘but’ for you. Why do you think that this is on the offensive side of things?
(Pryor asked me a personal question, and gave a personal answer.)
July 3, 2009 at 12:36 pm
Hi Justin,
I don’t think Atgemis’s views are bizarre. Unfortunately I think they’re quite commonplace. What is unsual is his candour. Many, many men share his views, they are just less explicit and/or don’t voice them in mixed company.
And yes, “least offensive” is high praise coming from someone who thinks the institution of marriage (and, more broadly, heterosexuality) is largely irredeemable! I don’t think that “bringing God and dead theologians” into the discussion is inherently offensive (and I wasn’t offended by your interview), more problematic. I think that bringing patriarchal institutions of any kind, secular or religious, into one’s intimate relationships always presents a challenge for feminists.
While it’s true that early feminists (in the late 19th and early 20th centuries) coopted the language of Protestantism to challenge men’s sexuality, I think the jury’s still out among feminists (and feminist theologians) as to whether patriarchal religion can be reformed and used for feminist ends. I find the (secular) socialist feminism of the 1960s and ’70s to be similarly problematic.
I hope that this answers your question.