Be it Cosmopolitan, Verve or Women’s Era, they lower self esteem. The fact that some of them are available in Hindi and Kannada makes it even more distressing. Most of these magazines are editorially alarmist and politically biased. The problem stems from the conceit that women are victims. Do women spend their days worrying whether antiperspirants cause breast cancer or wondering if a long airline ride will cause a fatal blood clot? Or are we just observing today’s favourite media technique to paint women’s lives to women audiences as a picture of accumulated woes?
What’s worse is that even men are falling for it. If magazine surveys are to be believed, a large number of men read women’s magazines. Which means, these magazines find their way into homes where their mothers, daughters and wives get to read them, too. And this makes it even more worrisome.
The truth is out there. A typical women’s magazine is just a ‘survival kit’ for the un-liberated and edited for advertisers, not readers. Most publication houses use the female fear factor to sell magazines. There is a big difference between creating change and creating a stir. And women’s magazines create a stir that’s unnecessary. Take Cosmopolitan, Gurlz or even Verve and New Woman. Most of the articles are from a western perspective. You even have foreign models showcasing most of their stories. Not much is actually Indianised, so what are we selling to Indians? The West? And if that is indeed the agenda, then we are on the wrong track. For long, women’s magazines in the West have been pushing chemicals into the hands of unwary women in the name of health and hygiene. Editors must realise that they are often manipulating their female readership with negative messages and one-sided politics. It was convenient to tell women about their stress, their fears, their woes in the 90’s. But I don’t like what these magazines have become. They use over-the-top cover headlines to compete on the newsstand and to create insecurity that makes women the willing consumers that advertisers crave. Articles about stress, a hardy perennial, are mostly conjured. A woman comes home from work and she has to choose between chicken biryani and ghee rice, and that becomes stress. It’s silly.
I find pathology everywhere I look on the magazine rack. To judge by the articles, women are always in danger of being hunted and killed by the opposite sex. “He is going to kill me! Is anybody listening?” read one Glamour headline. The perils are everywhere. “The Health Hazard in Your Handbag” read the headline on another article.
Much of contemporary women’s magazines are built on chronic fakery. Insiders have revealed that quotations are changed or invented, celebrity profiles are sanitised where anything unpleasant or offensive is deleted pronto, and photos are altered at whim to suit the magazine’s glamour quotient.
So the next time you see a so-called Indianised version of Cosmo or Verve, think again. Is this really a ‘survival kit’ or just a glorified pamphlet from the beauty industry?
