Glossy Women’s Magazines. Where Feminism Goes to Die

Roger Hislop

Why are mass-market women's magazines in South Africa so uniformly awful? With a few exceptions, it's just dross, dross and more dross. I'm a bloke, so maybe I'm not qualified to comment. So I checked with female friends and colleagues: professional, successful women, some with kids, some without. All despair. They pick up a women's mag occasionally, more from a fading habit than because the expect anything special.

Glamour. Cosmopolitan. Awful. Awful. Awful. Tedious. Repetitive. Synthetic flavouring and non-nutritive sweetener.

Fairlady. Femina. Little better. More pretentious, with more "serious issues" handled in the same lightweight, bite-size chunks, referencing the work of so-called topic specialists that are at best dial-a-quotes, the journalism equivalent of Heinz two-minute chicken noodles.

I pick up the international versions of these titles sometimes, and while they're hardly Vanity Fair, there is at least a sense of journalism, of editorship, of respect for the reader (that being said, they vary wildly - maybe I just struck it lucky).

The women's mags take fluff, and dumb it down even more. It's a monthly compendium of regurgitated pap. Flat tummy now! Better sex in five steps! What your lover never told you that would blow his mind! Stand up to your boss!

A litany of trivial, senseless nonsense. The editors are saying in 45-point sans serif font on every cover: "SA women? You are pointless, helpless and hapless, and even though you know you will never be Charlize Theron, Maria Ramos or Wendy Luhabe, the neediness and inadequacy that suffuses your needy and inadequate being is catnip for our advertisers."

God help SA women if these magazines are really a pfenster on their lives. More like a raphaeling for bankruptcy.

There are a couple of mags that are trying. Destiny tries to give the professional, intelligent woman something that talks to the real life she leads, rather than the stereotype-smothered vanilla Twinkie of a life that editors of the rest of the women's mags project onto their readers. For good or ill, though, Destiny has zoomed in on the urban black career-women living in Jo'burg. We need more.

There is a massive market opportunity in women's mag publishing for something a little smarter, a little less addicted to taking the safe, easy editorial option, and a lot more readable.

The glossy women's mags don't have features, they have compendia of soundbites and fact files loosely organised around the tepid opinions of the month's tame psychologist/style consultant/life coach. These magazines don't have points of view, they have top tips. The only principled stand they take is a grovelling adoration of luxury brands. They don't contain information, they polish turds.

I can forgive creative work many things (and a popular magazine is, at it's essence, a creative exercise, not intellectual) - bitchiness, bias, bitterness...

But I can't forgive them for being stupid, and I can't forgive them for being dull.

More than anything else, I'd like to see a few of the many talented, smart, informed, no-bullshit women journalists get together, pull in a couple of good men (to keep the womenfolk from straying back to make-up secrets and vacuous dissection of relationships), and veer off the well-trodden trail of current convention to produce the women's magazine that South African women deserve.

• 2009/09/25
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