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The Mr. Peanut chronicles
Burned by past disasters, icon managers have learned the hard way that the suave mascot must never wear a wetsuit and that Ronald McDonald cannot hang out in bars.
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[02/23/00]

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The other problem with the gender-casting that drives women's magazines is a social ill: the reduction of gender identity to its lowest common denominator, personal appearance. This happened because somewhere along the line, some marketing genius figured out that all women wear some women's clothes and most of them wear some makeup.

All of us, male and female, are ill served by this trivialization of femininity, this equation of womanhood with the application of cosmetics and personal care.

It was not always thus. Even in the most repressive Victorian circumstances, women were granted the dignity of being esteemed for their character, and the tasks they were supposed to be good at, while no matter of choice, were not all ridiculous.

Is it more prestigious to be renowned for your bread-making or for your mascara application? For your church attendance or your knowledge of where to get a great facial? Yes, femininity is always going to be a social construct, but the version the women's mags market is a particularly mediocre one.

Moving back further in time, think about how rarely Jane Austen speaks of the appearances of her heroines, or for that matter of their clothes. Certainly these ladies lived in relatively oppressive circumstances. We would not trade places.

But they had the dignity, charm and allure of human beings whose identities were based on their character rather than their superficies. They spent their leisure hours riding or walking in the country rather than shopping for nail polish or conditioner. They danced at balls, not in classes at gyms.

Today's women's magazines are 19th century in their insistence on the indoors as woman's sphere. The world of the women's magazines is an indoor world, one of trying on clothes, of shopping for makeup and applying it. Even the exercise recommended is of the indoor variety -- aerobics, exercise classes, yoga. The emphasis in fitness is on "toning" rather than strength, on avoiding risk rather than finding pleasure in it. For every one article on some very mild adventure travel there are 10 on spas.

I know these magazines are supposed to be fun, to allow women the playfulness of experimenting with self-image and ornamentation. Of course those can be good things, in their place. But most of the women's magazines offer their readers the merest shadow of real, spine-tingling, breath-catching fun.

Most of the magazines offer a scaredy-cat hedonism of puerile pleasures like baths and massages, with a childishly erotic undercurrent. Maybe this diffuse eroticism is meant to appeal to women who want to avoid genital sexuality. And despite the celebrated emphasis of Cosmopolitan and its imitators on sex, their typical sex technique piece has all the erotic charge of an aerobics manual.

Young readers don't realize that the content is driven not by some definitive vision of what a woman is, but only by outdated visions of what women will buy. The magazines themselves have become institutions, part of our culture's definition of femininity, but we forget that their version of womanhood is but a blip in the great screen of time.

Capitalism may have created this monster, but even more capitalism is bringing it to an end. That is what is wonderful about the time we live in, and why I love capitalism: Greater efficiency and lower search costs in the exchange of information and goods do lead to greater freedom in the ways we invent ourselves.

We owe a lot of this freedom to the commercial exploitation of the Internet, and to the libertarian culture it brews. I am sympathetic to some of the observations and arguments of writers like Paulina Borsook about the shallowness of e-commerce culture. But I am overwhelmingly grateful to everyone who made it possible. Never have so many holes been dented so quickly in what looked like a monolithic culture.

At 41, I remember well what it was like to grow up in the '60s, when intelligence and interest in the sciences marked you as a weirdo in school, when half of one's questions were answered, "That's just the way it is," when women and blacks and Jews all knew their places. How good it is that we are no longer there.

I am always amazed to read that women aren't supposed to be quite comfortable online, or that we need special (third rate) Web sites of our own. Hello? The Web has given women (and people of color) a splendid new chance to defy those who would stereotype us. The only question is whether we have the courage to seize these opportunities, or whether we will continue to be the prisoners of gender -- this time in cells we build for ourselves.
salon.com | May 5, 2000

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