This is my 7/31 post for the Ultimate Blog Challenge... wow. Behind and do-able!
I learned something today that startled me.
Mademoiselle Magazine hasn’t existed since 2001.
“What?” I wanted to compare content I found from a 1970 issue on “The Masculine Mystique” which I found very intelligent and amusing with what they had in today’s magazines.
Instead I found Mademoiselle folded its content into Glamour magazine ten years ago.
I checked to see what Glamour was writing about. It has been a long time since I have sat on the beach with a Glamour magazine by my side, nearly constantly. I didn’t think it had the intellectual content of Mademoiselle then – with the words of writers such as Joyce Carol Oates, Truman Capote, Flannery O’Connor and guest editor Sylvia Plath gracing the pages.
I found the young women reading Glamour have decidedly unthinking content on their mind. Topics like “What do Dudes Wear on Summer Dates” and a revelatory article about how to keep from losing bobby pins in your purse.
Can I even remotely imagine a 2011 Sylvia Plath guest editing such a magazine?
I learned from a young, much hipper than I man at my favorite local coffee house that a magazine similar in content to Mademoiselle might be a magazine whose title is “Female Dog” and he called it a “Feminist Magazine.” I huffed and said, “Right there, if you call it a feminist magazine it will turn off the mainstream young women who need to be reached!”
I visited the Bitch Media website and while it is intriguing and indeed, much smarter, when you have taken a Women’s History class at a local college and none of the young women in the class call themselves feminists and are, in fact, afraid of the word – a magazine like Bitch isn’t going to reach these young women in my mainstream 2011 in Bakersfield, California.
A magazine like Glamour might.
I have to believe the girls reading Glamour would like to go deeper than the most fabulous engagement rings on the market.
I am ashamed I didn't realize any of this until the last couple hours.
I pray I will remember this in the days and weeks to come. My daughters are so much smarter than I was, they and their wise friends and young-women-who-don't-know-yet need to be exposed to smart, funny, slightly or more-than-slightly edgy material.
Am I alone in this opinion? What do you think? Is a cutting edge solution for finding bobby pins really the most important material for your daughter, roommate, neighbor, college and university student to read?
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© 2011
Julie Jordan Scott
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