Letters to the Editor
Sandra M
Published Letters: 578 Editor's Choice: 139
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You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear
[Read the article: Fashion faux pas]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Is anyone really surprised that Atoosa Rubenstei, editor of Seventeen, is into starving herself for pretty clothes? She works for a magazine that exists for one reason, and one reason only - to sell products to girls. In order to better sell those products, the editorial slant creates a perceived need for those products by telling women then need to fix themselves - fix their weight, wrinkles, cellulite, sun damage, hair color, hair highlights, you name it.
I have always found something insidious about these magazines talking about self-esteem, pretending to be 'for' women while secretly undermining them with the message that they need endless, endless fixing.
Girls are never going to get positive messages from the fashion rags. To suggest this is, or should be, a goal of these magazines is laughable. How many men do you think seriously see Esquire and Maxim and GQ acting as a compass by which to navigage the world, and a legitimate means for measuring their self-worth? Those magazines sell things to their audience too, but mostly it's stuff that purports to make a man's life better, more interesting, more fun. Not improving the man, but the man's life. And, with Esquire at least, there is some attention to the life of the mind - the fiction is good and the political essays are intersting. And any objectifcation going on is of the oppostie sex, and for pleasure. Women's mags, by contrast, objectify our own sex....and nearly everything in these periodicals points to improving the woman's physical self, with the implied promise that this will bring the rewards of landing a man.
I wasn't surprised to see Rubenstein's remark, and I think it's hypocritical to ask her to pretend she really doesn't think that way, when flipping through her magaizne for five seconds tells us that yes, she clearly DOES feel that way...as do all of the contributors and advertisers comprising the magazine's content. It would be downright bizarre to have this woman espousing a healthy diet and a 'we're all beautiful on the inside' message when the value of the products she is selling is predicated on the idea that no, women aren't good enough as they are, and never will be.
The answer isn't for Atoosa to become a hypocrite, mouthing the party line about loving youself for who you are no matter what size you are, all the while filling the pages of the mag with pictures of rail thin models, expensive handbags and shoes, a plethora of unnecessary clothing and accessories and a virtual avalanche of beauty products for hair, nails, skin, face and body that send the exact opposite message.
The answer is for women to stop lapping up the crap the fashion rags sell them. It's not likely to happen, though, until women stop accepting and perpetuating the notion that beauty and sex appeal are the most important qualities for a woman to possess. Stop blaming men, stop blaming the media....take responsibility and stop playing the game. Stop buying magazines that promise to tell you how 101 ways to make him wild/lose weight/firm up that cellulite/look 10 years younger. Don't buy it and don't buy into it.
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More stirring the pot with bad research
[Read the article: Are female boomers getting any, or not?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Daphne Merkin posits that 'Sheehy has not dealt honestly" with the realities of dating after 50 based on a single incident she had with a 50-something J-date dude. Hardly scientific.
Why are there no stories out there about 40-50-something men not getting any? Are they ALL getting laid by younger women? Really? Are the younger men only having sex with the older women the older men (and the younger men) don't want relationships with? Or are the younger women having sex with the older men AND the younger men while the older women get left out? Are the younger women having sex with the older women for the same reasons they are having sex with the older men? Gee. It's all so confusing. And tiring, if you're a younger woman.
It's ridiculous to think men at any age are motivated by egg freshness, either consciously or un. How unfair to them, and how limiting for women to give head room to that sort of crap. Seems to me that men are motivated by getting the best-looking woman who will have them who meets all their other critiera. For the most part, so are women. I've dated guys aged 29 to 56 (I'm 43). The richest one was 29. The most mature one was 32. The best body goes to the 40-year old. The nicest was 46. The bitterest guy was 37. I simply can't cast a stereotype net over the whole group and come up with a pithy overarching obervation that would be true. When I look around me - and I travel a lot, domestically and internationally - most couples seem to be w/in +/- 5 years of one another, regardless of the decade they are in. What universe does Merkin live in?
Men reject women for all kinds of reasons. But I bet they reject Daphne Merkin because she's a bitter know-it-all who draws spurious causal links and engages in specious reasoning in order to blame men for the desperate fear of aging that is destroying her sex life.
"Merkin is the Friday turd at the Saturday market" - gotta love that.