November 20th, 2007
Everything I need to know I learned from In Touch Magazine
Everything about misogyny, fat-hating, postcolonialism and consumerism, that is.
In a delightful feature under the heading “body news,” we’re informed about the “Spice Girls’ Body War!” wherein they are “battling to see who will look the best” on their upcoming tour. I’m not under any kind of delusion that the Spice Girls are feminists, but isn’t it at least possible that some of them actually like each other? That their tour isn’t going to be one big competitive catfight over who’s the hottest? The most outrageous part is the teeny paragraph of text about Victoria Beckham, AKA Posh Spice: “Too Skinny To Tour: Stick-thin Victoria has reportedly been ordered to gain weight to cope with the rigors of three months on the road. Usually living on just fruit and veggies, Posh has been put on a spinach-rich diet to increase her stamina, plus brown rice with every meal to pile on the pounds.”
Excusez-moi? Spinach is a departure in what way from her usual diet of fruits and veggies? It gives you stamina? And brown rice piles on the pounds? I can just hear thousands of anorexic girls across the US pushing away their plates as they read that. There’s a slight counterpoint provided here by Mel C.’s expressed determination not to let the “Body War” revive her anorexia, but she’s reported as eating “foods like goji berries and pomegranate smoothies.” Hardly pigging out on Cheetos, I’d say–and hardly the kind of food your average teenager can afford. The way this crap feeds right into the health police and their ideas about food and weight pisses me right the hell off. Of course no one will notice that Posh’s reported eating habits are direct evidence that many women stay smaller than they would otherwise be through chronic self-starvation. I can’t even imagine how intense the pressure must be when people are writing up what you eat in a national magazine.
Okay, this ad scared the shit out of me. I don’t know how old this model actually is, but here she looks, what, 14? Since we know that nothing in advertising happens by accident, and that marketers usually target kids slightly younger than those featured in the ads, that means that this clothing is being marketed to 12-year-old girls. Twelve-year-olds are being encouraged to sexualize themselves and see their bodies as some man’s property. To proclaim a man’s ownership of them via the clothing “you design!” Did I miss something? Did the 1970s never happen? Was “my body belongs to me!” a figment of my fevered feminist brain?Wal-Mart also pimps pre-teen girls to sell $10 hooded sweatshirts.
If you got it, flaunt it, and even if you don’t, I guess. Work the camera for daddy, girls. In a culture where men sexually abuse one in three girls, ads like this are criminal.
Asian woman in shackles, anyone?
But it’s for a good cause! The nice diamond people want to help “empower” the poor Africans–after they’re done with their exploitation and profit-making, of course. When you buy the $125 shackle, I mean, bracelet, “twenty dollars or more will go towards the Diamond Empowerment FundTM. Show the world the depth of your caring.” See how compassionate they are? And it’s Green and everything! Just like the bracelets! Because a mostly naked Asian woman wearing “jade” doesn’t recall, like, a racist porn stereotype or anything.
And last but most certainly not least, under “The hottest questions of the week” I was really relieved to learn that white celebrities’ right to accessorize with children of color won the instant poll by a slim margin over the alternative to “donate money to foreign orphanages.”
“Stars can give orphaned children a better life after they adopt them,” opines Danielle Ramirez of Washington, D.C. Well, of course, it’s much better for one orphaned infant to have a lifetime of nannies, limousine rides, and compassionate, empowered diamonds than for a whole orphanage full of kids to have, oh, I don’t know, food. (No brown rice, though, because we wouldn’t want them to pile on the pounds.) I hope the 55% of respondents who answered “No” to that ridiculous donating money thing are ready when that celebrity wanting to give their kids a better life shows up on the doorstep with a teddy bear and a designer wardrobe from Petit Trésor.
Oh, and news flash–Britney’s a bad mother.
The coverage of poor Britney is such a hellish mish-mash of condemning her for doing things lots of mothers who had two kids real fast real young do every day, while simultaneously ignoring the unique situation she’s in by virtue of her high profile and the media’s constant scrutiny. There also seems to be this weird reversal going on where, if Britney’s a bad mom, that must make K-Fed a good dad. Ah, no. I seem to recall just a couple years back he was being vilified in the press for being a no-talent gold-digging cling-on who was slapping chicks on the ass in Vegas the day after he split with Brit. Suddenly he’s transformed, by Britney’s poor judgment, into Mr. Mom? How nice for him.
Geez louise. When you spend some time ignoring this stuff and then go back to it, the obnoxiousness really punches you right in the gut. I could have scanned the entire magazine and vented my spleen about every single page, really, but it all makes me just so tired. I want the revolution, dammit.
