Earlier in the quarter, February 17th to be exact, my new hero and yours Helen Damon-Moore came into class wearing the most amazing grey turtle new plaid pencil skirt combo I have ever seen, ugh flawless, but that’s beside the point. She came into class to talk about magazines (which have been severely overlooked thus far in the WRD career) and certain abstractions they create. Such as Edward Bok who took over Ladies’ Home Journal because he was a dick who couldn’t handle his wife being more successful than him (this is an assumption, but I feel like this is the typical misogynistic ideology that went through the heads of the White Men™ of the time) so he wrote in the magazine about how ladies should act, such as going to bed before 10 pm lest we get too excited. Asshole.
But the sad fact is that not much has changed in terms of magazines targeting a certain demographic and telling them the proper way to act. It’s weird because while we’ve definitely progressed as a society that thinks girls that stay up past 10 are wild, we are still being told what is appropriate for certain demographics except now it goes beyond magazines and can be found in listicle formats in different websites, such as Buzzfeed, HelloGiggles, etc. with titles such as How to Be a Better *insert here* we think we’ve improved from the men telling the women what to do, but now we’re in this weird place where magazines can tell us how to be a better feminist.
