Just to let you know, this is not going to be an article discussing the Kardashians, because they are a really easy target of the media. I am going to discuss another easy target which is how many women's magazines (Elle, Cosmopolitan, and the like) really give women nothing but ads, false body images, and other lies. As I have said before, this is also an easy target, but in spite of constant efforts to shoot down the way women's magazines portray women, this type of feminine defamation still happens.
Part of my reason for discussing this issue is a recent YouTube video by Oskar T. Brand, which you can see below. According to his website, Brand is a "sit-down comedian" who likes to "make people think and laugh". The issue is that the video below made me cry, and I am not even the intended audience.
Chances are, the video of "Stay Beautiful: Ugly Truth in Beauty Magazines" didn't tell you anything you didn't already know, only that certain women's magazines (Elle and Cosmopolitan are used in his example) are 85 percent ads. That means that they are more product catalogs than actual magazines.
Of the 15 percent articles that are in magazines such as these, most of them are hardly empowering to women. You can see examples with the two different versions of the same Cosmopolitan October 2016 cover here. I'm actually not certain why there are two versions of this cover, but the one on the right I had to do a serious search for, as if Cosmopolitan doesn't want its readers to know that it exists.
Most of the articles are about how to get a better body or to please a man sexually. The Brand video also explains how all the women inside are touched-up digitally, which is probably the case for Kourtney Kardashian on the cover.
All of these fabrications results in creating "content dedicated to making you [women] feel imperfect and inadequate". Brand's next claim is that 70 percent of women feel guilty, ashamed and depressed after only 3 minutes of reading a fashion magazine. Then the video provides a list of models and celebrities with an alleged history of eating disorders, and it is quite long.
If you have made it this far, then you are probably thinking that this is just another news story telling you bad news that you already know. The issue is why isn't anything being done about this? These magazines could easily be devoted to issues of female empowerment rather than fashion, but they aren't.
I'm going to "go there" and compare this issue of the ugly truth of beauty magazines with slavery. I'm certain that when the first Abolitionists complained about the human rights violations of Africans, most slave owners ignored them, because their lives were easier with having slaves. The question that I am asking is: who is being made better when women's magazines have content like this? If anything women are being set back, and what revolution will it take before this changes?
