Muffin-top Propaganda

Since I was about twelve, I have actively invested a lot of my money in magazines. Nothing beats print press for me. The glossy pages and the smell of adhesive connote feelings of completion and aspirational plateauing. I don’t care how silly that sounds. Elle Magazine gave me hope that one day I would be able to buy a £300 pair of shoes in my lunch break and not have to starve until the next pay cheque. Nine years later and I can comfortably say that probably shan’t happen for me. I’m fine with this. A good magazine allows you to suspend your belief for an hour, allow you to be amongst the beautiful people, the beautiful things. It is a fantasy that we warrant ourselves every now and then.

You can now imagine my haughty derision when I see articles blaming magazines for nine year-olds developing anorexia nervosa. Imagine my raised eyebrow when the Daily Mail runs a story about Jessica Simpson and her inspirational views on body image one day, only to run a longer article nine days later lambasting her for not putting make-up on to take her child to the playground. The ‘body image’ issue is the least of our problems.

Magazines, don’t infantilise me with your ‘we love curves’ stance. I know everything is shopped. Everyone who buys these magazines knows that people do not look like this. We are not silly. We are sophisticated enough to justify buying a £4 magazine and reading it for articles and for ideas and for our own well-being and our own development. I do not subscribe to these magazines and think ‘if I don’t eat for the next six days, I will look like Allison Williams’, because she is a different person to me. She has a different body type to me; she has a different lifestyle to me. The real tragedy is that it doesn’t matter if you know who Allison Williams is or not, because you could just swap her with another up-and-coming twenty-something.


If you think I’m exaggerating, just go and have a gander at the magazine rack in your nearest newsagents or supermarket. Everyone looks the same. There is no variety anywhere – just skinny, white women, with interesting things to say but never anything that actually gets published. What disturbs even more is that they aren’t all Caucasian. The amount of skin lightening that is prevalent in today’s media is disgraceful. Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s US Vogue cover is genuinely the most shocking thing that I’ve ever seen on the front of a magazine. That is if you forget Vanity Fair’s racial profiling (Rudolf as Cleopatra? Rock as Nipsey fucking Russell?). But that’s nothing new.


Even my beloved Elle aren’t out of the woods. Their simpering sycophancy over David Beckham having the decency to grace their humble rag for the twenty-fifth anniversary is still having me cradle my head in feminist ire. British Elle, the most successful fashion publication that the UK has seen turns twenty-five, and they celebrate it by getting a man to grace the cover. Not only did they do this, but they acted as if it was a win for them. This stalwart of the press curtseys to a footballer. They should have played it so that Beckham was the honoured one. But this was not the case, as no man should ever have to bow down to a woman’s monthly. Elle turning twenty-five should have been a celebration of women, and not a reminder that the way we deem worth is still through male consumption.

So, no, I don’t give a flying fuck if you’ve gave Katy Perry a thigh-gap or made Kate Moss a D-cup, I am more concerned about you trying to defer the progress of humanity through patriarchy and white supremacy.