Books
Our Media, Ourselves
Dieting Again? Blame It on the Liberals
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Spin Sisters: How the Women of the Media Sell Unhappiness — and Liberalism — to the Women of America
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Here’s what passes for political argument these days:
Myrna Blyth, a former editor-in-chief of Ladies’ Home Journal who says she used to be a “registered liberal!!!!,” devotes a whole chapter of Spin Sisters to describing how women’s magazines and television programming are pulling “one of the shabbiest of all media scams” by featuring skeletal young models, unwearable fashions, and unworkable diets, all of which end up making most women not slender and hip, just ashamed and unhappy. It’s the “Tyranny of the Skinny,” says Blyth, who confesses, nicely, that she regrets having succumbed to it on occasion herself in her own magazine, and she calls it harmful and unfair to readers. And she’s absolutely right.
But who’s to blame for this tyranny? According to Blyth, it’s the women of the liberal media, those Spin Sisters who are the focus of the book. Rich, glamorous, pampered, and self-obsessed, the media’s most influential females are, says Blyth, out of touch with what most women want and need. (Before “trim and toned” Diane Sawyer came along, of course, the women of America were perfectly content with their looks — those corsets and girdles were just for fun.)
And who, in Blyth’s view, bears only a fraction of the responsibility for America’s obsession with image? The advertisers, to whose demands, Blyth acknowledges, “slavish attention” is paid but whose power, she seems to argue, is also the Sisters’ fault, since “once upon a time, women’s magazines . . . clearly separated advertising and editorial. The editors were editors who told things to their readers, not sold things.” (By “once upon a time” she clearly didn’t mean the past of her own LHJ, which in 1913, for instance, explicitly promoted itself to advertisers as a “trade journal” for the housewife — a tool to teach her how to “purchase her raw materials.”)
Who’s not mentioned at all, not once, in this “survey” of women’s magazines? That would be Ms. — the strongly liberal publication that for thirty years has been making precisely Blyth’s arguments about unrealistic standards for female beauty.
And who, in her discussion of how the Spin Sisters helped Hillary Clinton rehabilitate her tattered image, invokes the image of Monica Lewinsky “snapping her jumbo-sized thong”? Why, it’s Myrna Blyth herself, pointing out that the president — a liberal, of course — had an affair with a woman with (hee hee) a big bottom!
A similar penchant for corkscrew logic, addled nostalgia, and schoolyard taunts mars Blyth’s exploration of another intriguing and important issue. Although today’s women are “the best-educated, healthiest, wealthiest, longest-lived women with more opportunities for personal fulfillment than any other generation in history,” she says, the news and entertainment media alike endlessly peddle stories that show women as victims — of crime, scams, discrimination, stress, doctors, disease, men. Blyth, of course, sees this as another ploy of the liberals, who “have always needed victims” to “define themselves . . . as such obviously caring people” and to provide a “power base” that will support their demand for more government programs.
Perhaps. Maybe Dateline did betray a liberal bias by suggesting, in a “weepy” August 2000 program about unemployed people without health care, that it was government’s responsibility to solve the problem instead of demanding, as Blyth did, why those folks didn’t just get a job. But she also leaves completely unmentioned the many other possible explanations for the popularity of victim stories, which have historical precedents aplenty, among them the fact that significant movements of women away from “traditional” female roles to pursue jobs, wealth, or fulfillment have often aroused widespread social anxieties — real, imagined, and downright theatrical — about their sanity, their safety, their chastity, their children, and, not coincidentally, the status quo. Those white slavers in the big city, for instance, would never have so imperiled Pauline in the Saturday afternoon serials if Pauline and her flesh-and-blood sisters had stayed home with Mom and Pop where they belonged.
It’s a shame. Deep inside Blyth’s book is a serious critique struggling to get out, but it’s outshouted by the partisan snarkiness she can’t resist and undercut by the murky reasoning she can’t disguise. To explain why we should be concerned that the Sisters “have far more cultural and political influence than you might imagine,” all she gives us is a chapter sketching the “Media Queens” at lunch at a trendy Manhattan restaurant. We learn that they are “mostly Botoxed,” they are “hard-driving,” they are “wildly competitive,” they have a “tough streak” and a “fierce temper”; they air-kiss and they are fussy about their Cobb salad. In other words: the reason we shouldn’t listen to liberals is that they’re not like you and they’re not even nice.
All right. Let’s call a truce. Let’s stipulate that conservatives are in fact right: the personal political views of many prominent journalists are more liberal than their audiences’, and it’s easy for media elites — just like business or political elites — to lose touch with the lives of ordinary people. Let’s also stipulate that liberals are in fact right: corporate owners, executives, and advertisers can exert a strong and generally conservative influence on the media, and the great majority of the experts and sources interviewed by the mainstream media do tend to be white male power brokers. Let’s stipulate as well that anyone, whether liberal, moderate, conservative, or “don’t know/no opinion,” can find plenty to criticize in the media.
And then let’s move on. Like most of the current books gleefully pursuing what has become an endless and stagnant preoccupation with the political persuasions of media people, Spin Sisters raises some good questions but makes impossible any rational discussion of them. If we really want to open a serious public conversation about the media’s relationship with half their audience, the way to get there is not with a book that blames liberalism for making women feel bad about their thighs.
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