The V Spot

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett and Holly Baxter of the Vagenda Magazine

Women's magazines: exposing their vagenda

You’re no body if nobody loves you, say Rhiannon and Holly from The Vagenda in their first blog for

By Rhiannon and Holly Published 14 May 2012 10:50

Shay Mitchell signs her Seventeen magazine front cover. New Jersey, March 2012. Photograph: Getty Images

A vagenda is a woman with an agenda, or specifically a vagina with an agenda. Today’s media is full of them. Unfortunately, more often than not, these vagendas are not your friend - particularly in the context of women’s fashion and lifestyle magazines, which, quite frankly, have come to constitute one of the most underhanded instances of woman-on-woman crime. Fact is: Vogue has a vagenda, Cosmo has a vagenda, and even American teen mag Seventeen has a vagenda - and the vibe in there is not friendly.

Last week saw the meeting of two very different worlds: those of America’s Next Top Model presenter and Seventeen editor-in-chief Ann Shoket, and 14 year old body image campaigner Julia Bluhm. What was Julia’s beef with Seventeen? Namely that a publication targeted at teenage girls – who, by their very nature, are going through the hormonal shitstorm that is puberty, with all the insecurities that come with it – is touting an airbrushed version of physically impossible so-called perfection. Her petition against airbrushed images garnered an encouraging 30,000 signatures in the same week that Vogue editors worldwide agreed not to hire models with unhealthy BMIs. That’s progress, right?

Unfortunately, Seventeen’s response was the equivalent of a nursery school teacher patting a problem child on the head and calling their latest crimson finger-painting a masterpiece of incredible cultural significance. "We're proud of Julia for being so passionate about an issue – it's exactly the kind of attitude we encourage in our readers," simpered what we presume to have been the intern, since she was the only person taking calls. "They had a great discussion, and we believe that Julia left understanding that Seventeen celebrates girls for being their authentic selves, and that's how we present them."

What did they do to Julia during her time at Seventeen? To invoke Godwin’s Law, she came out of her meeting with the editor exhibiting a winning combination of optimism and total lack of guarantees, much akin to Neville Chamberlain’s famed "peace in our time" fandango. One pictures a totalitarian "re-education" process in which Julia was forced to watch incessant footage of chirpy cheerleaders in hotpants on treadmills, interspersed with subliminal advertising for the "cherry lip-gloss diet" and periodic snide remarks about her thigh gap (or lack thereof). What Julia has done was truly admirable, but why do we still believe that Seventeen’s thong-clad vagenda is sitting tight? Their inability to commit to one single image free from digital enhancement per issue shouts louder than an America’s Next Top Model contestant faced with the inevitable haircut.

The fact is that women’s magazines nowadays constitute a minefield of body fascism. When you flick through one ("read" is probably too strong a word for the image-and-Tweetspeak-heavy content on offer), you’re always dodging another insecurity explosion. Whether it’s Rihanna’s 25-minute underwear workout (yes, it’s a real thing) or snake venom infused lip-gloss, the underlying message throughout is that you are your body, and your body isn’t good enough.

There has been scant analysis of the effects of women’s magazines outside of the fashion arena. While the "size zero" debate provoked an ironically hefty amount of media attention, the written content of the magazines themselves has attracted less ire. Luckily, we have enough for everyone – and since we launched our blog, The Vagenda, women’s magazines have become our bête noir. Too often the focus has been on men - on page three and lads’ mags - when in fact the women’s magazine market could be seen as equally, if not more, damaging. This is why the term "patriarchy", with all its strictly masculine implications, just doesn’t cover it anymore.

What makes it difficult to be a woman nowadays is a complicated issue, but it starts at thirteen with your first encounter of "love your body, but try this diet." By the time you’re 23, you’re lucky if you’re not lying face-down next to a teetering avalanche of "it" bags, examining your cankles in suicidal horror. While magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Glamour may preach body confidence in their saccharine features, such cloying words of reassurance fall on deaf ears when juxtaposed with Photoshopped hotties and plastic surgery advertorial that includes such outlandish proclamations as "I hated every kilo on my body."

Photoshop, and Photoshopped images, are now so normalised that we barely register when we are confronted with skin so poreless that it has the silky texture of the Ambrosia custard that "100 ways to please your man" suggests you should be spreading on your boyfriend’s throbbing member. Alongside the obvious, an undeniably sad consequence of this is the rampant neglect of Photoshop’s untapped potential. Being as it is an immensely potent piece of software, it’s disappointing that it’s being used to skinnify limbs rather than to superimpose wings, unicorn horns or mermaid tails onto its unsuspecting victims. The women we see within these pages - their perky tits, their tiny waists, and their elongated limbs - are just as mythological as the hybrids we’ve imagined.

Women inhabit a different world to men a lot of the time, and it’s not because you’re from Mars and we’re from Venus. It’s a world largely foisted upon us by aggressive media tactics, and not one that will be transformed by token gestures such as Cosmopolitan’s F Word campaign, coming as it does wrapped in a fluffy pink bunny tail. A campaign whose central question is "do feminists vajazzle?" is not one that will make our friends, our sisters and our daughters feel any less alienated from the real world that men are privy to all the time, where things happen that don’t revolve around the latest seaweed diet and the newest chemical injection for your crow’s feet. The time we spend worrying about this is time we could be spending becoming equally regarded members of society: it is time lost. So while Julia’s campaign and Vogue’s declarations are to be welcomed, we need a fully mobilised movement to tackle these magazines’ vagendas to the ground and realise that by buying in to these ideals, we may well be selling ourselves short.

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Tags: feminism Cosmopolitan vogue

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Mon, 2012-05-21 10:21 — dodgy geezer (not verified)

What's so special about women's magazines?

Male-readership magazines place an equal pressure on men to conform to an image. Men have to be rich, successful and do cool, dangerous things like white-water rafting down the Amazon. And it won't surprise you to find that most men don't conform to this stereotype.

If you are a bespectacled, bald 120-pound weakling who has a dead-end job as an assistant to the assistant sales manager, you would kill for a set of creams and a change of clothing that let you feel you were joining this cool set. Unfortunately, they don't make such things for men...

Sun, 2012-05-20 11:52 — sigh (not verified)

Hmmmm general consensus in comments is the 'I'm a bloke, why don't you just not buy these magazines' line for heaven's sake these are teenage impressionable young women? Did you really not buy a lad's mag or sucumb to peer pressue when you were ikkle boys? Bravo you, what a strong will and determined character you seem to have had from an early age...
Anyway, I was commenting to say that this is a much more wide spread problem then just girls magazines, and that THIS is wonderful, a documentry/film about the widespread issue of women in media...
http://vimeo.com/28066212

Sun, 2012-05-20 19:48 — McMac

Surly these magazines are as much an outcome as a cause. I would be interested in pictures of breasts with or without the existence of lads mags.

It's not the fault of the publishers that if they want to sell to woman they need to stuff the pages with celeb gossip and the like, look at the success of the Daily Mail with women readers. Many otherwise intelligent women will describe these publications as their 'guilty pleasure'.

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Thu, 2012-05-17 17:08 — Burp (not verified)

"...a vagina with an agenda..."

Does every article have to metion Iain Duncan Smith?

Thu, 2012-05-17 11:23 — McMac

First of all, may I congratulate you on your vagina ownership. It’s about time that women started talking publicly about their vaginas. Perhaps, wrote books about them, plays, art pieces etc. That would shake up the patriarchy.

As a sign of respect and solidarity I’ve set up some Penistry work shops where like minded men can talk about dick politics, testicular expression and foreskin freedom. So far just me and bloke with a beard have turned up, but it can only be a matter of time before we reach a critical mass and our pricks explode into popular culture.

If I may be allowed a moment’s self promotion, my magnum opus "SORRY! It’s never done that before" charts the rise and fall of the John Thomas since the end of the First World War and is available online pending publication.

Thu, 2012-05-17 13:22 — Tesco Shelf Stacker (not verified)

lol very funny!!!!

Tue, 2012-05-15 20:50 — Get Real (not verified)

Sorry to lack enthusiasm here for this selfless cause but last time I looked these 'victims' do have a choice in what they read!! Nobody is forcing them to gaze lovingly into Sienna Millers eyes, oh but wait, they do because she is aesthetically beautiful but so what? Women stare and judge men all day long but it is how primarily Homo sapiens attract a mate.... other mammals use pheromones and scent.
I am a man but have four sisters and the one thing these 'Vagendas' can actually promote if we look into the semantics of the articles is that they enable women to accept that nobody is perfect. Celebrities are criticized frequently, women post in on problem pages, and the female race is able to see that they don't need to be perfect, it turns out everybody wants to be irrespective of 'Vogues' existence. If men, in general, perceived women to be inferior then you would be either gay or very single considering the irony of a feminist marrying into this 'patriarchal society' and a heterosexual relationship.

Stop trying to brainwash malleable young girls into a depiction of an unjust society when the fact is everybody suffers in life we just make the best of it!!
Oh by the way news flash!! By changing the topics in these 'Vagenda mags' there would be a very sharp decrease in readership because casting aside the innovative depictions you have embroiled us in throughout this article, the fact of the matter is, these issues and topics are tried and tested hence why they are so popular!!! Here is a business lesson for you whilst you are trying to steal readers....your magazines will continue to have a marginal slice of the pie because women who warrant mutual respect are those who go out and achieve it ie. Margaret Thatcher. Instead of sitting there bitching about 'life's not fair' and succumbing to the feminist archetype of just plain old being dissatisfied with their own lives so complain about the world......Imagine if those suffering from famine in Africa had your attitude?? At least they would feel at home with those "size zero" girls you seem to resent because they want to look a certain way.

Tue, 2012-05-15 13:11 — Emy (not verified)

I'm so sick of reading these articles about how negatively glossy magazines affect a women's perception of herself. It's been done now so many times by various publications. I'd like to see more publicity raised around the magazines who are advocating a more body-positive agenda.

Tue, 2012-05-15 00:10 — Tommy D@nger (not verified)

There are sheep of both sexes who will follow the latest fashions, suckle on the teets of the hottest brands, foisted upon them by slick marketing campaigns, whilst behind the scenes the fat business men smoking fat cigars wearing chunky gold signet rings watch on computer screens the share price of their corporations increase with every pound/dollar/yen/euro dropped into the cash register. They care only about the bottom line, not about your waist line.
The pressure to conform is a heavy weight to succumb to... I just wish more people would reject the system that dictates the norm. Alas, females are particularly prone to spending copious amounts of money on useless creams, pastes, scrubs etc. to keep looking young, when a healthy nutritious diet would do the job for a lot less expense.

Mon, 2012-05-14 17:08 — Lucky Wood (not verified)

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Mon, 2012-05-14 16:48 — jankaas (not verified)

"Too often the focus has been on men - on page three and lads’ mags - when in fact the women’s magazine market could be seen as equally, if not more, damaging. This is why the term "patriarchy", with all its strictly masculine implications, just doesn’t cover it anymore."

been saying this literally for years, glad i'm no longer the only one who sees these magazines as destructive garbage, and that women cause one another genuine damage. not that i don't see room for meaningless magazines that push fashion as a 'must' etc, just that it should be adults only and/or come with a health warning.

Des Demona has it right; "Don't buy the magazines!"

Mon, 2012-05-14 16:05 — John Cheese (not verified)

Totally agree. I always wonder why women aren't more p*ssed every time they see the sunken skinnys on all advertising. US restaurants don't help either with huge served portions...

Mon, 2012-05-14 14:17 — CaterpillarSam (not verified)

I think these magazine certainly have room for improvement - perhaps look at the positive messages sent by the Stylist team (and others): career profiles, business advice, issues debated and healthy, nutritious, scrummy recipes...