It was the classic right place, right time when I was appointed to my first editorship. I had been deputy editor of Dolly magazine for the previous six months, following a complete turnover of the magazine’s senior team. The editor had been appointed to the role shortly before I joined the magazine because her strong feminist beliefs mirrored the publisher’s new strategy: to target the thinking young woman with content that would shape her decisions. (Note: the publisher had teenage daughters at the time of this decision.)
During my editor’s brief tenure, hair removal articles were banned, beauty stories were focused on how to do-it-yourself by making your own organic products and relationship articles were largely abandoned in favour of stories about recycling garbage. Her dream was to create a magazine that moulded young female minds into smart, caring feminists.
I wasn’t surprised when readership dropped dramatically during this period. After all you can’t really expect people to pay for something that you think they should have. But I was perplexed by the very idea that smart young women couldn’t possibly shave their legs. I was a smart young woman of independent mind and I was as interested in fashion as I was in the news of the day. As a teenager I read Vogue and The Sydney Morning Herald. Surely I wasn’t an island?
So when I was given the chance to resurrect the readership I made sure the magazine contained content that would challenge their thinking as well as delight their senses. We published posters of the hottest young actors alongside articles about different jobs that women were succeeding in. The latest hairstyles sat comfortably next to a ‘how-to say no to sex if you aren’t comfortable saying yes’ story. Recycling your garbage to help save our oceans was as important to the mix as what to wear for your first job interview.
Years ago when I worked for Fairfax, I was in a meeting where a senior executive expressed horror at the realisation that smart, successful women read the horoscopes in The Sun Herald newspaper. A survey had determined that was one of the most-read features. He assumed it was because the newspaper was attracting the wrong type of reader so he asked me if I read them. I responded “yes, all the time”. He looked like he’d just sucked a lemon.
It’s not just men who believe this. Women too have given me strange looks for telling them that I check my horoscope daily. I have also overheard far too many women judge other women by the clothes they wear or the books they read. I will never have the time to read 50 Shades Of Grey but I respect the enthusiasm that millions of other women have shown for it. At the very least it has made a female author extremely successful and wealthy and that should be celebrated.
At its very best the original notion of feminism was to liberate us from a restricted and oppressive way of life. So it seems bizarre that we would then use it to prescribe another restrictive lifestyle. If we don’t respect the choices of other women and not allow our prejudices to stand in the way of female success then how can we ask this of men?
Do you agree that our judgment of other women is harming our opportunity for success?