You've Got a Long Way to Go, Baby.

• Author: STARR, ALEXANDRA
• Position: Women's magazines

Women's magazines continue to create--and exploit--women's anxiety

THE TEST MONITORS HAD WARNED that removing anything from the Advanced Placement English Exam book was strictly off-limits. But when I read the opening paragraph of Joan Didion's essay On Self Respect, I knew I had to smuggle it home. I was not the type to risk the opprobrium of my superiors (and I would have been mortified if I had been caught carefully ripping my test booklet apart), but I suppose that's why I found Didion's wry wisdom so compelling. At the awkward age of 17, I had bought the line that good manners, high SAT scores, and a small dress size would assure a lifetime's worth of happiness. Didion, however, delivered a very different message. Those accomplishments might earn praise from other people, she allowed, but impressing parents, teachers, boyfriends, et al. would never secure approval from the most important audience of all: yourself. Pin your sense of self-worth on opinions of others, Didion warned, and one day you will face yourself "with the apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand"

Overshadowing that insight is a curious irony: On Self Respect first appeared in the pages of Vogue. While Didion's essay explained that a sense of self-worth had nothing to do with the perceptions of others, the magazine insinuated that external image was everything. For the young women who picked up that 1961 edition of the glossy, it was a particularly potent message. Back then, women were shut out of all but a handful of professional careers, and their economic security hinged on the fortunes of the men they married. Attracting Mr. Right and keeping him happy was of paramount importance, and Vogue and sister publications like Glamour and Mademoiselle implicitly promised the battle plan to landing the gold ring. Cosmetics and clothes comprised the bulk of the weaponry, and it's hard to think of more fertile ground for ads hawking "indispensable" products like eyeliner and pantyhose than in their pages. But women's magazines didn't just sell ad space to cosmetics companies and clothing retailers--they actively plugged their advertisers' products in their articles, too. The proverbial wall between ads and editorial was never very high in these magazines, if it was ever erected to begin with.

Now, a logical legacy of the women's rights movement should have been the demise of these publications. Once women were free to navigate the shoals of corporate America or trailblaze in genetic research, their futures no longer depended on being attractive to the opposite sex. And as women's magazines had essentially made "how to land a man" their organizing principle, you would think emancipated females would have junked those glossies along with their Hoovers and Betty Crocker aprons. But the market didn't exactly dry up: An estimated 40 million women read these magazines each month. And while the women's movement preached autonomy and independence, that message didn't prompt women's magazine editors to rethink their promiscuous relationship with their advertisers; these publications still enthusiastically flog their advertisers' products.

Of course, those plugs are just an added bonus to an already lucrative forum for advertisers. While these slicks profess to help women "be all they can be," their photographs of anorexic models, innumerable diets, and fashion tips all raise the bar of what a woman "should" be to ridiculous (and unhealthy) heights. What better place than in their pages to peddle products that promise to close the gap between what women are and this unattainable ideal?

Stepford's little helper

"You...