Empowerful women and their empowerful publications

Working for a big corporate media behemoth has its perks: Decent pay, health insurance, air conditioning, cake when people get awards, etc. But there are drawbacks, too.

[Disclaimer: I like my job and would like to keep it. I am only writing this here at my personal blog because these are points I would be happy to make to any of my superiors if consulted; I write better than I speak, so I am, in effect, collecting my thoughts on the matter and offering them up for mass consideration. And ridicule. You know, whatevs.]

For one, you have to put disclaimers on your personal opinions because no one wants to get Dooced.

For two, you have to count yourself among the ranks of the dreaded MSM, which can make it tricky to rail against the dreaded MSM.

For three, you have to suffer through all sorts of insipid corporate e-mails from people you've never met who don't know your name or what you do.

For four, you are but a cog in a much larger machine that will often be used in ways you really, really wish would just evaporate and go away, because they're so horrid and your influence is so minimal that you can't really do anything about it.

I allude, clumsily, of course, to this: Skirt! — a monthly women's publication currently being offered to subscribers of the Knoxville News Sentinel (among other papers, I'm sure, including, very possibly, the CA in days to come).

I have to admit, I am not clear on all of the details of Skirt!. All I know is what one of my bosses told me when he laid his March copy down near myself and two fellow young women designers and asked us to take a look and tell him what we thought of the unconventional design approach. He described it as a publication geared toward youngish, successful professional women.

My first impression, based on the name and the flag design alone, was one of uncontrolled revulsion.

"Skirt!" is written in some vaguely familiar and probably commonly misused typeface (my guess is Franklin Gothic), and is at times stretched and condensed and all manner of other typographic abominations in order to achieve a sort of chaotic, frantic, childish feel, punctuated frenetically with an exclamation point. Which really bugged one of my co-workers for some reason. (Perhaps she had an exclamation-point accident as a child or something?) The 'i' utilizes a different typeface than the rest of the word — some sort of italic serif deal, which, on the website, is animated to be a blinking eye. I am sort of happy yet still queasy to report that there is NO EYE in the print edition. Small miracles and all.

So, based on name alone, you know where this is going. Tell me you've got a publication for strong, successful women and I'll usually be all, "Okay, right on," thinking we've got a political-minded, informative, thoughtful outlet on our hands. Tell me it's called "Skirt!" and my brain will start shutting down. Suddenly you've introduced fashion and feminine markers into the premise. Not to mention the secondary verbal definition of "skirt," which means to avoid or work around. It's indirect; it's passive.

Open up the tabloid (it's a large tab, maybe the size of the Scene or the Flyer — though I'm thinking the Scene is bit taller than the Flyer — printed on hi-brite with what seems to be full color available on every page, though they don't use full color on every page, which I'll get to in a minute) and you're met with the typical blitzkrieg of colorful advertising that greets you in any periodical. My boss asked our opinion of the editorial/advertising design divide, since it seems to have blurred a bit within the pages of Skirt!, thanks to the editorial and ad designer being one in the same.

The pages of Skirt! feature gaudy blue and violet display type, aligned anywhichway seems cutesy and fun, and hefty sprinklings of solidly colored flower clip-art. Think flower power clip-art. Flowers and text, flowers and text, cute illustrations of vaguely ethnic women with impossibly long nails and eyelashes and hair, flowers and text. Ads. Flowers. Ads. Text and flowers. Ads.

One of the more remarkable (and profoundly depressing) aspects of the design is the editorial photography. All editorial (non-advertising) photographs are printed in black and white. I am told that this is — and I shit you not — because women look better when not photographed in color. That's so their complexions don't look so icky in print.

So you've got brightly colored ads of airbrushed models sitting alongside somber black and white portraits of actual women.

I'm not sure there could be a more clear and ironic distortion of what it means to be a "real" woman than this policy.

The ads sing, of course, in full color, while the editorial copy whispers. "HEY YOU SHOULD BUY SOME OF THIS AWESOME DEPILATORY CREAM" vs. "Hi, my name is Mary Ann and I save lives because I am a paramedic who works 36-hour days while raising a kid on my own and raising money for cancer patients."

It's almost too sad to ponder.

The rest of the editorial copy within the newsmag ranges from the feel-good, pat-yourself-on-the-back-for-having-a-job type profiles of working/creative women to the usual hyperconsumerist agitprop about which wrinkle creams get the best results and so forth.

And then, of course, there are the little things. "Shemail" as a stand-in for "e-mail." A section called "PMS: Problems Men Started (right now, featuring "Girls Gone Wild," "Voting machines," "Brawling," "Office cubicles," and "Homophobia."). A page in the print edition devoted to the skirt of the month. And then this borderline crazy letter from the publisher about her leap into the unknown territory of publishing health and beauty tips for upwardly mobile honky women. Because, you know, that's something that's never been done before.

And yet, Skirt! proclaims its mission so loudly on its cover that I must snicker at the bitter irony (see Fig. 2 for details). A huge-ass tagline that touts its deepness and its ability to bring you to the light, to a revelation about yourself is, at best, a display in marketing hackery and, at worst, a cruel joke perpetrated on unsuspecting readers who, after years and years of being bludgeoned by the spiked mace of patriarchy-consumerism, may not know how to wield a skepticism filter properly.

It's just sad, really, that any of this could be touted as deep and meaningful, when it is so clearly viciously superficial and about anything but actual empowerment.

But that is the way with words and products hawked to the empowerful woman and the patriarchal construct that keeps her in check.

That's why this publication, aimed supposedly at professional women (which implies the twenty and thirty and forty and fiftysomething set, at the very least), looks like a joke; its design aesthetic is more suited to a magazine for tween girls who can more easily be wooed by cute flowers and choppy typography (which they see in their glossy mags every day anyway). And the copy? Well, it's the same hyperfeminine/hyperconsumerist shit you can read in any depressing glossy fashion mag that purports to be Empowered Woman's Best Friend.

Twisty, the patron saint of the What I Wish I Had Written, gets the last word:

This modern preoccupation with the Empowerful Woman was funny for a while, but it begins to wear thin. I predict that if a post-patriarchal social history of the New Millennium ever gets written there will be a hilarious chapter on this bizarre, buffoonish construct.

I allude to the confident, photogenic, entirely fictitious female who inhabits TV ads, “Sex in the City,” Oprah, and the popular imagination. Today’s woman isn’t a feminist. She doesn’t need to be, because she’s empowered.

She may only earn 3/4 of what a man earns, but she damn well has the empower to look sexy doing it in her cheapcrap push-up bra from Victoria’s Secret. She has the empower to demand pink products from manufacturers. She has the empower to cry out ‘I did it for me!’ when she gets her boob job; maybe she even has the empower to believe it. The empowerful woman is saucy, yet feminine. Clever, yet feminine. In her early thirties, yet feminine. Heterosexual, yet feminine. Stays in shape eating Lean Cuisine and sweating blue Gatorade while kickboxing in slow motion, yet feminine. Yes, the empowerful woman is many things. Too bad powerful isn’t one of them. That’s because feminine is all of them.