Marleen Troutt marleen@columnist.com
Author's note: This column was inspired by the research of an SIUC English graduate student. Thankfully, Jamie, you bring these issues into the classroom and thus reward our students with your cultural insight like so many other incredible women at this University.
Grocery store checkout lines are scary places. Above the Tic Tacs and the nick nacks, sits possibly the greatest insult to femininity evident in our culture. The crude compilation of air-brushed beauties beckons the onlooker from the mythical world where the wind is always seductively blowing their hair, but not enough to mess it up. Sometimes they are celebrities. These are mags like "People" and "Ladies Home Journal." Most times they are models. These are magazines like "Cosmo." And most of these are aimed at the demographic where you'll find me.
But there are many marketing flaws afoot. That is why, when I'm standing there, I dream of "Time" and "Nexus" and "Harper's" and "Newsweek" and "Columbia Journalism Review" and "The Economist" and "The Progressive."
"God," I plead, "If I have to stand here in shopping purgatory for 20 minutes, just give me something worthwhile to feed my natural, feminine curiosity." I would probably enjoy looking at half-naked women under most circumstances. Undeniably, our bodies were shaped by some divine hand that understood contour, depth, stroke and color better than we.
We are magnificent in our feminine aspect. That is why I find the one, glorified body shape so disenchanting. That is why I find airbrushing so insulting. But, these images are not the most insulting elements. The articles accompanying them are a disturbing testament to what entices the modern female consumer.
"How to keep him begging for more"
"10 days to the perfect bod"
"How to trick him into loving you"
Did it ever occur to an editor that I might not be looking to seduce anyone right now? What if I already have the perfect body and sleep with everyone? What then? Do I get some sort of award or incentive? The Nobel Prize for Striking Thighs, perhaps.
Unfortunately for the sales division, I have some heftier goals in mind than mastering the art of oral sex.
In the book, "The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls," Joan Jacobs Brumberg remarks that many of her students at Cornell University believe they are liberated in comparison to the Victorian woman - bound by corsets, never daring to utter the word vagina. That is, if they even knew the word existed.
But this scholar points out that females in our society now are lacking in liberty in a different fashion. Our "body projects" become our obsession within years of being born. Beauty, of course, has always been prized. But for Victorian women, there were more important things. They were to be more concerned with spiritual growth and the arts. Signs of vanity in young women were to be quashed immediately and replaced with headier thoughts.
Now signs of vanity seem to be all that's left.
Can I be one of some bizarre elite that still prizes art, literature, current events and inspiring stories of my fellow humans more than my own body project? Can we really be such anomalies? Perhaps we escaped out of the lab when the culture scientists were wiring our brains to be obsessed with calories and pleasuring males.
If this is true - if I am part of only a select group of Western women who have more on their minds than sculpting their bodies and seducing co-workers - I think we deserve a separate supermarket where we don't have to mingle with the lower element.
But I just can't seem to believe it. I have more faith in womankind than that. There must be thousands, even millions, of us shopping around, not giving a hoot about what men find sexy these days.
What about what I find sexy in a man? I can just imagine some such rag guessing what hunk would make me plop down two bucks for the thrill of keeping the insipid thing.
He would probably look like the male version of Miss Windy Weather. Ken would be buff and tan and his buns would flex obnoxiously under bikini briefs. He would be standing by some overpriced car, and looking at me like he "wanted to take me for a ride."
And he would make me want to puke.
Even if my male ideal stood enticing me from the cover, I probably still wouldn't buy it. Unless, of course, it had a really interesting article about the American prejudice against country folk, or a quirky short story about the birth of Hitler, or a history of alcohol and its social significance.
But I suppose the supermarket checkout lane will always be a place of degradation. With our cold cash, women have told the world that we are content to be idle sex kittens, more concerned with waxing off our body hair than salvaging humanity or contributing to the arts.
And I guess enlightened reading will always have to be looked for, not easily provided, as we shuffle past all the sex and vanity to pay for our daily bread.
The Femme Factor appears every other Friday. Marleen is a senior in journalism. Her views do not necessarily reflect those of the Daily Egyptian.
Published on 11/17/05; 12:24:44 PM
