Thursday, August 16, 2012

Manly Thor's Day special: Feminism doesn't sell

File this one under "reality check".

Without looking it up, what do you suppose the best-selling magazine in North America is? The answer is Cosmopolitan. The magazine business is not as influential as it once was. If you look at the data at the link I've given, you'll find that almost all of the top twenty-five best-selling magazines are in decline. It's worth discussing Cosmopolitan for a number of reasons though.

The first is that it's success is entirely the work of one genius named Helen Gurley Brown, who died last week at the age of 90. Brown was a real-life Peggy Olson who made it in the advertising business back in the day when it really wasn't easy and was given the chance to run a magazine. She chose to Cosmopolitan. It was an odd choice because the magazine was then failing and would probably have been shut down, just as so many other classic magazines were in the 1950s and 1960s, if Brown hadn't come along and saved the day.

She also wrote a very influential book called Sex and the Single Girl. Which leads me to this odd line in one of the obits
When Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique ushered in the modern women's movement a year later, the two works and their authors helped lead the growing national dialogue about the place of women in society and popular culture.
Here is how that "national dialogue" worked out in real life (as opposed to journalistic memory) just think of "the modern women's movement" as as Bambi:



Brown's giant innovation was to recognize that magazines such as Cosmopolitan sold because of what people saw on the cover. The woman who would by the magazine had to see a picture of a  woman she wanted to be and see teasers for articles that spoke to her. Thirty three years ago this month, the issue of Cosmo on the newssstands looked like this:



You know, a woman looking like that could walk out the door of any fashionable store or restaurant today and fit right in. She'd actually be cutting edge because that cheek-bone enhancing shadow she is wearing is just coming back in. And articles based on those teasers would probably do well today too. You'd need to update some of the celebrity news, no one knows or cares who Lily Tomlin is anymore. Likewise, worries about losing your teeth are less of a concern since the fluoride revolution.

But otherwise, this is attractive stuff that women actually want. Women don't call their boyfriends their "old man" today but a teaser that said, "you're blossoming but what about your boyfriend?" would pull in readers. Cosmo as rethought by Brown became such an incredible success that pretty much every other woman's magazine was remade in it's image. Women's site on the 'net such as The Frisky owe everything to Helen Gurley Brown.

You could have a long argument about whether modern women should want this stuff but it is what they do want and Helen Gurley Brown called it right and "the modern women's movement" called it wrong. It's really that simple guys.

Helen Gurley Brown was, by a long, lone way, the most influential woman of the last fifty years. Change was coming anyway, but Brown and not the Friedan saw the future and influenced the future. Walk around and look at women and you see her influence everywhere. Betty Friedan? Just a blip on the cultural radar by comparison.

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