"Because the kind of media coverage our prominent women are given is hugely reductionist and damaging. Although the media attitude to all famous people has an underlying schadenfreude-y current...female celebrities suffer disproportionally from this, because of the pivotal attention given to their appearance.
A 'sign of weakness' for a male celebrity is being found to be unfaithful, or unkind to an employee, or having crashed his car while stoned out of his tiny mind. A 'sign of weakness' for a woman, on the other hand, can be a single unflattering picture...[Paparazzi] will take pictures of women going to the shops in jeans and a sweater, with no makeup on, and make it look like her world is on the verge of crumbling, because she didn't have a blow-dry before she left home. Of course, in the real world, we know that women who always blow-dry their hair before leaving the house are freaks.
...And that's just bitchiness about being drab. There's a whole other league of judgement heaped on single pictures...when it appears a woman's body has changed shape in any way...Just as William Blake claimed to see the world in just one grain of sand, we presume we can see a whole woman's life in just one shot of Eva Longoria's upper arm looking a bit squished in a T-shirt...
There can't be a magazine-consuming woman in the Western world who's not been called upon to speculate on the mental and emotional health of these women on the basis of a single bad photo of her. I've read more about Oprah Winfrey's arse that I have abou the rise of China as an economic superpower. I fear this is no exaggeration. Perhaps China is rising as an economic superpower because its women aren't spending all their time reading about Oprah Winfrey's arse. If I knew more about China, and less about Oprah Winfrey's arse, I could probably argue a direct cause-and-effect.
~Caitlin Moran, How to Be Woman
This is why I boycott supermarket magazines. Also, the writing is drivel.
A 'sign of weakness' for a male celebrity is being found to be unfaithful, or unkind to an employee, or having crashed his car while stoned out of his tiny mind. A 'sign of weakness' for a woman, on the other hand, can be a single unflattering picture...[Paparazzi] will take pictures of women going to the shops in jeans and a sweater, with no makeup on, and make it look like her world is on the verge of crumbling, because she didn't have a blow-dry before she left home. Of course, in the real world, we know that women who always blow-dry their hair before leaving the house are freaks.
...And that's just bitchiness about being drab. There's a whole other league of judgement heaped on single pictures...when it appears a woman's body has changed shape in any way...Just as William Blake claimed to see the world in just one grain of sand, we presume we can see a whole woman's life in just one shot of Eva Longoria's upper arm looking a bit squished in a T-shirt...
There can't be a magazine-consuming woman in the Western world who's not been called upon to speculate on the mental and emotional health of these women on the basis of a single bad photo of her. I've read more about Oprah Winfrey's arse that I have abou the rise of China as an economic superpower. I fear this is no exaggeration. Perhaps China is rising as an economic superpower because its women aren't spending all their time reading about Oprah Winfrey's arse. If I knew more about China, and less about Oprah Winfrey's arse, I could probably argue a direct cause-and-effect.
~Caitlin Moran, How to Be Woman
This is why I boycott supermarket magazines. Also, the writing is drivel.
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