The Antidote To Katie Couric
We've all seen them. Tailgating you in their SUV with a cell phone glued to their traps. Sighing audibly as they wait behind you in line at the grocery store. Bitching loudly to their girlfriends about how frazzled they are. I'm talking about the Modern American Woman and this morning's WSJ has a tremendous review of a new book called "Spin Sisters: How the Women of the Media Sell Unhappiness and Liberalism to the Women of America" that lays out one of the ways they got to this point. (Although I have to say, that title needs some serious trimming).
The author (Myrna Blyth, editor of Ladies Home Journal) lays the serious smackdown on the victimization industry and the creation of the myth that women's lives are more stressed and less relaxing that they have ever been.
A bigger trend today is do-nothing feminism, the modern equivalent of smelling salts and neurasthenia circa 1900. Surely you've heard its cri de coeur, voiced with a mixture of self-pity and dainty pride: "I can't cook/vote/be on time/make my kids behave/pick up the piles of trash in my living room. I'm just... too... busy." And all of it followed by that bossy just relax tone that the women's media assume, like Big Nurse marching down the hall with an enema.
Never mind the real burdens of life before the washing machine: The conceit that the modern woman's life is unbearably overwhelming now pervades our culture. This is not surprising, considering that the Seven Sisters and their cousins have a readership of more than 50 million. To Ms. Blyth, she and her peers have plenty to answer for (although -- no surprise -- she maintains that her own LHJ wasn't quite as bad as its rivals): "Turn on your TV or pick up a women's magazine and the message is clear," she writes. "If you were born female, from the first wail of life you are granted automatic membership in the victim sisterhood."
Okay, so that's the victimology stuff, but what about the liberal politics?
"Spin Sisters" is undoubtedly a polemic, but Ms. Blyth has also done her research. She read two years' worth of nine women's magazines -- Cosmopolitan, Family Circle, Good Housekeeping, Glamour, Ladies Home Journal, Marie Claire, Redbook, Vogue and Women's Day -- and found that each issue had at least two victim stories, which often included calls for government action. "A month without a potential new disease to worry about," Ms. Blyth writes, "was like a day without sunshine." And she cites survey after survey showing that American women don't think the way that women's magazines editors assume they do.
Women are not, for instance, particularly concerned about abortion rights. They do favor the death penalty -- "I've seen women editors shake their heads in disbelief over that," Ms. Blyth notes -- and they supported the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, even being slightly more likely than men to think that social programs should be cut to fund military action. Despite patronizing media messages (e.g., Lifetime's "Every Woman Counts" election-year campaigns), women don't need to be urged to the polls like teenagers. In fact, they're at least as likely to vote as men -- sometimes more so. "Pretty darn good for a group that can barely manage to get through the day," Ms. Blyth observes with characteristic tartness.
She's got a point, and one worth making.
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