Confessions of a Mag-aholic
I am a magazine addict. I can spend almost half of my allowance on magazines alone and I am not exactly proud of that. I love magazines. I love the fresh-from-the-press smell it gives off when I open the plastic, the beautiful photographs that fill its pages, the well-written articles about art, fashion, and travel, and just the sheer joy that I get from holding a bunch of glorified, glossy papers bound in an attractive cover.
When I got to watch The Devil Wears Prada, my fascination for magazines and the amount of work that goes behind it increased. Although it was a lot of hard work, it looked like it was fun. But the most interesting part in that movie was when Andi (played by Anne Hathaway) transformed from plain Jane to fashionable Amazona. I realized that my attraction to these expensive books is not just limited to the published work. It was the lifestyle, so different from what could have been if not for these magazines.
The first time I laid my eyes on a copy of Candy was when I was a high school freshman. The cover alone suggested everything that an awkward 11-year-old could ever ask for—fun, fashion, and with the tagline “The best-est friend you’ll ever have,” a friend that can give advice that none of your real friends can even think of. I thought that it was my ticket to escaping the ordinary life that I suddenly found myself in.
When I entered college, I started reading Seventeen just because it claimed to be ‘Your ultimate college life guide.’ I thought that college won’t be fun, memorable, and worthy without Seventeen. Last April, Seventeen released its last issue. But I must say that I lived through almost five months without it. Although it’s sad because I won’t be seeing a new issue every month anymore, it also got me thinking that I can live my life without the tips and advices, whether in fashion, school, or relationships, that Seventeen gave me for the past three years. Also, the absence of an “official life guide” led me to the scary truth—my identity was based on what these magazines told me.
Beauty, fashion, and relationships, wrapped up in a heavy dose of advertising, have long been the staple of women’s magazines. For over 300 years, titles have been directed toward the female sex. The first recorded woman’s magazine, the London-based Ladies Mercury, which was launched in 1693, promised to provide answers to all “the most nice and curious questions concerning love, marriage, behaviour, dress and humour of the female sex,” which set a pattern for all women’s magazines for centuries.
Fast forward to 2009, lifestyle magazines still claim to have a special and sacred knowledge of things that are beautiful and acceptable. They set the standard and with that standard, they sell an identity that each of us can put on. It seems that through the photographs and text, the magazine pleads with us to experience both pleasure in consuming idealized lifestyles and a sense of failure and guilt if we can’t apply such representations to our lives.
To have is to be. That’s the basic message these magazines tell you. So if you can’t achieve what these magazines represent, you can’t be the “fun, fearless female” of Cosmopolitan? You’re clingy and needy because you’re not the “independent woman” of Metro? You’re uninteresting because you’re not the “Because You’re Not Just Another Girl” G! magazine caters to?
I’ve read somewhere that “music and newspapers were once lodestones of both daily life and collective experience.” Since the rise of lifestyle magazines, I’m sure that it’s a part of the foundation of mass culture that we adhere to today. But I’m scared to see the day when all of us would be walking around looking and acting exactly like the girls in those magazines.
I don’t want to hinge my identity on those publications because my identity cannot, and should never, be bought. So when I strip myself of all the characteristics I possess due to immersing myself in the lifestyle that they promote, who am I really?
