I have no way of knowing, Leslie Loftis, what it was any woman ever saw in any women’s magazine, nor do I care to speculate. But I happen to be one man who had taken some interest in things feminine since early childhood, owing mostly to having an older sister (rest in peace, she passed away suddenly many years ago now) whom I was very close to.
I always got it, that this business of male and female was a serious one, and that the only way to take either of us seriously was to take the vast and undeniable differences between us just as seriously. So yeah, starting out at maybe seven or eight years of age, I managed more than a few looks into various women’s publications lying around.
My mom was more the “Good Housekeeping” and “Better Homes and Gardens” type. She saw these periodicals as sources of updating her skill sets, as a dedicated homemaker who took her craft as an honor, pursued it diligently and still does now in her eighties.
My sister, always trying to be a sort of rebel but at heart as Good Girl a good girl as ever drew breath, and the girliest Girly-Girl I ever knew, tended more toward the Redbooks and the Vogues. What she got from them I think was mostly a means of keeping up with fashion sense (and startling our mom just by bringing them in the house), and she tended to go out and buy patterns for clothes based on more expensive designs she saw in the mags, so she could make her own garments that she could afford but still feel like she was up-to-date in her looks.
Both my mom and my sister were always vociferous anti-feminists. The very first foundations of my own antipathies toward the misery-making divisiveness that feminism offers women, came from these first two women I ever loved or lived with. So what they may have taken from the feature articles in any of their preferred magazines, I think was mostly that they each were glad that they weren’t the sort of self-obsessed, apartment-dwelling, career-mad examples of continual aggrievement that such pieces even forty-plus years ago were pitching to women as self-image and world view.
But I said before that I won’t try and speak for them or for any woman. I knew all along that I was not the target audience, if I sat down and read a piece in Vogue or in Good Housekeeping. It was probably from that exercise as a young reader that I learned the very concept of “audience.” And it is an interesting exercise in readership, to know coming in that “this is not about you.”
Only in the case of my sister’s preferred outlets, most of it was (!) Yes, in those mystic times of Ancient History now nearly forgotten and known generically as The Seventies, what I was reading in the more fashionable women’s publications, was mostly geared toward telling women how to first choose, then own and operate a man. What and how he thinks, how to manipulate him with pleasure and punish him by denying it. How to be passive-aggressive about what a gal herself is thinking and feeling, as if ever just coming out and articulating in words like an adult would be unthinkable. Et cetera.
I have said all along, Leslie, and you have seen me saying it, that feminism’s gravest unintended consequence has been the upsetting of The Matriarchy which has ruled men’s lives and determined the courses of them, since before recorded history. If women’s magazines have gone now from instructing women on how to possess and manage us properly, to guiding them in the direction of just looking down their noses at us and not bothering with us at all other than to take our jobs away by any means available, through my male eyes this looks like women’s loss.
Honestly, if there ever even was any such thing as “patriarchy” at least in the workplace, I daresay that a “male-dominated” work life had been for a long time the one safe haven any man had, from a life that otherwise was ruled in detail by women. I have watched that island shrinking from the inundating inflow of the flood of feminist dogma all my life. Men’s lives are ruled more than ever by the women in them, only feminism has seen to it that the terms be ones of hostility and aggrievement, and men’s only possible recourse now being that we continually apologize and ritually self-flagellate ourselves for our very manhoods, and lose what might be left of any respect we had ever had from the ladies in the bargain.
I wouldn’t call any of this a “deterioration” so much as a misguided and gargantuan attempt by feminism to sustain The Matriarchy by other means, but not going about it in a very smart or effective way.
Men either acquire the skill set to stand our own ground and stand up to women as we find them, or we don’t. Either way, what women take or ever took from the magazines aimed at you now or ever, will still be about seeing to it that we don’t ever learn to do that, or ever regard ourselves as your equals. Swap out the homemaker-as-boss or vixen-as-achiever rhetoric for feminist-as-avenger dogma all you want, but the core message remains consistent:
That men, according to their editorial voices in thrall to their advertisers’ Big Data, are now and always have been, The Enemy.
