Mary Kay Blakely

10 WAYS TO GET REALLY DEPRESSED:
A STEADY DIET OF TOP WOMEN`S MAGAZINES LEADS ONLY TO LOSS OF SELF ESTEEM

Chicago Tribune-January 4, 1987
 

Journalist Maggie Scarf stumbled upon the following finding during her 10-year study of
women and depression: ``For every male diagnosed as suffering from depression, the head
count was anywhere from two to six times as many females.``
The late professor Marcia Guttentag, director of the Harvard Project on Women and Mental
Health, confirmed the finding, calling depression ``epidemic`` among women. The strongest
clue Guttentag`s team of psychologists had unearthed about the reason so many women are
depressed had come from a 1974 analysis of articles in women`s and men`s magazines.
The content of men`s magazines ``tended to concern adventure, the overcoming of obstacles;
the preoccupations were with mastery and triumph,`` Scarf reports in her subsequent book,
``Unfinished Business: Pressure Points in the Lives of Women`` (Doubleday, 1980).
In magazines written for women, however, ``the clear preoccupation was with the problem of
loss . . . loss of attractiveness, loss of effectiveness.``
The message women`s magazines sent to 65 million readers was this: Whatever it is that
makes you happy, you are about to lose it.
There are two important psychological tasks that an adult woman must negotiate regularly
throughout her life to prevent debilitating depression, Scarf concludes.
Simply stated, they were: to grow beyond the unexamined myths of childhood; and to adapt,
changing an attitude of loss and powerlessness to one of anticipation and action.


 How much growing and adapting do women`s magazines encourage in their readers today?

Twelve years after Guttentag`s exhaustive study at Harvard, I conducte an informal,
unscientific survey of my own.

Women`s magazines spend thousands of dollars on surveys each year to discover ``who the
readers are.`` They want to develop a composite of the Average Reader so editorials and
advertisements can be directed her way.

I spent $16.58 for 10 recent issues of the 10 largest magazines ``about women`` to find out
``who they think we are,`` to study the reflection of women as it came back to me through
2,793 magazine pages. (The top 10 women`s magazines are Family Circle, Women`s Day,
McCall`s, Ladies` Home Journal, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Mademoiselle, Woman`s
World and Vogue.)

Judging from the headlines on the covers, the foremost concern of women today is not to
grow wiser but to grow smaller.

The Average Reader, magazines assume, is on a perpetual diet. There were ``Exercise and
Diet Tips for Your Over-Fat Zones`` and ``The Four Hot Diets--What`s Good, What`s Not.``

The cruelest cover combined a headline promising ``Prize-Winning Recipes`` just below a
picture of a freshly baked apple coffeecake so delicious I could almost smell it with a large
headline: ``Take 2 Inches Off Your Waist.``

The preoccupation with fat appeared as headlines on 60 percent of the covers, as articles in
9 out of 10 and as advertisements in all. Could this obsession with thinness contribute to
women`s pervasive depression?

A recent study of bulimia, a disorder in which victims force themselves to vomit after eating,
would indicate that it does.

Alarming reports of bulimia among college-age women have been circulating for some time,
and now there are symptoms of the illness among 30-year-old executives.

The obsession with thinness was never labeled clearly as ``vanity``--it masqueraded as
``health.`` Celebrities such as Jane Fonda, Cher, Raquel Welch and Stephanie Powers were
offered as ``health experts`` to advise readers on how to maintain a 25-year-old physique well
past 40.

 One magazine promised an exercise program to ``Age-Proof Your Body,`` and in another I
learned how to rid myself of ``underarm sway.`` Before last month I never knew ``underarm
sway`` was a threat to my health.

The clear message was that whatever growing and changing a woman must
do psychologically to prevent depression, she had better accomplish it in a body that never
grew or changed past 25. And without frowning too much either, for then a woman risked the
second-worst fear dominating the pages: wrinkled skin. A youth/confidence equation
appeared in several hundred pages of ads, promising to fend off wrinkles with ``anti-aging
complexes,`` ``age-zone protectors,`` ``cellular-replacement therapy`` and ``line preventers.``
Again, unwrinkled skin was described as ``healthy`` skin. If wrinkles are indeed a threat to
health, shouldn`t the media be providing as many reports on the President`s wrinkles as they
have on his colon? Shouldn`t Paul Newman take to his bed?

Editorial and business departments of the magazines operate like the right and left sides of
the brain--articles creating anxiety about ``what`s wrong with you`` preceded ads supplying
the remedies.

One feature called ``Quick Lifts for the Morning Uglies`` (a peculiar form of depression
suffered by young readers) mentioned seven tips for ``improving your outlook.`` Five of them
involved the purchase of a bath gel, a blemish cover, a blusher, a scarf, a perfume.
Because a woman, if she lives to old age, will become wrinkled, will shift in weight, there will
always be the need for more treatment.
The Average Reader is not encouraged to look forward to her old self as a woman of
achievement but as a waste. ``How you look`` was synonymous with ``who you are,`` and for
older women that means ``invisible.``

 Magazines must sell ads to stay in business, but as author and columnist Mary-Lou
Weisman points out, ``There are so many more products to sell us if they`d let us grow up, if
they`d encourage women to do something besides dressing and undressing, eating and not
eating.`` She mentioned cars computers, ``a camera would be nice.``

 Not only does the Average Reader have to achieve her growing and changing without
bulges and wrinkles, but the current purge of serious issues means that she must proceed
without information.

As Elizabeth Sloan, editor-in-chief of McCall`s, recently told the press, the magazine`s past
issues had been ``too text-oriented. We`re going to have pictures of girls spinning, kicking,
swirling. We`re going to be much younger.``

She promised an end to ``essays on serious issues, societal issues. They just didn`t
belong.``

``We like our readers to feel happy at the end of an article,`` an editor explained several
years ago. She then described what I came to think of as the Valium Theory of Writing: prose
that numbs the pain without actually naming the problem.
The decision not to shock the Average Reader, however, can inadvertently contribute to
another kind of depression women suffer: the prolonged, debilitating feelings of
powerlessness.

Surveys indicated the Average Reader liked how-to features, especially how-tos that would
solve a problem by next weekend.

The Valium Theory with its quick-fix approach permeated the pages of the recent issues:
``How to Stop the One You Love From Drinking,`` ``Loving Ways to Talk Out Anything--So
Your Marriage Wins`` and ``How Not to Look and FeelTired.`` (``Do you envy women who
always seem to have boundless energy? Well, you won`t have to anymore--here are the
health and beauty secrets that will make you one of the lucky megawatt people!``)

There is hardly a problem in America the Average Reader can`t somehow solve with health
or beauty techniques.

The beauty tricks recommended made the sad-looking woman in the ``before`` photo look
decidedly more cheerful, but can a cold, a quarrel and a hangover really be cured by
mascara? Is a compact of translucent powder a good defense for radioactivity?

``The articles speak to us as if women are extremely simpleminded,`` says science writer K.

C. Cole, a panel member for a recent symposium on the trivialization of women in magazines
at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan.
``Problems are cast in terms of before and after, do`s and don`ts, yes and no. There are
rarely shades of gray, rarely `sometimes` or `maybes.` It`s the language a mother uses with a
small child, not the language of women dealing with extremely complicated issues.``

The contempt for readers was based in part on the composite picture drawn from the
surveys--the advertising dummy made up of all women but exactly like none. The Average
Reader may have 2.5 children, but no real women do. The Average Reader may strive for a
body like Jane Fonda`s, but most real women live in bodies like Erma Bombeck`s and Betty
Friedan`s.

Most of the myths about youth and beauty are based on the childish expectations of the
Average Reader, who is a myth herself.

As the late physicist Frank Oppenheimer once explained to his students, ``We don`t live in the
real world. We live in a world we made up.`` The world made up for women through 2,793
pages of the magazines I selected was this: 40-year-old bodies can look like 25 if women would only
try hard enough; if ``anti-aging`` formulas fail to keep wrinkles off women`s skin, surgery is available;
 and marriages can be saved in three easy steps. There are few signs of life outside the United States, except in
Paris. If women feel depressed about any of this, they probably need more blusher.

The ``Unfinished Business`` Scarf wrote about six years ago is still vastly undone. Instead of
encouraging women to grow beyond childish myths and adapt to the changes of life, women`s
magazines have readers running in place, exhausted.

The anxieties and depression instilled by these magazines have risen so high that executive
women are inducing nausea and healthy women are submitting to surgery. This is the world
we have ``made up`` for women, and it is a perilous place to exist.