Elle and the state of women’s worlds essay

In his Ways of Seeing, John Berger addresses the idea that the man is constantly and consistently presumed to be the “ audience. ” In it, he states, “ Women are depicted in a quite different way from men—not because the feminine is different from the masculine—but because the ‘ ideal’ spectator is always assumed to be male and the image of the woman is designed to flatter him” (64). The predominance of the assumption that the presumed ideal audience of anything, even a woman’s magazine, is male runs rampant throughout Elle. This issue is crammed full with advertisements for any number of products, from makeup to hair dye to sneakers, with images of women posed seductively, looking straight out at the viewer (presumed to be male).

Berger notes that “ One might [say]…men act and women appear. Women watch themselves being looked at…Thus she turns herself into an object—and most particularly an object of vision: a sight” (47). Berger argues that women perform both the roles of the surveyor and the surveyed: on the one hand, the woman is constantly the surveyor, surveying herself and judging herself based on the assumptions of how others will judge her. As a surveyor here she can monitor herself and better control her behavior, thus bettering herself in the eyes of her outside surveyors (men). On the other hand, the woman is also constantly surveyed, and is aware of the ever-present scrutiny she is under by other surveyors (again, men). Berger uses early European oil paintings to demonstrate his thesis; here we will be using Elle.

First allow me to state the obvious here by pointing out that the absence of any food or eating-related content presupposes that women just don’t eat, or that it is not important to them, underscored with the idea that it shouldn’t be. Susan Bordo, in her “ Hunger as Ideology,” attacks the above assumption and more in relation to how women’s eating is depicted in advertising and what that speaks of the greater sociocultural attitudes towards women’s eating. Bordo begins this section of her book Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body by exploring in detail two specific commercials current to the time period, and explaining how, among other things, women’s relation to food is expected to be “ cool,” or casual. The idealized woman would have an attitude towards food that is nonchalant, that food is “ no big deal” (100), she who feels that “ food is merely ordinary, who can take it or leave it” (100). The idealization of this attitude makes itself known in the pages of Elle vis-a-vis the near complete absence of any content—advertisement, editorial, or other—that is food or eating-related (and of course the majority of those that are present within these pages are for the diet/lo-cal versions). It would be understandable if the food and dining content were kept to a minimum in a fashion magazine, but here it is so minimum as to be almost nonexistent—as if to say that women just don’t eat, that it doesn’t concern them and is something that just isn’t as important as having Giselle Bundchen-like hair or designer plaid knickers. The absence of food-related content here completely supersedes any idea that women are only interested in chocolate, or diet products, etc.

This magazine bypasses this stereotype entirely, aiming instead for the food-as-unimportant-to-the-contemporary-woman one instead. And the best way to foster this kind of casual attitude towards food? Ignore it entirely. Despite Elle’s attempt at eradicating on a large scale the desire of food in women, a couple of ads still snuck their way into its pages, the most significant being the Pop Secret ad. This ad shows a close-up of a women munching from a snack-size bag of Pop Secret Movie Theater Butter popcorn. The woman, the top of whose head is cropped out, concealing her identity, is smiling widely as she clearly sneaks her small bites of popcorn from the bag that was hidden in her purse. The tagline is “‘ Snack Size Movie Theater Butter is Perfect for Sneakin’ ’” (pg. 117). Immediately a number of conclusions can be drawn from just glancing at this ad: (a) The woman’s identity is concealed for her own protection, so no one else will ever know of her “ Secret” binge on popcorn.

The women who can buy Prada bags all have other women doing the cooking and the cleaning at home; this sort of labor is something they just don’t trouble themselves with, so they can focus more on their cake-making and furniture-designing. This magazine is pretty light on advertisements for anything related to cooking, cleaning, laundry, child care, and the like, meaning the Elle reader just doesn’t do these things. It can furthermore be assumed that those women who are doing the cooking and cleaning in these women’s homes are of color, relegated to the realm of domestic servant by their skin. As Evelyn Nakano Glenn notes in “ From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Paid Reproductive Labor,” “ The dominant group ideology…was that women of color…were particularly suited for service…Whatever the specific content of the racial characterizations, it defined the proper place of these groups as in service: they belonged there, just as it was the dominant group’s place to be served” (63). It’s no secret that a woman of color living on maid wages wouldn’t be able to afford Fendi anything, so it is of no great surprise that the magazine pushing the designer labels is pushing them at white women. A white woman who has a domestic servant is “ thereby freed for supervisory tasks and for cultural, leisure, and volunteer activity or, more rarely during this period, for a career…If the heavy parts of household work could be transferred to paid help, the middle-class housewife could fulfill her domestic duties, yet distance herself from the physical labor and dirt and also have time for personal development” (60). Or, at least, have more time to shop. This issue of Elle is most certainly not hurting for a lack of products to buy.

At every turn of every page, there is an appeal to purchase. Steinem states that the nature of women’s magazines is to perform as catalogues: “ The main function was to create a desire for products, teach how to use products, and make products a crucial part of gaining social approval, pleasing a husband, and performing as a homemaker” (8). Even in an editorial piece that could otherwise be somewhat touching, “ Miss Behavior” (pgs. 104-107), which offers a brief biography of Chloe Dao, the winner of the second season of Project Runway, the woman’s life story is only legitimated by her ability to create and manufacture something that can be advertised and consumed, and at decidedly high prices. In the four-page spread, only one page is dedicated to actual text about the designer; the rest is dedicated to the model and the designer’s clothes, with the complementary “ Whats,” “ Wheres,” and “ How Muchs. ” There is a humble effort to make the article seem like a heartfelt exploration of racial stereotyping: the highlighted quote at the top of the editorial page reads “‘ Being a good Asian daughter, I thought I should try to become a buyer or work on the business side instead of trying to design’” (pg. 106). But this is as close as it actually gets to doing so.

August 2006, Issue No. 252. New York, NY: Hachette Filipacchi Media U. S. , Inc. Glenn, Evelyn Nakano. “ From Servitude to Service Work: Historical Continuities in the Racial Division of Reproductive Labor.

” Feminist Frontiers. Ed. Laurel Richardson, Verta Taylor, Nancy Whittier.