Young Woman Blues (at the magazine shelf)

A couple of weeks ago, I bought two magazines.
One was interesting, insightful, well written, and challenging.

The other one was aimed at women my age.

This is something I've been brewing on for a while now. I felt insulted to have paid £3,50 for something I felt, in a nutshell, to be a collection of meaningless sentences arranged around some photographs. For every page I turned to see the same nonsense - clothes, celebrities wearing clothes, some mention of health and quite a bit about relationships and sex - I felt just a little bit more insulted. Not merely because the information was so incredibly trivial - I was expecting that - what really got to me was the fact that it somehow didn't seem to add anything new.

I read to get new impressions. A unique point of view, perhaps, or new information, or just to escape from reality altogether. I certainly don't read to confirm something I could quite easily derive at myself through pure reasoning. Take this example: "Your man suddenly stops texting you. He's probably not that into you." Which, by the way, is not directly quoted from anything, and I'm sure I've come across it more than once. I'm also pretty sure it is usually the answer to a question that goes something like: "He suddenly stopped texting, has he lost interest?"

Yes, this answers itself.
Most likely.

Unless the woman is overanalyzing normal behaviour. I'm not going to generalize here. Not much, anyway. Overanalyzing is something I've been guilty of doing more than once myself. I have worried unnecessarily more than once, because I've failed to see the obvious explanations. I'm not even going to try to blame this one on the media, because although I read girls' mags as a young teen, I never truly took them to heart. Nonetheless, I think there is an issue with the way men are represented in media aimed at women.

At best, all the thoughts and emotional range of men appear to be represented by one man, or a small group. At worst, men are presented as aliens or animals. They will relate to you. They might love you. They have thoughts and feelings - but not the same thoughts and feelings as us, and must be constantly watched and analyzed.

I may be guilty of occasionally overanalyzing things, but don't come here with the suggestion that men and women share the same emotions or basic reasoning. And if you're trying to tell me every man on the planet can be represented by a group of 5, you've got another thing coming.

By the way, the interesting and intelligent magazine I mentioned at the beginning of this post was the New Scientist magazine. Thought I'd mention it.