Page 171 - Cultural Theory and Popular Culture an Introduction

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Reading women’s magazines 155

tensions as an expression of women being ‘ideologically bound to the personal terrain
and in a position of relative powerlessness about public events’ (70). Like the so-called
‘triumph over tragedy’ stories, the readers’ letters and editorial responses often reveal
a profound commitment to the ‘individual solution’. Both ‘teach’ the same parable:
individual effort will overcome all odds. The reader is interpellated as admiring subject
(see discussion of Althusser in Chapter 4), her own problems put in context, able to
carry on. Short stories work in much the same way. What also links these different
‘fictions’ is ‘that the human triumphs they detail are emotional and not material ones’
(76). In many ways this is essential for the continued existence of the magazines’ imag-
ined communities; for to move from the emotional to the material is to run the risk of
encountering the divisive presence of, for example, class, sexuality, disability, ethnicity
and ‘race’.

Thus the ‘we women’ feeling magazines construct is actually comprised of different
cultural groups; the very notion of ‘we’ and ‘our world’, however, constantly under-
cuts those divisions to give the semblance of a unity inside magazines. Outside,
when the reader closes her magazine, she is no longer ‘friends’ with Esther Rantzen
and her ilk; but while it lasted it has been a pleasant and reassuring dream (77).

This is perhaps even more evident on the problem page. Although the problems are
personal, and therefore seek personal solutions, Winship argues that ‘unless women
have access to knowledge which explains personal lives in social terms . . . the onus on
“you” to solve “your” problem is likely to be intimidating or . . . only lead to frustrated
“solutions”’ (80). She gives the example of a letter about a husband (with a sexual
past) who cannot forget or forgive his wife’s sexual past. As Winship points out, a per-
sonal solution to this problem cannot begin to tackle the social and cultural heritage
of the sexual double standard. To pretend otherwise is to mislead.

Agony aunties (and magazines) act as ‘friends’ to women – they bring women
together in their pages and yet by not providing the knowledge to allow women to
see the history of their common social condition, sadly and ironically, they come
between women, expecting, and encouraging, them to do alone what they can only
do together (ibid.).

At the centre of Winship’s book are three chapters, which in turn discuss the indi-
vidual and family values of Woman’s Own,the (hetero)sexual liberation ideology of
Cosmopolitan and the feminist politics of Spare Rib.I have space only to make one point
with reference to these chapters. Discussing Spare Rib’s reviews of popular film and tele-
vision, Winship responds with comments that echo through much recent ‘post-feminist’
analysis (and much of the work discussed in this chapter) on popular culture:

These reviews . . . bolster the reviewer’s position and raise feminism and feminists
to the lofty pedestal of ‘having seen the light’, with the consequent dismissal not
only of a whole range of cultural events but also of many women’s pleasurable and