Myrna Blyth, former editor of Ladies' Home Journal, lets it rip in 'Spin Sisters: How the Women of the Media Sell Unhappiness and Liberalism to the Women of America.'

She gets pretty fair treatment today in the New York Times.

Naturally though, The Times has to include some nasty scraps from aggrieved industry insiders (read the whole article). Here's the filet.

In the book Ms. Blyth indicts a whole category of magazines as politically tendentious and editorially alarmist. 'Deep down, most of our Spin Sisters are just good old-fashioned left-wingers, wired for a liberal response to every issue,' she writes. Ms. Blyth suggests that this reflexively liberal bent stems from the conceit that women are victims. 'Do we spend our days worrying whether antiperspirants cause breast cancer or wondering if a long airline ride will cause a fatal blood clot?' she writes. 'Or are we just observing today's favorite media technique to paint women's lives to women audiences as a picture of accumulated woes?'

...Ms. Blyth, 64, was editor of Ladies' Home Journal for more than two decades, arriving in 1981 from Family Circle to turn around a foundering magazine. In 1998 she helped conceive More, a magazine for women over 40, one of the most successful new magazines in recent years. She retired last July from the Meredith Corporation, which also publishes Better Homes and Gardens and other women's magazines.

Ms. Blyth said she had written 'Spin Sisters' both as a corrective and a penance. 'I was a Spin Sister,' she said during a recent lunch. 'I used the female fear factor to sell magazines.'

....Ms. Blyth has always been an odd fit in the magazine sisterhood. She said she often attended events or parties where she was the only Republican in the room. And she said it was women's magazines, not her, that had done most of the changing.

'It became convenient to tell women about their stress, their fears, their woes in the 90's,' she said. 'I lived through 30 years in the industry, and I did not like what these magazines had become.'

....Ms. Blyth contends that women's magazines use over-the-top cover headlines to compete on the newsstand and to create insecurity that makes women the willing consumers that advertisers crave. Articles about stress, a hardy perennial, are mostly conjured, she argues.

'A woman comes home from work and she has to choose between Domino's and Hamburger Helper, and that becomes stress," Ms. Blyth said. 'It's silly.'

Ms. Blyth finds pathology everywhere she looks in the magazine rack. To judge by the articles, she said, women are always in danger of being hunted and killed by the opposite sex. 'He is going to kill me! Is anybody listening?' read one Glamour headline. The perils are everywhere. 'The Health Hazard in Your Handbag' read the headline on another article.

So much of this just seems stuff to wrap around ads, but is really about buying into a clientized, consumerist society. A great antidote to the big-time women's magazines is, naturally, online. Check out ifeminists.

Times story tip via I Want Media.

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at March 2, 2004 09:19 AM

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