0.3% of women look like supermodels. And yet, models occupy the cover of nearly every “lifestyle” magazine along with newest fad diet or workout routine the purports to help you, the consumer, achieve that level of beauty. Assuming for a minute (unjustifiably) that women who occupy magazine covers actually qualify as universally beautiful, it seems statistically improbable that only those women would wind up on magazines without some underlying cause. That cause of course, is that it sells; more specifically, it sells to women (of course, images of beautiful women sell to men as well, but for the time being we’ll focus marketing oriented towards women).
A quick visit to “Women’s Health Magazine” (ongoing sneer quotes) has links to how to “Unleash Your Hottest Body”, as well as the “Deadline Diet” and the “Fat-frying Workout”. Accompanying all of these titles are images of women that occupy the aforementioned 0.3%. Now clearly the women in these images aren’t the ones who the articles are written for, so why are their images chaperoning a diet or workout article? The answer, I would argue, is that these images make women feel like shit about themselves. They’re intended to make the 99.7% of women who don’t look like supermodels (read: target market) insecure and spend their hard-earned money to get the new secrets to beauty (which don’t exist). Making people feel unattractive is a massive business, and I feel deep down that its diabolically evil. Imagine what people would think of me if I went around pointing out women’s love handles and cellulite. Furthermore, imagine what people would think of me if I made money off of it. This might sound like an unfair comparison, but I would argue that this is exactly what “Women’s Health Magazine” is doing in putting images of incredibly thin women next to fad diets and workouts. Now, these magazines come out monthly (or weekly, or biweekly) with new secrets to health and beauty every time. Meanwhile our species hasn’t changed significantly in many millennia and yet every couple of weeks or so there are new “miracle ” diets and workouts advertised in supermarket check out lines. So lets recap: our bodies haven’t changed since well before the invention of paper, and yet people make millions of dollars telling other people new and improved ways to be healthy, ad infinitum. Sooner or later you’d think people would have a pretty decent idea how to be healthy and not need to buy a magazine to tell them how to do it. Well, of course, they do they just don’t like the answer.
Clearly, “Women’s Health Magazine” doesn’t have any interest in making the other 99.7% of women look like supermodels, because they would go out of business. They have an interest in giving their readers the impression that the magazine is a vital part of their health goals. Part of that includes distorting those health goals to the point of being unreasonable, as the worse someone feels about themselves, the more likely they are to buy magazines that claim to have the answers. Its also worth noting that the same ruse exists in Men’s Health magazines (“1000 Sex Secrets to Please Your Girl!”, “8 Pack Abs in 8 Minutes!”).
Another good example of this phenomenon is in hair loss commercials. Not only do they all claim to have a (likely fallacious) solution to a man’s receding hair line, but they all include before and after images that show how much more handsome a man has become since using their product. Implied in the whole farce is that men are less attractive without hair and that hair loss is something to fight. Again, the intent is to make people feel like shit about themselves in order to motivate them to buy a product; these companies are actively working to make people feel worse about themselves in order to make a profit. Ultimately, the only fail-safe way to treat hair loss is accepting it and perhaps finding a suitable hair cut (specifically not the ponytail).
In conclusion: they’re assholes so don’t buy their crap.
