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by Joe Grossberg.
Original Post: Like So Many Women
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Body + Soul and Yoga Journal are two of my new favorite magazines. I find them really insightful, interesting, throughtful, well-written, well-designed and reasonably-priced.
My main gripe: the publishers, writers and advertisers (reasonably, in all likelihood)‚ assume their audience is overwhelmingly female. The cover photos, advertisements, yoga pose instructions and personal testimonies always feature women.
This, despite the fact that the subject matter is very gender-neutral, unlike say "Women's Health" or "Shape" or "Self", which include articles on makeup, menstruation and 99 ways drive your man wild in bed.
Now, I understand they are businesses, and showing a more even distribution of male and female subjects makes only marginally more sense than putting lots of black dudes in a mag dedicated to NASCAR.
And I'm well past the point, where I feel the need to justify it when I have an interest in stuff immature people think is girly. I do yoga. I drink Evian. I watch the Golden Girls. I own cats. I bought that Cardigans album back in the day.
Anyhow, I'm reading this article called "The Myth of Independence: We learn early on that strong, capable people don't need anyone else. But the most enlightened and happiest among us know otherwise. Find out what we lose by going it alone."
Touchy-feely? Yes.
But, this is very much a problem that affects guys. I would argue that it does, moreso — not only are there the pressures, internal and external, that we all feel, the notion of self-sufficiency in the face of adversity is something our culture deems the epitome of machismo. From Hercules, Theseus and Perseus to Superman, Rambo and John McClane (Die Hard), our culture has this archetype of (literal!) super-man as being a guy who can overcome the greatest challenges on his own. Yes, there are exceptions, but did the Lone Ranger "need" Tonto, Odysseus "need" his crew and Batman "need" Robin and Alfred in the same way Buffy needed the "Scooby Gang" and Giles?
Anyhow, I digress.
The article's author: Terri Trespicio, a woman. Illustrator: Juliette Borda, a woman. The illustrations picture a woman trying to scale a mountain ("by herself, she proudly climbed") before being helped to reach the summit by a man and woman. (I would imagine that many men would wince at a depiction of a woman, rather than a brother or male friend, helping the guy finish his climb.) The opening anecdote is from a 32-year-old woman. "Like so many women [sic], I'd measured success by how much I could do on my own," she says. The article's author notes, "For women [sic], the myth of independence can prove especially risky." They then quote (female) psychotherapist Florence Falk, author of "On My Own: The Art of Being a Woman Alone". Etc. etc. And this is just one article.
Falk says "We don't ask [for help] because we're afraid it means admitting we can't be all things to all people." My boss literally told me about a month ago to "stop trying to be all things to all people" when I was getting really stressed out.
Good article. Good magazine. Good advice. But I keep feeling this sense of "Hey, what about me?"
Somehow, I feel like all my female readers are thinking, "Welcome to our world," right about now.
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