First published in Column Eight on the 8th June, 1994
And remember too, the women’s magazines we used to find in
the dairies, full of knitting patterns, and recipes, and letters to the editor
telling about Johnny’s latest little escapade? And padded out with stories
about famous people who were living out lives for the most part more
interesting and adventurous than ours.
We could look back now and say that none of these reflected
the ‘truth’ of either Hollywood stars or the society we lived in. And we might
be right.
We could say (with difficulty, I think) that the present
women’s magazines do represent the truth of famous people’s lives. (The film
magazines have long gone, of course.)
Or we could say that they represent something else altogether.
We know now, after opening countless pages of newsprint and
glossy magazines, that all the Hollywood stars – yes, all! – were really living
lives of terrible trauma. None of them were nice to their children; none of
them stayed married to their partners for five minutes; and all of them fought
tooth and nail with the studio bosses and with anyone who made more money than
they did.
We now know that royalty is really the sickest part of our
society, that ministers of the crown run a close second in the race towards
depravity, and that anyone else we can find to talk about is doing all the
wicked and nasty things we never mentioned in the old magazines.
I don’t think famous people have changed so much. Perhaps it’s
the magazines that have changed.
I’m amazed that the number of ‘exclusives’ the women’s
magazines boast they’ve nabbed. Are famous people really interested in
promoting their latest evils to tiddly little magazines printed at the bottom
of the world, in a country half the famous people couldn’t find on the map?
I wonder how many of the exclusives are really so exclusive.
I wonder if the story wasn’t worth printing in the first place, and the only
way to make someone read it is by tagging it ‘exclusive.’
I know there’s a war on between the women’s magazines: they’re
all fighting for survival. But at what cost to themselves and their readership?
Every possible evil is portrayed week after week. I don’t believe this is the
healthiest way to make your magazine pay.
If gossip over the back fence, and the spreading of rumours
throughout the neighbourhood has become a thing of the past (since most barely
meet their neighbours from one week to the next), is the hunger for it now fed
from the glossy magazines with their endless destructive stories?
It’s probably never paid anyone to be famous, in terms of
what it does to your reputation or your integrity. I would suspect some of the
cast of Shortland St are finding this to their cost. I’m not sure of the
advantages of being plastered all over the latest women’s magazines, with stories
made up practically out of thin air.
Were all the efforts of the thousands of women who fought
for ‘liberation’ over the past twenty years for nothing? I’m sure they never intended
that the cosy image of women as homemakers should be replaced by the image of
women as gossips and scandalmongers.
But isn’t that what these magazines are saying? Make no
effort to lift people up or praise them; pull them down until they can’t rise
any more, and then go out and find some new victim.
The word ‘gossip’ derives from the old English, godssib: God
and sib – a godparent. How far it’s fallen.
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| Cover of the December 1917 Film Fun with illustration of a child with a motion picture camera waiting for Santa Claus, captioned: "I'll get him this time if he shows up!" Courtesy Film Fun |
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