After reading the FP special ‘sex’ issue this week I had the strangest feeling. It was like I woke up and it was 1991 and I was 13 again reading teen magazines. After reading Charli’s excellent post on the issue I couldn’t help but chime in. You see, I know that one of the obvious retorts to some of the criticism that has been waged about the issue will be ‘Hey, it was meant to raise a few issues and have some fun while we’re at it. We’re riffing off the Cosmo style ‘sex’ issue and just mixing it up. Lighten up.” Ok, fair play FP. But keeping with that theme let me start by saying that most of the issue was more like a teeny bopper mag rather than a sex issue (with some excellent exceptions). You’ve missed the target audience FP, and you are behind about 20 years in research. Parts of the issue was sort of like having an article on “a girl’s first period’ in a magazine aimed at adult women and men (oh yeah, I went there). Here are a four pointers on how to write a real sex issue.
1. When you read a Teen Mag you expect banal questions like “who is the sexiest teacher/leader/football player,” but even a low grade pop magazine wouldn’t publish the idiotic list of answers you got re: world leaders (which included Vladmir Putin and “those in South Africa and Muslim countries”). You might as well have just published “brown men” as one of the answers. When adults respond to surveys in ‘sex’ issues you’d hope they can at least remember the names of the brown bodies they fetishize. Why not just have a bunch of photos of politicians and have us rate them ‘hot’ or ‘not’?
2. When you asked why there should be more women in politics you collected answers that covered almost every single cliche: they are more peaceful, they think more about children, they are multitaskers…I guess for the full effect you could have asked someone to mention puppies, gardening, and aprons too…but not exactly sexy right?
3. The article, ‘The Most Powerful Women you’ve never Heard‘ of, must have also been aimed at teens. If your readers have never heard of any of these women then they haven’t been reading the news, preparing for lectures, watching TV, or generally participating in public life. So, like, duh. We know they are powerful- now how about some analysis? This list was like a “60 Sex Tips” article that wouldn’t help the reader undo a bra. Talk about a “most embarrassing moment” FP!!
4. The cover images? That Miley Cyrus-esque Vogue-naked-hunched-pose combined with elements of Muslim/war porn-fetishism is interesting but really below you, don’t you think? Also, paint the woman blue and you’ve got the playbill for Blueman group too, so there may be copyright issues with that.
FP, maybe its time to take the survey: “Are you totally out of the loop?” when it comes to gender and sex. Next time you want to write a sex issue, call in (more) of the experts.
The analogy to a teen mag is brilliant, but let’s take it a step further by letting the Freud flag fly. Teen mags serve two purposes:Â
1) They allow teen girls (and similarly aged boys who can get their hands on them without peers finding out) to play around with ideas about sex without getting their hands dirty, so to speak. It’s a sandbox for urges and insecurities to be aired while keeping things light and playful. You can figure out what’s normal and how deviance is dealt with, for better or worse. They’re kind of Lonely Planet guides to adolescence in consumer culture.2) They diffuse the parents’ tension and insecurities about daughters’ burgeoning sexuality. Mom and Dad know that sexuality is rapidly moving from horizon to collision course, and they (mostly Dad) is freaking out. Knowing that daughter reads about stuff like bikinis and petting in a sandbox medium let’s them/Him ignore what might be going on in daughter’s life. For parents, teenie mags are a safety valve to let the pressure diffuse.Okay, now let’s carry that over into IR. A materialist/rationalist dinosaur (Mearsheimer/Keohane Knows Best) can read such an issue and feel reassured that they’ve engaged with gender issues. It’s in FP, so they better know what the kids are up to these days, but it’s presented superficially enough for nobody to feel threatened. Such a presentation dissolves Dad’s tension faster than a Glenlivet on the rocks waiting for Him after a hard day.But it also satisfies a need among the younger IR-types with a more serious engagement with the literature and debates (e.g. MM and CC). Namely, it lets them be experts about topic in defiance of Dad’s tired, old wisdom. Sure, Dad was reading your issue of Seventeen, but he doesn’t necessarily get to hear you talking with your girlfriends during spare in the cafeteria about how all the bikinis in the last issue were so 1987 (Grandma has one!) and how John Stamos isn’t half as hot as Jon Bon Jovi, the stud. So there’s the social and sandbox experience without having to get too real or face Dad. It’s a way to reassert the difference to the parents’ generation at very low cost. It titillates the Id, strokes the Ego, and deflates the superego. A teenage dream if I ever saw one. Might sound far-fetched, but you might want to consider it in light of this. I mean, at the end of the day, you’ve read your way through the issue and the critiques, so you were getting *something* out of it, right?The bonus for FP is that they get everyone’s attention, reassert their status as go-to IR web publication, and they do it with facile fluff. Perhaps it’s time to revisit the wisdom  of Howard Beale.
GF this is an interesting take. I appreciate you taking the teen mag reference further and you had some hilarious points. I guess I would push back a little and say that its weird to refer to the IR mainstream boys as the ‘daddy’s’ of the field and the feminist or ‘critical’ scholars as children- that brings up entirely different aspects of Freud and its not really how I see it…there may be evidence that a major cohort of scholars are out of touch when it comes to gender, but I’m not buying that they still have- and will have- power. I see it as evidence of failing power and falling power (and relevance). My students,for example, now know not to bother with FP when it comes to gender (and I teach a class of 300 students). Times are changing. Maybe I got my analogies wrong this issue is more an example of a 1950s Women’s Weekly than Teen Celebrity.