The sex and shopping gland

When Marcelle d'Argy Smith left the editorship of Cosmopolitan suddenly this summer, the world of women's magazines was rocked to its high heels. Her departure stimulated more column inches than that of Andrew Neil's from the Sunday Times. Cosmo staff reacted to the news as if there had been a death in the family. The embodiment of Cosmopolitan had packed up her soul with her Dorothy Parker wit, and left.

For me, Marcelle's departure coincided with the culmination of ten years work in women's magazines. Newspaper journalists have rarely taken women's magazines seriously. Yet it was once a world to which many intelligent women were attracted because it reflected and respected womanhood. It turned Simone de Beauvoir's second sex into the first. It was a world with a woman's lens over life, generated by offices with 90 per cent female staff, where women felt freer to say and wear what they liked without fear of being misunderstood. Being understood was always a given. And if the pay wasn't enormous, the pleasure certainly was.

In my ten years of work, women's magazines have built healthier-than-ever circulation figures. But at the same time, they've witnessed a profound cultural change. It's an industry shift personified by the recent changes at Cosmopolitan. While Marcelle d'Argy Smith described her motivation as editor as "finding wonderful writers and mobilising women to take control of their lives," incoming editor Mandi Norwood told a newspaper she was motivated by "making money, and stacks of it." It is an unavoidable development, given the new economics of women's magazines. Editors who aim to do the best by their advertisers as well as their readers are on a fast track to insanity.



Commercialism used to be discreetly commonplace in women's magazines, where letters to the editor have long been sponsored by pen companies. Now that commercialism has all but taken over, editorial integrity inside women's magazines is a quaint notion. An industry once peppered with gentle and creative souls who preferred to avoid the grittier journalistic ghetto of Fleet Street, is now dominated by marketeers. Cosmetic advertisers now keep a tally of the number of plugs they get, threatening to take their budget elsewhere if their quota isn't met. And according to Campaign magazine, the beauty editor of Women's Journal is to appear in a television commercial promoting a Procter and Gamble shampoo.

Pre-recession, only beauty editors were required to attend cosmetic product launches. By 1993, the launch of a mascara would guarantee the attendance of every top women's magazine editor, publisher, and sales team. Editors now understand that the cosmetic companies require a good excuse for absenteeism. As a result, they're run ragged by the time demands of the advertising, marketing and promotions departments, leaving less and less time for ideas and writers.

Worldwide advertising expenditure in consumer magazines is expected to rise from $16 billion in 1985 to a forecast $25 billion in 1995. Across western Europe there are now over 39,000 magazines of which 10,000 are considered to be vital for advertisers.

Women's magazines no longer exist for women readers, but for advertisers who want to sell to women. Why? It's all depressingly simple. Because glossy magazines are increasingly expensive to produce and depend for more than half of their revenue on advertising. With this year's 30 per cent increase in paper prices, margins have been badly squeezed. While newspapers have engaged in a circulation war in an attempt to boost revenues, magazines have taken the advertiser route, engaging in complex negotiations involving sponsorship, page rate discounts, and the promise of ever more editorial coverage. Pages are devoted to pushing products at readers through cut-price offers and special club memberships.

When I was a staff writer on Australian Vogue ten years ago, the advertising department was situated somewhere upstairs. We only knew the ad staff by the names on the masthead. These days, advertising teams request features schedules and frequently ask to read copy. In one case I know of, the publisher has asked to vet all editorial copy, not just so he can sell against it.

Tension between editorial and advertising departments is common to many publications. But in women's magazines it has taken a particular form: the huge slimming and cosmetics industry must foster female anxieties in order to sell more products-often in direct conflict with promoting women's confidence. The clout of the advertiser has effectively silenced editorial concern for women's issues. Editorial and advertising share open plan offices, attend inter-departmental meetings and team-building weekends away. Inside the magazine, the two come together in "advertorials" or "promotions"-the word promotion implying the magazine is endorsing the featured product. Research is consistently produced to say that readers like promotions, but editorial staff say they have only ever met people who were irritated by them. But the practice continues and women's magazines, now known as "brands," begin to look like catalogues. Catalogues that sell.

For a large number of women of all social backgrounds and levels of education, there has always been an element of sheer psychological comfort and escapism in picking up your favourite women's magazine. There is also, of course, the vicarious shopping. Sales actually increased during the recession, when a woman who could not afford that Versace dress, the latest convertible, or a Caribbean holiday, could at least spend ?2 on a magazine which cheered her up by feeding the dream. Or, when your emotional world is falling apart, a magazine that lifts your spirits by offering you sound advice can be far better value than psychotherapy.

Women's magazines are an extremely powerful, pleasure-based medium. Now, with advertisers tickling the shopping glands on both advertising and editorial pages, serious concerns-which have always been seen as important by both women's magazine journalists and their readers-are threatened. Social and health issues, politics, literature, and intelligent debate in general, may not appear at the top of market research polls of what readers look at most, but readers definitely like them. Just as people who live in London and don't go to the Tate Gallery for a year would not necessarily want it removed.

Despite the reprimand from the modelling agency director Laraine Ashton that women's magazines are "obsessed" with sex, the selling of sex will almost certainly continue. Most editors are unwilling to risk altering the mix while it seems to be pushing up circulation. But some recent research suggests that Laraine Ashton's views may be held by readers too. The CIA MediaLab's Sensor study says that almost half of all women believe that some women's magazines concentrate too much on sex.

The ultimate imperative today is that each story must shift copies, regardless of the effect this has on the balance of the magazine. Each newly reported sensation, therefore, must beat the last, and everything else gets superlatively better than ever. Of course women's magazine journalists want to achieve higher circulations, but not if the end result is mostly sensational, lowest common denominator rubbish.

Any hope of inspiring women to improve their lives, any campaign defending women's rights, any wish to write about something challenging and not loved by advertisers, is now edited out by the great god of the bottom line.

Sadly, an increasingly well-educated female population is reflected less and less in the women's press. But if women's magazines are unable, or unwilling, to grow with their readers, they may discover that the readers will outgrow them.