A new book points out how women's magazines market anxiety and attempt to portray women as victims. The ironic thing is the author of Spin Sisters is Myrna Blyth, the retired editor of the Ladies' Home Journal. In this article, Rondi Anderson looks at the book and the criticisms being levels against it. She also shares her own experiences as a writer for such magazines; experiences which correlate with Blyth's premise:
I hoped to explore in this article the politics of the disease, showing how the threat of breast cancer is disproportionate to the amount of attention and money it receives, and that attention takes away from other problems and, indeed, from the quality of life.
Editor after editor rejected the idea with no comment, except one at a magazine called Elm Street who snippily e-mailed: "There is no way this story can do anything but trivialize the plight of women with breast cancer."
That this woman failed to see how condescending she was being to her readers - as though females cannot grasp nuance - should not have surprised me. Ultimately, I wrote the piece for an online Libertarian magazine. This argument has been made elsewhere, notably in "PC, M.D.: How Political Correctness Is Corrupting Medicine," by Sally Satel, a Yale psychiatrist.
Just FYI, this book does follow the modern tradition of pairing a short book title with an extremely unwieldy subtitle. The full title is Spin Sisters: How the Women of the Media Sell Unhappiness --- and Liberalism --- to the Women of America
