Toxic masculinity is built into the fabric of our urban spaces: okay, I have walked around certain cityscapes and thought 'urgent phallic look, what' and 'mi patriarkle thrust, I show u it', but you know, I could live with a certain amount of upthrusting architecture providing there was an adequate provision of public loos, which are not mentioned ( Read more... )

Columnists are deploring the closing-down of women's magazines: Women’s magazines are more progressive than ever - and they’re all closing down and Marie Claire wasn’t all fluff. It filled a crucial gap in women’s lives.
And, okay, I'm glad to see that they're acknowledging the work that these magazines did, but - as ever, I'm a bit irked that ( Read more... )

Today's ODNB Life of the Day: Marje Proops by Katharine Whitehorn.
I daresay that many of my dr rdrs were in the wrong country to know of or born just a bit too late to recall Dear Marje, so I will copy a few choice bits here, as those links do not last: [T]he editor of Good Taste magazine asked her to write an article on the problems of mothers ( Read more... )

From comments apropos of this story:
Nuts and Zoo are aimed at male morons, whose minds might be ugly, but you shouldn't tar all men with that brush. Are the female equivalents, of which there is a larger and more varied selection, Heat and Closer etc etc. a fair reflection of the inside of the female mind?
Whether or not, I really don't think ( Read more... )

When I was but a little girl (hey, ho, the wind and the rain), in the days when mammoths and sabretooth tigers roamed the streets, I used to read my mother's Good Housekeeping, just like I read anything printed that came through the door.

And in those days, my pets, Good Housekeeping only ventured into the bedroom in order to explain how to choose ( Read more... )

Kathryn Hughes on the history of the woman's magazine on which there is currently an exhibition at The Women's Library. Interesting, but I'm not sure I agree with the categorisation:
the home-making (Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, Prima) to the campaigning (Englishwoman's Journal, Spare Rib) by way of the liberating (the Freewoman, Cosmopolitan ( Read more... )

When Observer Woman is inflicted upon us.

And to add to the horror, when I go to the website, they still have last month's content up, which I thought I had missed (one of the upsides to being in Urbana-Champaign).

So I will not be linking to the totally bizarre, incongruous, indeed nauseatingly jolting, juxtaposition of an article about handbags ( Read more... )

A tangential train of thought started by the various posts concerning LJ's new 'flagging for adult content' facility,* and people mentioning what they read at what age and whether they even noticed the 'adult content' elements.

I'm pretty sure I didn't really get what The Charioteer was all about, in spite of already having read Renault's ( Read more... )

Article in today's G2 about new feminist magazines. Which is all well and good.

Though, circulation of 5000 for a magazine like Shrew, produced in those there days by typing stencils and duplicating, with an editorial collective circulating around various different women's groups, thus appearing not entirely regularly, and without all the ( Read more... )

Yes, it's Observer Woman time again!

It's too late now, but I think Bjork might have appreciated a codfish or two when being interviewed by Polly Vernon - honestly, would you talk to PV about feminism? Or ageing?

I've never heard of Hilary Duff, who is, apparently, a pop star, but I could get behind whapping her with a codfish for her dimwitted ( Read more... )