Tasty Tacos

"Jane" Magazine and the Betrayal of the Fashion Mag

I like Avril Lavigne, not because she's good, but because she is such a conundrum. I think of Britney Spears's good girl image. She used to be the nice girl next door who was cute and innocent, thus making her the object of male fantasy. Now Avril Lavigne is as the media calls her, the anti-Britney. She is this because she doesn't dress or act or sing like Britney. Instead of being a good girl, she gets in fights and does other rowdy stuff. in reality, however, she shows her midriff just as much as Britney, is a sex-object just as Britney is (again, partly because of her youth), and heck, her songs could be Britney's! At least some of them could. Maybe not "Sk8r Boi," but the others are just simple pop songs. She's not the anti-Britney! She IS Britney!

I like "Jane" magazine, too. It seems to be the non-fashion magazine. It is a magazine that's entire MO is to be beligerent. It's for people who don't like fashion magazines. (How I came to read "Jane" is another story, one involving a sister-in-law, some unused airline mileage, and a move to Houston.)

Yet the magazine is really just another ploy to get people to read. Nils mentioned Maxim or Blender or Stuff or one of those magazines, and their refusal to call themselves pornography. Well, he's right, of course, but the magazines also don't pretend to be anything other than "men's magazines" just as Playboy is. They're definitely not highbrow.

Jane, however, thinks it is. For instance, they include an "under-makeover" in every issue. They find someone who wears too much or bad makeup and make them over so that the makeup isn't so obvious. The implications are that women are naturally beautiful and shouldn't wear so much makeup. Two points, though: 1. if women are naturally beautiful, why wear makeup at all? and 2. why does the magazine have so many advertisements for makeup? The feature seems more like a "how to wear your makeup correctly," more than a statement about the value of makeup, which is what it wants to be.

This month they also included a feature about personal ads. They answered three different personal ads with someone who was different from what the person actually wanted. For instance, one male wanted a "curvy" girl because he can't stand skinny ones. They sent him a skinny blonde, and he was upset. He wouldn't date the person after he met her. One guy wanted an Asian girl, and they sent an American. Another wanted skinny, and they gave him big. The point was to put down guys for being so bent on looks; guys can't get past looks to see personality. Fine, a great statement (even if it is cruel and misleading), but not for Jane magazine. This magazine features incredibly beautiful women who fit all of the model stereotypes of beauty on every page. It's ads are virtually no different from any fashion magazines except the models tend to be skinnier and maybe a bit younger, becuase the magazines readership fits the bill, or at least they want to, right?

Perhaps Jane is attempting to change everything from the inside. Perhaps it has to have the advertisers in order to subtly undermine it all in its articles. I don't think so, though; everyone just keeps buying it, and probably agrees with the articles and then looks at all of the models and says, "why can't I look like that?" If anything, it's undermining itself.

What do I want from Jane? Nothing. If nothing else, it's entertaining (even if I am an evil male). It should just have the guts to be what it is.

Jenny,

I agree with you on a few points you bring up about "When Harry Met Sally." (Notice how I conveniently skip the "silly" issues about men and women and body image to get right to the real stuff...). Your points, I think, boil down to this: "WHMS" is a good romantic comedy.

This genre is actually one that I like. I hate to admit it, but I do. I will never want to watch one if I have a choice, but when I do, I tend to like 'em. But as good movies, I think they generally fall flat. There are exceptions, of course, but in general, romantic comedies are fluff movies that play into our notions that men and women will eventually get together and everything will work out in the end. "WHMS" is different, then. Sally's last statement is about how much she hates him. Then why in the world are they together? I tend to scream at the screen.

Anyway, I agree that this is a good romantic comedy. But the issue isn't merely that the questions it brings up are "dated" because the genre since then has "pushed the sexual envelope." This sounds like it isn't scandalous enough or is tame in comparison to other movies. Actually, I was surprised by its candor in treating the characters' relationships.

The main theme about male and female friendship is just too commonplace now, and my question is not faulting "WHMS." It is asking whether the movie came up with these ideas or not. Was it the first to say them? Whether it did or not, however, may not matter, because if the ideas are now commonplace, it means, as you suggest, that we have to watch the movie for "more than just 'issues.'" Now we look for scenery, character interaction, etc. It's no longer about the central issue. I agree--I think it does these other things wonderfully. (I thought Carrie Fisher was awful, however.)

Granted men and women still no nothing about one another (don't I know it!). But my wife isn't quite Sally, and I'm sure as hell not Harry. Maybe the real question is why do goody-goody girls go for god-awful guys????

P.S. I don't think I'm really disagreeing with you, Jenny. Just wanted to clarify (or muddle) some points.

P.S. P.S. Fight the jam bands!!

Cause and Effect

A woman puts her six children in a small car, something like a Honda Civic. Then she drives to the store and gets in a wreck on the way. Two of her children die. Horrible. She sues the car manufacturer for making airbags that killed her children.

Something is terribly wrong here. Cause and effect is never so simple. Sure, the airbags might be the direct cause of a child’s death, but it could also be that there were seven people in the car! I’m not saying that the airbags were not at fault. Perhaps they were. But cause and effect is never so simple.

Now consider a more benign example.

I just watched “When Harry Met Sally” for the first time. I know, I know, I have been under a rock for fifteen years. I just didn’t care to see this romantic comedy when it came out (when? in 1989? geez, I was 15…). The movie was funny, certainly, but it doesn’t seem to have withstood the test of time. I wonder about that.

Billy Crystal is better than I would have imagined. Meg Ryan is actually quite cute. Maybe it’s the story itself. Something about cause and effect here. The movie’s premise and lines have become complete commonplace: saying that men and women can’t be friends because sex gets in the way is a statement that no longer needs stating. I think this movie no longer holds because its very ideas, which may have been intellectually stimulating at one time are no longer so. They now seem like things my kid brother would hear in junior high.

Consider the major funny points: the fake orgasm; the dating scene including the “white man’s overbite” while dancing; the argument at the very beginning about men and women; the idea that men wonder how long to cuddle after sex; the view of marriage as debilitating to a friendship and to sexual intercourse. There’s good stuff there, but it’s all old hat now. Now the interesting discussions are not about whether sex ends after marriage but whether oral sex ends after marriage. Not about whether men and women can be friends, but whether men and men can be friends without some kind of weird sexual tension (see “Y tu Mama, Tambien”).

So, my question is this: was “When Harry Met Sally” on the cusp? Was it taking ideas that were already in circulation, already common? Or were its psychological insights into the dating relationship really new? The interviews included on the DVD make it seem like no one had ever said these things before, but I wonder about that; they could always just be tooting their own horns.

It makes me wonder, but not too hard. Whichever is true, the movie is still funny, but not like it may have been at one time. Now it’s more like a piece of history, an anthropological project: let’s see when these ideas about men and women were first stated in a pop culture forum…

Whichever is the case, I’m glad I saw it.

How Genre Fiction Saved Civilization
Over the weekend, with all the cultural commentary from Tasty Tacos rattling around in my mind, I found myself in deep sympathy with Chad's idea that much if not all of what can benefit us in "high" culture is present in "low" and popular culture. In spite of the fact that it's manufactured for the masses, popular culture serves a valuable purpose, particularly in a time like ours. Like the Irish monks of old, celebrated (and probably mythologized) by Thomas Cahill, the genre writers might just be saving civilization.

The quality of "craft" in literary fiction (or at least, fiction that aspires to be art) is at an all-time low. Partly this is due to the fact that more people are trying to create it, and this always lowers the average. But it is partly the result of the fact that, like visual art, fiction has experienced and is experiencing a major ideological shift. It has to do not so much with content as with style, or technique. You can't write a "well made" story. You can't be non-experimental. When I was at University of Houston, Rosellen Brown, who had a reputation for rather impenetrable experimental fiction (I was in a workshop where a three or four page story of hers took an hour and a half for the instructor to "explain") sold her rather conventional novel Before and After for a million dollars. It was made into a movie with Liam Neeson and Meryl Streep -- Rosellen played us tapes of the dialogue read-through when we met in her living room for a workshop. As a result of her success, there was a feeling in the program that she had "sold out." She had given up her art for a commercial success. It would be like Jackson Pollock doing a few hunting scenes to pay the bills.

"Craft" is not something they teach much in a program like that, even though it is virtually all that is taught in low-brow sources like Writer's Digest. As a result, sophisticated graduate students have a hard time pulling off what the aspiring romance novelists at the Clarion Inn workshops have no problem with. They have a hard time writing stories with conflict, stories populated by plausible characters, stories that end for a reason other than the author's indifference. I was fortunate to have spent a lot of time in Daniel Stern's workshops, where an anachronistic emphasis on technique persisted, but the fact is that most of this academic fiction (mine included) is intended for no audience whatsoever. It is published (without money changing hands) in small journals that are only read by people hoping to be published by them. And this is the pinnacle.

Meanwhile, the lowbrow workshops are preserving technique -- admittedly, in many cases but thoughtlessly repeating what has gone before, but often innovating in a way that puts the self-conscious "artists" to shame. Looking at it from another angle, "genre" writers are producing some of the most interesting novels. John Le Carre is an example. Perhaps the best, in my mind, is Patrick O'Brian, who in spite of being categorized as a writer of historical adventure novels, created some of the most remarkable characters I've ever encountered in fiction.

I'm an elitist at heart, and I do think there is some ineffable hierarcy of merit in artistic endeavors. But it has nothing to do with the cultural placement of a work. My friend Eric Williamson wrote a novel, East Bay Grease about his childhood in Oakland among bikers and sax players, and it is unquestionably art and unquestionably "low brow" at the same time. He wouldn't have had it any other way. There are products of "high culture" -- such as the Three Tenors, already mentioned in the discussion -- that are so self-evidently bad as to be unconscious parodies of the thing they embody. What separates them is the skill of execution....and something more, maybe the choices that skill serves.

Anyway, I'm heading to the movies to see 28 Days Later, pleased that I can justify the pleasure as a cultural statement, too....