04.19.01
When I am at not working hard at my job, the thing I enjoy most (besides dusting and answering the phone and picking up after my messy coworker and folding capes and towels!) is reading magazines. I excel at the reading of magazines, and trust me, we get ooooodles of them at work.
Dude, it's a hair salon.
Now, I subscribe to a few magazines myself, but none of them are the girly girl magazines that are so much fun to read. We get those at work, so I don't have to squander my money on something besides snooty home decor and lifestyle magazines* or inexplicable long-term subscriptions to the men's magazine equivalent of Cosmopolitan**.
Anyways, despite the fact that we have almost no African-American clientele (we don't maintain the chemicals to do relaxers because Overlord Carol is deathly allergic to them, and most people aren't really into the Jeri Curl anymore), we have apparently been gifted with subscriptions to Honey and Heart & Soul. From what I can tell, Honey seems to be a YM-like magazine geared towards the 16-25 African-American female demographic, and Heart & Soul is like Self for women of color.
Flipping through Honey, I got to thinking about the more mainstream fashion/girlie-stuff magazines that I normally read. Except for a few advertisements with racially diverse groups of models, every single face in Honey was black. Now, when I read Glamour, I honestly don't pay much attention to the color of the faces of the models or the people in the ads. I notice the colors and the shapes and styles of the clothing and the make-up. I don't look at Halle Berry shilling lipstick for Revlon and think, "Yeah, that's a nice color on her, but I'm not black," or "Gee, Naomi Campbell sure looks spiffy in that color, but my skin is too light to pull it off."
However, I can appreciate Honey's intent. This magazine exists to empower young black women and make them realize that they can be anything they want to be, and that there are strong, powerful black women out there that they can look to for role models. Of course the faces of the models are going to be dark, because why would they have Nikki Taylor modeling ivory or beige foundation when most of the readers wear something along the lines of mocha or cocoa?
I suppose it was just a shock to realize that there are exclusionary magazines out there like Honey, and I don't mean that in an insulting manner. I mean that all of their content is about black women, whereas a magazine like Allure doesn't really seem to care about the race of the person they feature in a story or a photo. Of course, most of the models and people represented are white, and that's the stereotypical 'model' of beauty that Honey is fighting against.
I just wish that the editors and writing staff of Honey weren't so damn chipper. Except for an article about how the women of West Africa are disfiguring themselves with toxic skin bleaches in order to achieve the western concept of beauty (light skin), every article in the magazine had an intensely positive spin to it. Controversial interviewees like Destiny's Child are given gushing reviews while the more colorful parts of their fame are overlooked. Only books and music by black artists and writers are reviewed, and glowingly I might add.
You can empower, you just don't have to put your readers into a diabetic sugar coma to do it.
*These would be: House & Garden -- sort of a Better Homes & Gardens for the Vanity Fair types. Metropolitan Home -- similar content to H&G but more architecturally focused.And, of course, the ever-present Martha Stewart Living Magazine -- come on, would you expect anything less of me?
**That's right, I have a subscription to Details magazine. You know, it used to be cool when Glen O'Brien was still the Style Guy and Anka was the Sexpert, and they had interesting articles and attractive pictures of celebrities and athletes. Mr. O'Brien has since moved to GQ as their resident Fashion Flair for the Style Impaired expert, and Anka has moved on to books and talk show circuits, or possibly porn. I don't really know for sure.
What I do know is that thanks to magazines like Gear and Maxim, what was once a decent magazine has been morphed into Cosmo for Boys. Thank GOD that GQ stepped up to the plate and took over the niche that Details formerly occupied.
