While preparing a class on the social role of magazines, I heard Susan Faludi was visiting my campus. Like many college women in the early 1990s, I read her book, “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women,” and realized I was riding feminism’s third wave. In a box somewhere, I think I still have the 1992 Time magazine with Faludi and Gloria Steinem on the cover.
Now that I’m a professor teaching magazine journalism, I wonder who could join those two women on a magazine cover today. At least we had a backlash to talk about back then.
Today, no one I know reads Ms., and other feminist magazines seem more concerned with survival than inciting change. Bitch’s Web site features its store on its homepage. The Web sites for Bust and Jezebel sell celebrity and sex – and stuff, of course – with a feminist attitude, which somehow passes for feminism today.
The substantive issues are certainly still there. Among them, a woman still earns less than 80 cents to every dollar a man earns, having a baby makes her less promotable and gender inequities in health care persist. As Faludi said in an interview with me Tuesday, “we’re a long way from the Promised Land.” So where are the articles, investigations and documentaries? The feminist magazines of 40 years ago both reflected and propelled the grassroots support for feminist causes. Why is today’s movement represented only in a handful of thought-provoking blogs with little or no real reporting?
“I think feminism, feminist journalism, which there wasn’t that much to begin with, has really been just stripped of – or [it’s] overlooking larger systemic issues, those bread-and-butter sort of economic questions, social change,” she said. “It’s all about the individual woman, self-expression, self-promotion and self-fill-in-the-blank. It’s really disheartening.”
While Bitch provides great commentary on culture and Feministing does a good job blasting the stereotypes perpetuated in mainstream media, no magazine regularly publishes serious, in-depth treatments of issues important to women.
“For correcting the record, Web journalism is useful,” Faludi said. “But for not for more thoughtful pieces. I don’t see them doing that.”
The problem with journalism, right now, is the problem with feminism: too much Me, not enough Us. With the exceptions of The New Yorker, The Economist and a few other titles, magazines have given up what they do best – critical, well-researched think pieces – in order to compete with the Web, much as they did to compete with television in the 1960s and 1970s.
Faludi is a former Wall Street Journal reporter and winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Recently, she was talking with some junior faculty members in the Boston area. She said they were asking her advice on where to publish some weighty, but not quite academic articles on feminist subjects.
“It was painful, I just had no idea,” she said. “You know, it’s too long for something on the Net; it’s too intelligent for any magazine. . . . So then we all sat around and said, ‘You know, we should all start a magazine!’ But then we decide to go have another drink instead.”
It’s not that a magazine or a Web site of that sort wouldn’t get read. It just wouldn’t make any money today. Perhaps a ProPublica of feminism would be possible, I suggested. “Right,” Faludi agreed. “As soon as we find somebody who has $50 million that they want to just spend and never recoup their funds.”
I tend to think that someone is going to make this work. Feminists have figured out how to do tougher things. I enjoy the pop-culture criticism as much as anyone, but the post-backlash era has left a big gap in coverage. Faludi suggested something I tell students to do all the time: Carve out a unique niche for yourself.
At this time, “what we need is really smart, wonderful young feminists going to journalism,” she said. “There aren’t that many people out there writing these stories, so if you do the work and really investigate a question, a burning question you have within feminism, it will stand out because you have almost no competition.”
So who could be on that 2010 magazine cover with Faludi and Gloria Steinem? What would be the right magazine? For the cover, Faludi suggested Jessica Valenti from Feministing or Lisa Jervis from Bitch. I’m still looking for the right magazine.
For more on Faludi’s talk at Kent State, check out the story on KentWired.
This article was originally published on my blog, InspireMeJProf
