Hér á eftir fer afar merkileg grein úr The Guardian. Maður er alveg að sjá þessa þróun í íslenskum fjölmiðlum. Blöð eins og Birta, Vamm, Orðlaus og allt það sem eru ekki um neitt nema föt, tísku og frægt fólk. Höfum við virkilega ekkert merkilegra að segja? Hafa konur bara áhuga á sögum um fólk sem missir ástvini sína, sigrast á erfiðum sjúkdómum eða missir nokkur kíló? Erum við kynslóð án hugsjóna? Erum við búin að gefa vonina um betri heim upp á bátinn? Stundum finnst mér það og það er mjög sorgleg tilhugsun.

Too funny for our own good

A media diet of shopping and shagging is making us stupid, says Yvonne Roberts

Monday May 23, 2005
The Guardian

In the 1970s, the most common complaint about feminists was that when humour was being doled out, somebody else received their ration. They just couldn't see the joke. It was all struggle, struggle, struggle.
Several decades later and inequality in society is even more marked: the value placed on caring continues to be stuck at rock bottom; the objectification of women is wholeheartedly endorsed by the advertising industry, television and almost all women's magazines; a young female graduate in the same job earns considerably less than her male peer for no reason other than her gender; and the easiest crime to get away with is serial rape. But there has been a change.

Now, the thirtysomethings who dominate much of the media, broadsheets and tabloids, apparently can't help but see the funny side. An army of young women, dexterous with the written word and generous with their wit, with notable exceptions, pontificate even on the most serious issues, determined to amuse us all to death.
Of course, there's never enough comedy in the world and radicalism disguised as raising a laugh has a long and honourable tradition - except that, if this lite and sugary diet is the only one we're permitted to digest, there's a danger that the punchline becomes more important than the politics. The impassioned, angry, challenging, investigative and - to use an old-fashioned word - empowering arguments that we ought to be hearing from a range of thirtysomething voices are buried beneath an avalanche of unthreatening quips.

The meatier issues are still aired (at least occasionally) - the poverty of female pensioners, the accelerating numbers in women's prisons, and the alarming rise in depression and alcoholism among young females, to name a few - but they are frequently knocked out in the same bantering style as an in-depth analysis of whether Brad is giving Angelina one and a survey of 1,135 swimsuits for summer (who says today's woman doesn't have choice?).

And there's another problem. Almost 20 years ago, Janice Winship wrote Inside Women's Magazines, based on her research at the University of Birmingham's Centre for Cultural Studies. She pointed out that certain subjects - pornography, rape and equal pay, for instance - had been pushed on to the magazine agenda alongside knitting and cooking by the impact of feminism. But, they had been made palatable by stripping away the politics.

It's dispiriting that now, even more than in the 80s, issues are reduced to a string of confessional stories offering only "individual survival strategies". We have the how, what and when, but not the most important question of all: why?

So, in Grazia, "Britain's first weekly glossy", GMTV's Fiona Phillips tells us why she's, "stuck in the guilt trap". She is a member of the sandwich generation, holding down a job, raising small children and dealing with her mother who has Alzheimer's. At the end of the article is the web address for advice on caring for a person with the illness. The article fails to point out that a significant amount of Phillips' guilt and exhaustion is not down to her "trying to have it all", but because of inflexibility within the workplace and the lack of practical, collective solutions to what is seen, mainly, as a woman's problem. For instance, the government could make it feasible to obtain affordable housing so an elderly person can move to live near an adult son or daughter.

Again, there are exceptions. Marie Claire and Cosmopolitan occasionally display a more hard edged approach. This month's Marie Claire, for instance, covers the campaign to end world poverty as well as racism. But the little that exists is swamped by celebrity mania; cosmetic surgery; shopping and shagging.

The feminist Elizabeth Wilson once wrote that feminism is about a political and ethical commitment to giving women their true value. Look at a selection of this month's magazines and the most prominent women are: Rebecca Loos (slept with Beckham); "three in a bed" Abi Titmuss; Meg Mathews famous for having once been married to a pop star; and Sadie Frost, ditto, except to an actor. Of course, magazines are about escapism but this is an exit to a kind of hell where no one is comfortable in their own skin and canvas espadrille wedges cost a week's wages.

Aren't there more enticing ways to escape; more interesting and stimulating people to interview? Glamour has a section entitled, "YouYouYou". It embraces work, love, mind, sex, money, body. Have the interests of today's young women narrowed down to such an introspective and cripplingly small, debt-ridden canvas?

Perhaps you're not what you read; but anyone absorbing the continual message that we're nothing but a bundle of imperfections who can be healed only by acquiring a new wardrobe, buttocks and a rampant bed stud, may be affected so badly that they may forget to laugh when they are asked to engage their brain.

Professor Lynne Segal, who is that endangered species, a socialist feminist, and who also has a wicked sense of humour, wrote in Why Feminism? of the radical potential of feminism (and boy, is that needed today) "as an oppositional politics; one which dares to fight a culture and a political system which tries to numb us into a acceptance that it can fulfil our needs and desires."

Smile, while you can.