Faking It: Sex, Lies, and Women's Magazines

By Liza Featherstone, Columbia Journalism Review. Posted March 4, 2002.

Standing on line at the grocery store almost anywhere in America, the hapless shopper is bombarded with insistent exhortatory headlines: blow his mind; sexual bliss secrets!; get his sexual attention instantly; what he's thinking about you ... naked. Perhaps she stands in front of them to prevent her mother or her kid from reading them aloud. Or she skims the copy to see if it might deliver the promised ecstasy. Whether or not she actually buys women's magazines, she can't escape their sexual anxieties, enthusiasms, and obsessions.

Our shopper might have been all ears at a fall cocktail-hour panel of women's magazine editors, hosted by Mediabistro.com, a media networking organization, and held at Obeca Li, a trendy nouvelle Asian restaurant in lower Manhattan. Audience members, mostly senior-level editors and writers for women's magazines, joined the panelists in voicing many familiar complaints about the industry: too many skinny models, even more emaciated feature stories, and too much advertiser influence on editorial content. Laurie Abraham, executive editor of Elle magazine, however, had something else on her mind. The worst thing about women's magazines, she asserted during the panel discussion, is how much "we lie about sex."

Under normal circumstances, a roomful of experienced journalists might rise up in outrage at being called liars. But Abraham's statement was met with nods of guilty agreement and mildly embarrassed "tell me something I don't know" shrugs. No one denied the charge.

This is not Watergate, of course, or even Monica-gate. Yet these ubiquitous stories about sex are presented as journalism, chock full of analysis and quotes, and they are surely believed by many of their readers. They are a formidable cultural force, shaping and reinforcing our attitudes about men and women, orgasms and relationships. Women's magazines run scrupulously reported and fact-checked articles on such subjects as breast cancer and women under the Taliban. Do they have a problem with sex?

Well, yes, it turns out, they do. Many writers, editors, and fact-checkers involved with these sex articles (most of whom asked that their identities be protected with the top-secrecy accorded Seymour Hersh's CIA sources) agreed that the editorial standards for them are abysmal. To return to Abraham's blunt characterization: these articles are full of lies.

Fashion and beauty magazines like Vogue or Allure seem to avoid sex, perhaps because it demands so many aesthetic compromises -- inevitably messing up eyeliner or hair. It is the life-style magazines like Mademoiselle, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Marie Claire, and others that most often run the most features dedicated to sex and relationship conundrums. Within these service-oriented magazines, the worst abuses seem to occur in a specific genre -- the relationship/advice story (opposites attract, the seven-year itch), which is usually illustrated by ebullient quotes from supposedly real women ("Marisa, a 26-year-old executive secretary"). Just about everyone interviewed for this story said that these stories were embellished.

"These stories were so 'tweaked,'" says a former fact-checker at Mademoiselle, which folded last fall, "that checking them was not a priority." A woman who works for Glamour acknowledges that quotes are routinely rewritten. "They get people to interview people -- or purport to interview people," but quotes are then re-phrased to sound as silly and perky as the magazine's copy. "No one talks like that," she says. Former Glamour fact-checker Amy Feitelberg is even blunter: "Quotes were totally changeable."

The former Mademoiselle checker says of the sex articles, "When I first got there, I would try to check those first-time-I-had-sex quotes. You know, 'It was Christmas Eve, we made a fire ... .' And I would get blank looks" from editors. "They'd say, 'Um, you want to call these people?'"

A former Cosmopolitan editor, interviewed by cell phone during a manicure/pedicure, says that Cosmo nearly always changed the ages of people quoted, to hit the magazine's mid-twenty-something target readership. Writers and editors often interview their friends, and "we didn't know anyone of the correct age. Such a nuisance!"

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