Great episode in so many ways. I genuinely did not know how curated the ‘regular women’ profiled in magazines were. I experienced major heartache in my teens and 20s (and sometimes still in my 50s) because I know models and actresses have to look a particular way and money and resources were put toward that look. But I spent a lot of time very upset because I felt I did not even measure up to the ‘regular’ women. Left me hopeless. I’m smart, I should’ve known, but I didn’t. So much to grieve for my younger self.
I mean, we were working very very hard to make sure you did not know/did not see how the sausage got made! Definitely much to grieve, but this was not on the readers at all.
FFS the editorial preference for “attractive” 9/11 widows and non-“chubs” cancer survivors?!?🤬 And the unsolicited use of “portly” is a definite choice.
I 100% believe you two. It sounds so uncanny valley that it has to be real. Gah then there’s the layer of beauty labour you were expected to maintain to fit in. It’s a trap!!
As a young breast cancer survivor, just, my goodness. On one hand, if I had been diagnosed back in the aughts I'm sure it would have been helpful to see another young survivor since that was such an overlooked demographic (thankfully that's changing, though not fast enough). But on the other hand, I had plenty of problems adapting to my changing body and navigating PTSD in the wake of treatment that I absolutely did not need the implicit shame of only seeing survivors in thin bodies on top of those. Whew.
I worked as a freelance copy editor at magazines from 2008 to 2010 and ate plenty of meals in those two hallowed cafeterias, and it was just wild to me how many options they offered for what you could eat, pizza and pasta and stir-fry and Niman Ranch steak and on and on, and I was like “are you really not supposed to eat any of this?” And because I was freelance and usually ate alone, no one ever said anything to me about what I was eating and I had more freedom than someone trying to climb the corporate ladder as an actual staffer. But the other side of that “freedom” was my lack of status—freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. And I was not thin but I tried to play the dress game as well as I could with the body I had, and depending on which magazine I was going to work at on a given day, I would change the number of makeup and hair products I would use when getting ready, and the women’s/fashion magazines were always the most. Abetted by the high-end beauty products I got for next to nothing at the magazine “beauty sales.” What was also so wild to me was how there was never really very much work to do, as a copy editor I had huge unwieldy amounts of downtime in which I had nothing to do, and the dressing up was one of the most labor-intensive aspects of the job. I once remarked to friends, “we’re bored heiresses sitting around in our finery.” In 2009 I went to the Barneys Warehouse Sale and got a 3.1 Phillip Lim dress that actually fit me, and I wore it to work at one of the fashion magazines and was actually complimented on it by an editor, which in one way was like “!!!!” but in another, it felt like “is she really reacting to the dress itself or just doing brand recognition?” And if it was the latter, then the compliment was more like “yay, you’re finally halfway acceptable.” And the compliment was a reminder that you were being evaluated in that way.
Time Out New York was also one of the magazines I freelanced at during that time, and it was my favorite place to work out of all of them, but it also paid the least. So yeah. I can’t wait to read Jenn’s book.
Again thanks for an amazing interview on a topic that fascinates me.
On a personal level, as someone who used to see writing for magazines as one of my paths not taken in life, NO REGRETS on that score. And of course given how I looked in my 20s and 30s there'd have been little chance in the first place of breaking into that.
Also good to have it pointed out that womens magazines are a pink ghetto for writers.
Partly as a result of listening to you every week, and following various Insta influencers, I look at people in a new and frankly more fun way-- I appreciate the appearance of people who are not following the appearance or chicness rules, and I see a lot more beauty in a day now I've expanded that horizon.
Also, Virginia, keep up getting on the floor and up again! At 20 years older than you I can tell you it's better to not lose the ability than to have to work to get it back. The more I divorce energy levels and physical strength from anything to do with how I look, the more I've stayed motivated to climb stairs, get up from the floor, etc on the regular.
I'm doing it!! Just started a new thing where I try to stretch a bit right after I get up (because I am my MOST creaky then) and also get up and down from the floor. It does help!
Once upon a time I was laid off and lifting weights a lot so I decided to take the firefighter test. For training I bought a weighted vest and I would do the stair machine with it on at the end of my strength workout. It had little pockets all over that you put the weighted bean bags in, so you can easily control how much weight and how it's distributed. It was 50lbs and I fucking hated putting the thing on. It's also a pain to store. I timed out on the test (you have to do everything in 8 minutes) but the firefighter assigned to me was very kind and supportive. If anyone else decides to do this, take the practice test first.
Your talking about the hair situation reminded me that in the late 70s, my mom took me a couple of times into Manhattan to get our hair done on W57th St, which at the time was where all the salons Vogue mentioned were located. I was about 14. The hair stylist immediately started negging me: my hair was TERRIBLE, so dry, so frizzy, I needed to do SO MUCH to it, I needed all these PRODUCTS. )They also made you take all your clothes off and wear a gown. I will never forget seeing a stylish young woman in the dressing area who was wearing sheer black pantyhose with no underwear under it. Her bush squashed under that nylon SHOCKED innocent little suburban me! This was 50 years ago and I still think of it from time to time. ) Today I still pay way too much for my haircuts (I go to a salon that specializes in curls) but my great haircut guy never negs me! Of course! I no longer stand for that shit and wouldn't return to or make a purchase anywhere that's still using that technique.
I think this episode was very insightful for me. I wonder if two white women who have never been incarcerated should be titling a podcast episode around prisons and the very real oppression that Black, Brown and Indigenous people face in prisons.
this is a completely fair assessment — this was an insensitive, flippant and unfortunate word choice. I strive to be more thoughtful than this and I'm grateful to you for pointing it out.
Thank you and I will completely fall on this one because I said it without thinking, which is why Jenn then said it/expanded it. Prison was the wrong word choice. Fancy cult might have been better?? We were there of our own free will and yet we could not see a way out even when it was so clearly toxic, with many abusive power dynamics at play...
Whew, I definitely would not have cut it in that world, which I really aspired to (but then took zero practical steps to attain, lol). Either that or, like you two, I would have figured out the class and appearance stuff asap and made it work. But that would've been an enormous hill for me to climb -- hippie parents = zero understanding of that kind of beauty/class standard. I think I'm about Jenn's age, and hearing her story is like a sliding doors moment... I've got to get the book!
Yeah I'm from a fairly well-off family, grew up mostly in a wealthy Connecticut town and then went to NYU with a lot of wealthy people and -- the class and money stuff in women's magazines was STILL a whole other level from what I knew. It was like, hedge fund and Hamptons money. Just wild to navigate.
This brings back such fond memories (sarcasm) of showing up for my first day of in-person work as associate editor for a website after freelancing for year. I was wearing a pair of Frye oxfords I had gotten on sale for the occasion and still paid more for than any other shoe in my closet and the EIC looked at my feet and after scrutinizing the debossed logo said, "Those are actually pretty cute for Frye." This, followed by a stop into an extremely expensive boutique in SF en route to a staff lunch, where the editors mused about which sack-like dress would best suit me. All of them being double the price of my weekly salary. EXTREMELY KEWL BEHAVIOR.
1) did you ever call it Conde Nasty to yourselves?
2) the stuff about having to have your hair/nails done and the limited clothing sizes (thus barring larger sizes and voices from that world at all) and especially the brand/style needed to fit in really hits the same note as Anne Helen Petersen’s dive into Bama Rush culture: https://annehelen.substack.com/p/culture-study-meets-bama-rushtok
Which I found fascinating but also thought sounded completely exhausting!
Oh I absolutely called it Conde Nasty, I think that was part of the gallows humor. And OMG yes, so many overlaps with Bama Rush culture -- thanks for connecting those dots!
"It was a fancy prison. That’s exactly right. It was a fancy prison run by skinny, wealthy, white women. Like, Mayflower white. Because it was also a very particular kind of white lady who was acceptable in those worlds." Made me wonder (not wonder) if there were any black women in these circles at all. That was not a question.
Great episode in so many ways. I genuinely did not know how curated the ‘regular women’ profiled in magazines were. I experienced major heartache in my teens and 20s (and sometimes still in my 50s) because I know models and actresses have to look a particular way and money and resources were put toward that look. But I spent a lot of time very upset because I felt I did not even measure up to the ‘regular’ women. Left me hopeless. I’m smart, I should’ve known, but I didn’t. So much to grieve for my younger self.
I mean, we were working very very hard to make sure you did not know/did not see how the sausage got made! Definitely much to grieve, but this was not on the readers at all.
This conversation sneakily explains why every rom com character from that era worked at a magazine.
ALSO you both have me flashbacks to why I felt alienated from fashion and style as a teen... That culture set up a game you really could not win.
EVERY ROM COM.
FFS the editorial preference for “attractive” 9/11 widows and non-“chubs” cancer survivors?!?🤬 And the unsolicited use of “portly” is a definite choice.
I WISH WE WERE MAKING THIS UP.
I 100% believe you two. It sounds so uncanny valley that it has to be real. Gah then there’s the layer of beauty labour you were expected to maintain to fit in. It’s a trap!!
As a young breast cancer survivor, just, my goodness. On one hand, if I had been diagnosed back in the aughts I'm sure it would have been helpful to see another young survivor since that was such an overlooked demographic (thankfully that's changing, though not fast enough). But on the other hand, I had plenty of problems adapting to my changing body and navigating PTSD in the wake of treatment that I absolutely did not need the implicit shame of only seeing survivors in thin bodies on top of those. Whew.
Yes, it was absolutely this double-edged sword. Whew, indeed.
I worked as a freelance copy editor at magazines from 2008 to 2010 and ate plenty of meals in those two hallowed cafeterias, and it was just wild to me how many options they offered for what you could eat, pizza and pasta and stir-fry and Niman Ranch steak and on and on, and I was like “are you really not supposed to eat any of this?” And because I was freelance and usually ate alone, no one ever said anything to me about what I was eating and I had more freedom than someone trying to climb the corporate ladder as an actual staffer. But the other side of that “freedom” was my lack of status—freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. And I was not thin but I tried to play the dress game as well as I could with the body I had, and depending on which magazine I was going to work at on a given day, I would change the number of makeup and hair products I would use when getting ready, and the women’s/fashion magazines were always the most. Abetted by the high-end beauty products I got for next to nothing at the magazine “beauty sales.” What was also so wild to me was how there was never really very much work to do, as a copy editor I had huge unwieldy amounts of downtime in which I had nothing to do, and the dressing up was one of the most labor-intensive aspects of the job. I once remarked to friends, “we’re bored heiresses sitting around in our finery.” In 2009 I went to the Barneys Warehouse Sale and got a 3.1 Phillip Lim dress that actually fit me, and I wore it to work at one of the fashion magazines and was actually complimented on it by an editor, which in one way was like “!!!!” but in another, it felt like “is she really reacting to the dress itself or just doing brand recognition?” And if it was the latter, then the compliment was more like “yay, you’re finally halfway acceptable.” And the compliment was a reminder that you were being evaluated in that way.
Time Out New York was also one of the magazines I freelanced at during that time, and it was my favorite place to work out of all of them, but it also paid the least. So yeah. I can’t wait to read Jenn’s book.
OMG love all these stories. WHAT WE SURVIVED.
Again thanks for an amazing interview on a topic that fascinates me.
On a personal level, as someone who used to see writing for magazines as one of my paths not taken in life, NO REGRETS on that score. And of course given how I looked in my 20s and 30s there'd have been little chance in the first place of breaking into that.
Also good to have it pointed out that womens magazines are a pink ghetto for writers.
Partly as a result of listening to you every week, and following various Insta influencers, I look at people in a new and frankly more fun way-- I appreciate the appearance of people who are not following the appearance or chicness rules, and I see a lot more beauty in a day now I've expanded that horizon.
Also, Virginia, keep up getting on the floor and up again! At 20 years older than you I can tell you it's better to not lose the ability than to have to work to get it back. The more I divorce energy levels and physical strength from anything to do with how I look, the more I've stayed motivated to climb stairs, get up from the floor, etc on the regular.
I'm doing it!! Just started a new thing where I try to stretch a bit right after I get up (because I am my MOST creaky then) and also get up and down from the floor. It does help!
Once upon a time I was laid off and lifting weights a lot so I decided to take the firefighter test. For training I bought a weighted vest and I would do the stair machine with it on at the end of my strength workout. It had little pockets all over that you put the weighted bean bags in, so you can easily control how much weight and how it's distributed. It was 50lbs and I fucking hated putting the thing on. It's also a pain to store. I timed out on the test (you have to do everything in 8 minutes) but the firefighter assigned to me was very kind and supportive. If anyone else decides to do this, take the practice test first.
Your talking about the hair situation reminded me that in the late 70s, my mom took me a couple of times into Manhattan to get our hair done on W57th St, which at the time was where all the salons Vogue mentioned were located. I was about 14. The hair stylist immediately started negging me: my hair was TERRIBLE, so dry, so frizzy, I needed to do SO MUCH to it, I needed all these PRODUCTS. )They also made you take all your clothes off and wear a gown. I will never forget seeing a stylish young woman in the dressing area who was wearing sheer black pantyhose with no underwear under it. Her bush squashed under that nylon SHOCKED innocent little suburban me! This was 50 years ago and I still think of it from time to time. ) Today I still pay way too much for my haircuts (I go to a salon that specializes in curls) but my great haircut guy never negs me! Of course! I no longer stand for that shit and wouldn't return to or make a purchase anywhere that's still using that technique.
I think this episode was very insightful for me. I wonder if two white women who have never been incarcerated should be titling a podcast episode around prisons and the very real oppression that Black, Brown and Indigenous people face in prisons.
this is a completely fair assessment — this was an insensitive, flippant and unfortunate word choice. I strive to be more thoughtful than this and I'm grateful to you for pointing it out.
Thank you and I will completely fall on this one because I said it without thinking, which is why Jenn then said it/expanded it. Prison was the wrong word choice. Fancy cult might have been better?? We were there of our own free will and yet we could not see a way out even when it was so clearly toxic, with many abusive power dynamics at play...
Medanegha, thanks for naming that.
Whew, I definitely would not have cut it in that world, which I really aspired to (but then took zero practical steps to attain, lol). Either that or, like you two, I would have figured out the class and appearance stuff asap and made it work. But that would've been an enormous hill for me to climb -- hippie parents = zero understanding of that kind of beauty/class standard. I think I'm about Jenn's age, and hearing her story is like a sliding doors moment... I've got to get the book!
Yeah I'm from a fairly well-off family, grew up mostly in a wealthy Connecticut town and then went to NYU with a lot of wealthy people and -- the class and money stuff in women's magazines was STILL a whole other level from what I knew. It was like, hedge fund and Hamptons money. Just wild to navigate.
This brings back such fond memories (sarcasm) of showing up for my first day of in-person work as associate editor for a website after freelancing for year. I was wearing a pair of Frye oxfords I had gotten on sale for the occasion and still paid more for than any other shoe in my closet and the EIC looked at my feet and after scrutinizing the debossed logo said, "Those are actually pretty cute for Frye." This, followed by a stop into an extremely expensive boutique in SF en route to a staff lunch, where the editors mused about which sack-like dress would best suit me. All of them being double the price of my weekly salary. EXTREMELY KEWL BEHAVIOR.
GAH. Frye boots were my biggest splurge during those years! Those are not cheap shoes!!
1) did you ever call it Conde Nasty to yourselves?
2) the stuff about having to have your hair/nails done and the limited clothing sizes (thus barring larger sizes and voices from that world at all) and especially the brand/style needed to fit in really hits the same note as Anne Helen Petersen’s dive into Bama Rush culture: https://annehelen.substack.com/p/culture-study-meets-bama-rushtok
Which I found fascinating but also thought sounded completely exhausting!
Oh I absolutely called it Conde Nasty, I think that was part of the gallows humor. And OMG yes, so many overlaps with Bama Rush culture -- thanks for connecting those dots!
"It was a fancy prison. That’s exactly right. It was a fancy prison run by skinny, wealthy, white women. Like, Mayflower white. Because it was also a very particular kind of white lady who was acceptable in those worlds." Made me wonder (not wonder) if there were any black women in these circles at all. That was not a question.
There were some, but absolutely not enough.