Grrrr Grazia

I was initially planning to blog about something completely different but then...I had my little Thursday night bubble bath and a magazine routine. Due to cash constraints I picked up Grazia magazine which bills itself as 'Britain's First Weekly Glossy'. Harumph. There were a number of things in the magazine that got my goat but the one that took the proverbial biscuit was an article titled 'Why it's suddenly hip to be 40'. Where to start...well first of all, the article covers two double page spreads and features pictures of Meera Syal, Sandra Bullock, Liz Hurley, Sarah Jessica Parker, Madonna, Michelle Pfeiffer, Cindy Crawford, Kristin Davis, Teri Hatcher, Elle Macpherson and Halle Berry who are all supposed to show us how fantastic and sexy women in their forties are (despite the fact that Liz, Cindy and Halle are actually still in their thirties). Despite a brief mention of the feelings of getting older the article almost completely focuses on appearance and how much of a great thing it is that these women do not 'look old'. First, this completely reinforces the signs of ageing = ugly equation that has grown more rather than less ingrained in recent times. Check this out:

Where once, chests were heading south, hips heading east and west and the body heading to bed with a good book, now 40-year-olds are gracing front covers, hitting the silver screen and inspiring women the world over.

Honestly! This totally implies that women over a certain age simply don't want sex and if they did they wouldn't be getting it because they're just too damn ugly with their wider hips and less than perky boobies. It also implies that the women pictured are all having fabulous sex simply because they are thin and meet some kind of standard of beauty and stylish-ness. Please! Another thing that really pissed me off was that in this same article the writer praises up Elizabeth Hurley for her "hand-span" hips while in a piece earlier in the magazine she's described as "Liz who eats just one meal a day, goes to bed ravenous and treats herself to snacks of just six raisins." I guess ravenous and ravishing go together then?
Many of the women pictured are very beautiful and successful in their field but the field is oh so totally narrow and the values so completely superficial that it's excruciating. How about role models such as J. K Rowling? Tracy Chapman? Martina Navratilova? Michelle Yeoh? Or are they just not thin enough or 'pretty' enough or straight enough?
The line that really did it for me was this "Getting old, it seems, is on hold." Um, no it isn't. No-one (so far as I know) has found a way of stopping time. We are all getting older. The choice implied by Grazia (and table-slappingly backed up by the advertisers within the magazine) is this: do we spend our money attempting to hold back the effects of time on our faces and bodies (sometimes to the extent of 'freezing' our faces with botox and carving ourselves up with cosmetic surgery) or imagine a fate where our older selves are the objects of repulsion?
Hell no.
And as my good vibe went down the plug-hole with the bathwater, that BUST subscription started looking a whole lot less expensive.