Alternative Ms.

Yesterday, while perusing the shelves of a bookstore near Columbia University, I was lucky enough to come across the Fall 2010 issue of Ms. Magazine. The magazine, feminist Gloria Steinem's creation, was first published in 1972, and is now owned by the Feminist Majority Foundation. Although I had heard of Ms. before, yesterday was the first time my eyes had actually seen a copy in print.

The general lack of the appearance of Ms. on newsstands presents a feminist problem: women, already historically considered "outsiders" and "others" by the patriarchal world which has written history, continue to be excluded from the public majority. This fact is certainly not a new occurrence within society; while women worldwide have made waves in politics (Hillary Rodham Clinton's 2008 campaign for the presidency, Switzerland's current female-majority government, the 2005 inclusion of the female vote in Iraqi politics), the United States has never elected a female president, nor are newsstands an accurate reflection of female empowerment.

Magazines like Ms., Bust, and Bitch are all responses to the host of women's magazines available today that, in one for or another, promote female negativity. With the exception of Ms., the other two feminist magazines did not debut until the 90s, leaving girls and women with magazines that tell them how to "Seduce Him!" (Cosmopolitan, September 2010) or provide models (literally) of what femininity should look like and aspire to (Ralph Lauren's 2009 advertisement showing a severely air-brushed Filippa Hamilton). With regard to the Cosmo headline, I am not proposing that women should not or are not interested in such articles; I myself read Bust, Cosmopolitan, Lucky, Glamour, etc. Rather, I am suggesting that women need to be offered all types of magazines and all sorts of knowledge. Females need to understand that women come in all shapes and sizes (Filippa Hamilton is on the slenderer side, just not that slender), and that all bodily forms are normal. After all, how can one began to "Seduce Him!" without first possessing an inner-beauty and self-confidence that comes from an understanding of womanhood?

With mainstream publications (such as Cosmo) that have both existed longer and thus been more widely distributed being the ones most women have come to read and turn to, a whole other bastion of knowledge has been denied from females. So-called women's magazines, by providing male-centric headlines, fail to teach women to remember themselves first. As Beauvoir states in The Second Sex, man has historically been seen as "he who is his body," leaving woman to be defined as "something other than her body," making her a figure of alienation from her body. So-called feminist magazines, by providing an alternative to the mainstream publications, teach women to delight in themselves as well as in the men (and women) with which they choose to surround themselves, are a tribute to the lost knowledge of womanhood and to the reclaiming and empowering of woman as anything but an other.