"How to stop your man from straying"

feck. arse. drink.

*grunts*

revol you are missing the point here mate - Jess is simply asking what are the background factors contributing to more and more of this kinds of articles being published (and the whole lads mags phenomenon while you are at it).

+1 for being interested to hear

-1 for being able to contribute to it

you're sublimating again revol, go watch some porn.

has your man been straying Jack?

pyschology and pop-cultural criticism should never be mixed, says zizek68

Jess, i suggest to avoid being "inane" you should rephrase your initial post with terms like 'objet petit a' and 'minimal difference', so that we neanderthals can sublimate our gentetically insatiable libidos into some intellectual internet cock-waving

1) Because Cosmo reckons they’ll sell, they reinforce the original selling point of the magazine (ie. the provision of a ready-made ‘ideal lifestyle’ within and supporting certain existing social trends/ideologies within their target demographic) and simultaneously come across as leading edge to a certain kind of reader because of their ‘risque’ presentation.
2) Yes, but not uncritically – this is a lifestyle mag after all.
3) In some undoubtedly. In others, maybe not. Depends on the relationship at hand. If you’re talking trends I’d say it probably doesn’t encourage mistrust directly but it certainly encourages further division and misunderstanding between the sexes.
4) Yes, it clouds real issues with a load of bollocks more suited to Days of Our Lives.
5) Provide alternative media and directly challenge such trash to the editors? Other than that not a lot, it’s a lifestyle mag so there’s a limit to both its scope to cause damage outside individual articles, and our ability to really influence or change it.

TBH though I agree with revol, the potential gain from challenging it is probly not great enough to warrant eating into other projects.

then pick up a copy of cosmo ffs

it sells becuase life's easier when you reduce people to objects.

its the tricky crossword isnt it?

Chloe? wow that's cool. Could she poison bono too you reckon?

i bet it is! i'm starting right away

revol, are you sure you aren't just seeing liberalism in the way your average teenage leftist sees FASCISM!!11! ?

i mean if Jess had said 'in what way does this example of popular culture manifest the ontological void, the trauma of the Real, the ceaseless, futile pursuit of objet petit a which is infact a facet the mutual implication of subject-objects' would you say the same thing? I mean loads of people read cosmo, and to a large extent it repeats and amplifies popular prejudices to shift units, like Saii says. but i know people who have had allsorts of relationship issues around the kind of mistrust cosmo parrots/preaches, so it isn't an issue that's irrelevant to everyday life.

whether we can do anything useful about it specifically is a fair point though, the spectacle after all grows out of real alienation, rather than being it's originary cause.

Whatever you do, don’t let your mate take any hats or pairs of trousers that are lying around, or multi-millionaire Bono will probably be a twat and sue. especially don't encourage them to take every costume available and give it local Oxfam shops...

touché

but i mean, given as two couples i know have split up over paranoia like cosmo promotes (not me before you ask ), do you think discussing the whole spectacular gender binary thing and the real divisions it foster is relevant to everyday life?

excellent rhetorical question Jess

revol, where did jess say we should lobby cosmo or whatever phantasm you seem to be railing against?

yeah belfast stop being a nob, you're just projecting onto jess.

Oh come on so what we're not allowed to shout at the news either?

Actually I heard jess stopped posting cos she started hanging out with cool people. But I guess she's moved now...

well that's just the problem isn't it

and chomsky should stop reading the fucking press

Yeah, and what you're not allowed to slag off shite music "Just don't listen to the radio/hang out in 'mainstream' places", or shite tv shows "just don't watch the 'idiot box'"?

I reckon Jack would qualify as that.

Revol don't be a knobber. Jess has a point, I think it's really quite interesting to think about how masculinity is constructed in the mass media. She wasn't trying to organise a boycott of cosmo or any other bollocks. Yr telling her off for posting "inane" shite, but I can rememeber you getting well upset on that circumcision thread cos no-one wanted to talk about circumcision as a vehicle for constructing masculinity. I reckon stuff like this is interesting and relevant in that shit-loads of people read cosmo, and whilst no one's gonna build their entire view of gender roles from reading a magazine, there's enough patronising "common sense" "truisms" about what men are like, boys being boys and all that crap, and it's interesting to see how stuff like this is played out.

Ahem. Back to the original point then... I think articles like that (I've not read cosmo or it's ilk for years, but was an avid consumer of it from the age of about 12-17) are published for a variety of reasons, one of the most obvious ones is that Cosmo (if we take cosmo to represent that media genre) has a MASSIVE focus on making it's readers feel inadequate. Of course "your man" wants to sleep around:

1) You're not really ever gonna be enough for him
2) You know, boys are boys.

The best bit about all this "men are primal and can't possibly be expected to keep their cocks in their pants" (or, at least limit them to one woman's cavities) is that it pretty much goes against all other accepted truisms about gender. For example - women are generally the ones who are seen as "close to nature", you know, all those maternal instincts, and the hysteria and innability to control emotions, and lack of proficiency in technical knowledge and the big wide world in general. Men have apparently moved away from nature, they're past all that primal emotional stuff. Except, that is, when it comes to sex. When it comes to sex, men are somehow magically transformed into incontrollable, species reproducing raging beasts with needs and urges that can't be surpressed (you know, for the good of mankind innit) and their "sex drive" becomes this almost entirely ungovernable, alienated force that we just have to put up with.

Even if putting up with it means putting up with adultery, assault and rape. Cos you know, it's only natural, isn't it?

Yet despite all this ungovernable natural sexual energy that men can't be expected to contain, they still don't have the stigma women's "natural" tendedncies have (pesky things like jealousy, and wanting babies and that).

Several pother posts have appeared while I wrote that, revol's still being a knobber.

*resists urge to pun*

Right, so you're saying you don't think it's at all useful or even a mildly interesting way to while away a wednesday afternoon thinking about how the mass media helps to perpetuate constructed gender roles? At all?

Well go start that thread and stop being such a knobber?

So, you have nothing to respond to in any of my earlier post, either? Shall I go back to 1987?

you heard her jack, buy him one of these:

i haven't been here long enough to know what you're refering too, and nothing in her post gave me that impression. quick, let's all attack others for their embarrassing past politics, because we're so pure our fucking birthmarks look like the grundrisse

back on topic ...

true, i could always tell when my gf was feeling down 'cos she'd come home with a copy of cosmo. damned low self-esteem feedback loops. and for the benefit of revol, discussing this is not a substitute for mass proletarian organisation, and neither is most of the inane shite i post here to wittle away the work day.

Ok, forget Cosmo then. I mean, you know, the whole mass readership thing is pretty much irrelevant isn't it?

Anything to add, oh wise and sagely intellectual one? Or discuss, or criticise?

go for it, last thing we'd want to do is discuss the things half the people we know read

it's not like in dicussing pop culture critique is necessarily limited to pop psychology, as you well know, having read your way through zizek's back catalogue.