Jennifer Nelson (1)

I really wanted to like Airbrushed Nation. I wanted so much for it to live up to the cover blurb's promise that it will be "critical, clever" and "expose the naked truth behind the glossy pages of women's magazines, both good and bad. " Unfortunately, Jennifer Nelson's "expose" is as heavy on fluff, lacking in critical and clever content, and poorly written and edited as the very magazines she claims to be critiquing.

While Nelson has a superficial understanding of the major problems with women's glossies--their sexism, size-ism, agism, consumerism, and passive racism--her examination of these issues never moves beyond the superficial. Indeed, it's not clear how much she even understands the issues themselves: witness the book's first and strongest chapter, on the historical development of women's magazines, which does nothing more than summarize and dumb down a single piece of preexisting research on the subject (check out the chapter notes to confirm for yourself) without bringing any new insights to the table. This problem continues throughout the volume.

Nelson is also guilty of the same lazy, factually distorted writing that she criticizes in women's glossy content. We're told over and over that "women" feel this or react like that to the content of women's magazines, with nothing concrete to back it up--not even a quote from an actual glossy reader, let alone studies, academic sources, or other concrete sources of information cited. Like women's magazines themselves that highlight the dangers of fad dieting while featuring size 2 models and harping on celebrities' weight loss regimens, Nelson contradicts herself left and right to suit the needs of the moment instead of actually forming a consistent thesis on the topic at hand. Here she is in one chapter telling us that women's self-esteem suffers after reading about perfect celebrities, that readers show "increased body dissatisfaction after viewing appearance related images," and here she is in the next telling us that "seeing a favorite slim star in a magazine may actually give women's self-image a boost." Similarly, in the chapter on women's magazines and fear mongering, she cites articles on endometriosis as an example of how women's magazines "largely exaggerate, if not intentionally craft," the topics of their articles "to sell just the right brand of fearfulness." Two chapters later, Nelson cites articles on endometriosis as "important...information about female sexual health" that women's magazines impart to their readers. The laziness and cherrypicking extends to Nelson's examination of the women's magazine publishing industry itself. In the shamefully brief discussion of race in mag publishing, why does Essence get mentioned but not Ebony, to say nothing of Latina magazine? In the discussions of the lack of political and other intellectual content in women's magazines, why does Nelson offer up Ms., as a rare counterexample, but fail to mention Bitch or Bust? One rather gets the feeling that she's just generally ignorant of the larger publishing world of women's magazines.

The good points Nelson does make about salient issues, such as women's magazines' role in contributing to sexist and unrealistic body image expectations, are better handled by other authors elsewhere. Nelson further undermines even her superficial treatments of these issues through her careless journalism. For instance, in chapter 2, "Truth in Advertising," Nelson castigates magazines for not adhering to Association of National Advertisers guidelines on product placement. Only problem? The guidelines in question were published in 2011 but Nelson's examples come from 2005. Indeed, Nelson is a poor author in general, and publisher Seal Press did not invest in the editing necessary to improve her writing. On top of the sloppiness of Nelson's pervasive (and thus, irritating) grammatical mistakes, this lack of editing renders much of what she says downright nonsensical. Nelson frequently misuses basic words and phrases--usurp, disdain, Trojan Horse, endear--with the result that I had to reread many sentences two or three times before I could figure out what she was trying to say. And then there's the horrid purple prose. Do women really want articles in Cosmopolitan or Vogue to "invade their souls," as Nelson claims they do on the book's final page? Somehow, I doubt it.

Like so many of the women's magazines Nelson claims to take to task, Airbrushed Nation fails to make good on the content promised on its cover. This book may be an eye-opener to a dedicated Cosmo reader who lacks basic knowledge of feminist critiques of gender roles, beauty expectations, and pop culture, but any other reader's time would be better served through Kilbourne's Dangerous Persuasion, Wolf's The Beauty Myth, Ms., Bitch, or Bust; or even a visit to Jezebel or Alternet. Give this book a pass.… (altro)