I used to subscribe to several women’s magazines — Fitness, Health, Women’s Health, Shape — and would occasionally buy others off the newsstand at the grocery store or airport. For a long time, I simply thought of those magazines as easy reading that had some good health tips. But I’ve changed my mind.
I keep a box of magazines in my classroom. I use them for various lessons, and my students can grab one to read if they’re done with an assignment and forgot their usual reading book. One day, I was packing up some magazines at home to add to my box at work. As I looked at the aforementioned magazines, I thought, ‘I’d better just recycle these. I don’t want my students reading them.”
These magazines often have articles about sex, but that wasn’t what concerned me for my students. No, I was more worried about articles with headlines like these:
Do you see a theme in these articles? Of course you do. “Be skinny and toned to be sexy. Lose body fat to be hot. Exercise to become gorgeous and desirable.” And, most disturbing at all, “Lose weight so you can love yourself.”
Now, I don’t have a problem with people working out for aesthetic reasons, and honestly, that’s probably one reason that most of us exercise. But I don’t want my vulnerable 15-year-old students to think that the only reason or the main reason to work out is to be “sexy.” I don’t want them to get the message that health is second to appearance. I want them to realize that health is important for its own sake.
And I want them to accept — to love — their own bodies, regardless of if they look like those in the magazines.
My kids already see such messages everywhere they look. I can’t stop them from being bombarded with such messages everywhere else, but it didn’t have to happen in my classroom. And that got me thinking:
If I don’t want my kids reading these articles and being told that “sexy” and “healthy” are the same thing, and we must be “sexy” to love our bodies, why was I subjecting myself to those messages? Sure, I’m an adult and can better filter those messages, but reading those articles and looking at those perfectly Photoshopped bikini bodies is not healthy for my perceptions, either.
I don’t need to read articles that suggest that to be happy, I, like Elizabeth Banks, need to be not just healthy, but “hot.” I don’t need to see hundreds of pictures of “sexy” bodies that mine will never look like. And so I cancelled my subscriptions to all those magazines.
I haven’t missed them at all. I don’t have much time to read magazines, so when I do, they need to be worthwhile. A magazine full of Photoshopped bodies and declarations, implied or explicit, that I need to be sexier are simply not worth my limited time.
What do you think of women’s health and fitness magazines? Do you read them?
Rural Running Redhead 
Bravo!
Date: Wed, 10 Dec 2014 03:26:05 +0000 To: buffmom81@hotmail.com
Great post. No, I do not read them at all!
I used to read them but I haven’t for years. I have found most information in them to be useless.
Yes, exactly. There’s occasionally a good recipe, but that”s about the only value.
Awesome awesome awesome! I hate these magazines when we talk about nutrition and fitness in my health classes. The perception is so skewed and the kids eat it up because they read it in a newsstand every day and even spend their few dollars on them. Thanks for a great read
Thanks, Mike! I’m glad your kids at least have a good health teacher to try to contradict some of those messages. 🙂
You are so on the mark here. I’m more and more appalled at the junk that is pedaled to us as women, and, as a teacher as well, I can’t help but think what effect it will have on my girls. They are so impressionable, and they’re growing up in a world where they get bombarded with it 24/7. I always tell people that I’m teaching them more than just history, and this is a big part of the lesson!
Yes, if we only were teaching history or English, it would be a lot easier, but we’d be doing our kids a significant disservice.
I LOVE this post! This is the #1 I cancelled my subscription to Cosmo (I have way more issues with that magazine than just health!), Glamour, and Fitness. Women magazines need to be INSPIRING!!!! Love that you took action in your own classroom.
Cosmo is a disaster. I can’t believe I ever read that.
I wish I could leave the hand clap emoji for this post, because it sums up everything I want to say. Those magazines are bullshit.
Amen, sister.
That’s awesome, Cassie. I used to read fitness magazine as well, but now I subscribe to Runners World, Triathlete, Outside Magazine, and National Geographic. I feel like a lot of the fitness magazines provide information that is redundant and recycled. I would much rather read blogs and get my information from other sources. Now that I am getting older, I’m trying to focus less on the “sexy” “skinny” “slim” body and more on the “fit” “healthy” “me” body.
I really want to subscribe to Outside, but I’m afraid it would just be added to my “to-read” stack and never actually get read. I read an article about Kilian Jornet in it at the gym the other day and I wanted to steal it. 🙂 (I didn’t, for the record.)
I did the same thing!!! I realized it was just junk and I already knew the exercises I thought I was buying them for. Total waste of money.
They do just cycle the exercises again and again. I’d rather read your blog for that sort of thing. 🙂