Women, if one is to believe the propaganda, engage in an endless search for self-knowledge. It goes on mainly between the covers of their favourite magazines - even if they only half-seriously indulge in the quest for half an hour under the hair dryer or when the children are in bed.
From next week there will be another source of inspiration when the first British edition of the successful American magazine Cosmopolitan will set out to sell to the woman who is, according to its advertising, "lively, sensual, fun, adventurous . . . honest with herself". And honest, in this context, implies sexually frank, for Cosmo's American reputation has been founded on the philosophy of its editor Helen Gurley Brown, author of the best-selling book Sex and the Single Girl.
The emphasis on exactly what women's priorities should be in their search for perfection varies, if subtly, from magazine to magazine. By far the largest number in circulation terms are undeniably those which address women through their biological and social functions as housewives and mothers. There is no reason to suppose that this is not a successful formula. Although some, including the biggest weeklies Woman and Woman's Own, have been losing readers recently (and no one seems quite sure why), the ones which concentrate more directly on the homemaking skills have been increasing their circulations. One is Woman's Weekly; another is the monthly Woman and Home.
Woman and Home calls itself the magazine for "the woman who leads a full life" and was given this sobriquet, according to Miss Wyatt, "two or three years ago when it was felt that the upsurge of women's lib was undermining the traditional image of woman's work - bringing up a family, running a home, working for the WI, being creative for other people really is leading a full life." Woman readers as seen by Woman and Home are basically sensible and practical: "These women have settled their life style and their energies are directed to improving their environment, in contrast with those who are still looking - not just for a man but for an ethic, a moral structure to base their lives on." The Woman and Home readers come from all age groups; the Woman and Home ideal woman is usually portrayed with, or wearing, something home-made; her man, who often appears with her, looks as though the same could be said of him.
Cosy
Traditionally the other side of the rather cosy domestic coin has long been represented by the romance magazines containing mainly fiction. Read mainly by girls and younger women, they could be criticized as crude devices for baiting the marriage trap - a fantasized mirage of sex beckoning seductively to the kitchen sink. But some newer magazines introduced within the past 10 years have attempted both to break away from the domestic formula and to prove that women possess brains and bodies, not merely hands for rocking cradles and mixing puddings.
Nova, introduced in 1965 as "a new magazine for the new woman" has consistently tried this tougher-minded approach, although with degrees of interpretation that have varied according to changes of editorship. Its editor Gillian Cooke, under whose direction a falling circulation has been halted and apparently stabilized around 110,000, says that she is aiming to produce a magazine that "has vitality - it looks exciting, it may shock and upset but it doesn't bore". She also says that she is "not editing for women but for people" and indeed perhaps some of its reputation for outspokenness has been earned simply by the fact that it pioneered in-depth discussion of sexual problems as they apply to men as well as women - radical at the time perhaps, but hardly reprehensible any more.
However, Gillian Cooke believes "Everyone has taken sex too seriously for far too long. I think communications generally have been going through a sexy and sensual phase but that looking ahead, the provocative issues seem to be in other areas, more towards the whole life-and-death syndrome". She feels that her readers are more confident in terms of age, experience, and education and can therefore take a more light-hearted, even humorous view of sex.
It looks as though the Cosmopolitan girl, on the other hand, is going to be in deadly sexual earnest. Although hoping to follow its American progenitor in attempting a high standard of fiction and factual reportage content it will also follow American Cosmo closely in devoting much of its energies to being a straightforward and specific guide to getting, keeping (and if necessary getting rid of) your man. In its second issue it even intends to have a (more or less nude) male pinup. Much of the first British issue is in fact about men and editor Joyce Hopkirk reckons it is probable that up to 90 per cent of the content could be. "After all, in our age group they're the primary interest!" she says with a cheerful grin, she points out that in this country as well as in America there is an excess of women over men which makes for a fairly competitive situation where finding Mr Right is concerned.
The Cosmo reader's age group is reckoned to be between 18 and 34 although she will be "addressed as if she's 25": the initial print order is 300,000 although Joyce Hopkirk will be happy if it settles down around 150,000. She thinks her reader is "not a new kind of woman - she's been there all the time but she just hasn't been catered for. There isn't a magazine that treats her as a friend talking to a friend. Most of them treat her as a wife and mother, not just a woman".
Ambitious
Joyce Hopkirk sees her future reader as "very articulate, intelligent but not intellectual. She has brains as well as a body. She's smart and ambitious; she doesn't regard her man as a meal ticket, she doesn't want to sit back and be taken care of. She wants to live her own life, even though life is better lived as a pair." It seems by current standards a reassuringly orthodox concept, although expressed with unusual verve and directness, and one which perhaps differs from the domestic magazines only in method and level of sophistication. Whether you dress up to catch your man or cook a meal to keep him, the motivation is the same. The Cosmo girl as shown on the first cover appears to take her sexual role as mantrap seriously; but could it be that above the confident body in its flamboyantly frilled red dress the face wears a slightly anxious expression?
Looking even at Cosmo, as well as at all the other competing and overlapping images of women offered by the women's magazines, the thought does occur occasionally that they are only merely skirting round the really basic issues. Like its rival. Playboy (which it now claims to outsell in this country by three to one), the two million circulation London-based men's magazine Penthouse claims that between 25 and 30 per cent of its readers are women. Women actually enjoy looking at the luscious pictures of unashamedly sexy girls in its pages: according to Penthouse publisher and editor Bob Guccione. "One of the fundamental reasons is that they want to see the kind of woman who is being idealized for men; they want to know what the ideal values are. Another thing is that they like to make direct comparisons of breasts and hair and skin texture, and they are interested to see what kind of clothes the girls are wearing."
Bob Guccione also belives that women are normally interested in each other in a more sexual way than men are: "It's a kind of sexual affection they have for each other. . . ." He thinks too that women are more sexually liberated than men and that men need educating to appreciate women. "Women are like a mountain - you know that every element, every mineral necessary to life is in that ground. Men are prospectors. But they have to be educated to know what is contained in that earth. Some men only look for gold. But if you don't find gold you might find uranium or copper."
Unlike Nova's Gillian Cooke who thinks that Cosmopolitan represents a backward step that could make women more obsessed with themselves, their bodies and their clothes, Bob Guccione comments: "Although I don't think there's been a real women's magazine yet, American Cosmo is the closest - it gets down to basics, it doesn't preach to women, it doesn't create a phoney idealized environment to which they have to conform."
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