shopping and sweat patches

There's an excellent piece today on the Guardian's Comment is Free site, written by sex blogger and slightly scary feminist Zoe Margolis. It's not really a new point, more one that most people with a brain have probably been thinking for a while - namely why otherwise intelligent women buy into the whole celebrity magazine thing. Perhaps I'm being too ernest, or a bit 'bah humbug', but I too can't get that excited about pictures of vacous "celebs" carrying designers shopping bags and flashing sweat patches and cellulite.

Says Margolis: "There was me thinking that us women had better things to be thinking about these days, like, oh, I don't know, equal pay for example, or affordable childcare, or perhaps the fact that the conviction rate for rapists is lower today than it was 30 years ago...
"On and on they go, but the message is always the same: if you are female, know that you will be judged based on what you look like; expect to be objectified; and hope to receive external validation from others about your image, which will give you self-worth...."

Too true. In my job, I find it endlessly frustrating how stories with a lame celebrity angle end up close to - or indeed on - the front, when stronger and more important stuff is shoved right at the back or not used at all.
I once worked with an editor who was obsessed with using celebrity to - as he put it - give our newspaper a "lift". It's all so incredibly cliched and predictable....and one of the most depressing things professionally is that this odious part of the print market seems to be one of the only ones picking up sales and with any kind of future.