I was saddened by the news that Family Circle magazine, a British monthly for so long a mainstay of news stands, is to close down after a run of 42 years. Circulation has fallen to an unsustainable 113,000, a fifth of what it was almost 20 years ago. When I was growing up, copies of Family Circle were stacked up at home along with Woman’s Own, Woman’s Weekly, Vogue, Good Housekeeping, Punch, and an ever-changing list of new titles as and when they came on the market.
They contributed in no small way to what became my lifelong fascination with the medium. It was years before I realised that ours was an unusual household in this respect, because in most other Maltese households, there was no culture of magazine buying or reading, by women still less by men. I was hooked on the habit at an early age, with a childhood subscription to Dandy, Beano, Twinkle and Bunty. Fortunately, our household was unusual in this respect, too – the parents-in-residence were more enlightened than many others and didn’t condemn comics as a bad habit or a waste of money which would teach their children bad English.
Then came my weekly fix of Jackie magazine and Smash Hits, for which I would make a Friday pilgrimage to the long-gone Manche’s newsagent in Tower Road, to blow the best part of my pocket money. “They haven’t arrived yet!” the shop assistant would call as soon as she saw me in the doorway. “Don’t worry – they’re not going to run away.”
But those magazines were the highlight of my week, because they gave me perspective on mainstream teen culture outside Malta in years when our country might as well have been behind the Iron Curtain. It was then that I realised the essential purpose of good magazines, which is to keep people in touch with what is going on, and to keep them in the loop. As the Sex Pistols turned the world upside down, I graduated to Pink – not the one we love to read now, but the original British Pink in the late 1970s. The dot on the i was heart-shaped, which tells you about all you need to know. It was a little more risqué than Jackie because it had stuff in it about boys and periods, while Jackie was primarily concerned with spots and pop stars.
After Pink, there was a hiatus in which, aged 15 to 18, I couldn’t find a magazine to fit the bill. I already knew all I wanted to know about acne and French kissing, I was way too young for Good Housekeeping, and Cosmopolitan was for the older crowd – girls who worked and had “relationships” about which they needed to ask questions that got very complicated answers from Irma Kurtz, who is still writing her agony aunt column. Then I graduated to Cosmopolitan and took it seriously for a while, more so when I met its iconic long-time editor, Marcelle D’Argy Smith, and she came to dinner, which was all very exciting. Other people had rock star heroes; mine were the big names in magazines.
Even when I had three babies and absolutely no disposable income, I would somehow squeeze out the wherewithal for my magazine fix. By then, I was on to Vogue, House and Garden, and The World of Interiors – habits which I have sustained since because they are a blessed respite from the ugliness of so much around us in terms of shoddily dressed people and hideous buildings. The irony of an old-jeans-and-scruffy-shirt-wearing, baby-food-spattered young woman bearing off these trophies to her grotty, toy-bestrewn flat did not escape me. Yet that is the purpose of magazines: to feed dreams and to help us break away, if only for the hour or two it takes to read them, from the harsh realities of our lives.
I still love magazines with a passion, and regularly make the trip to the news stand in the airport departures lounge – the best-stocked magazine shop on the island, with all kinds of esoteric titles – to browse the racks like a pervert in a sex shop. Occasionally, when I am standing at the till paying a magazine bill of Lm25, which I justify by telling myself that I need to keep in touch with the latest developments in my field (it’s true, but that’s not the only reason), I can see the lips tighten on the person standing next to me in the queue, as though to say: “Kemm hi halja. She should have spent that at the butcher’s.”
The odd thing is that, if I were to spend eight times that much at a dress shop, there would be no such expression on the face of the next-in-line. Spending on dresses is all right and understandable, but spending on magazines is a frivolous waste of money and should get a woman locked up for lack of thrift.
It’s because magazines are widely considered to be a sheer waste of Lm2.75 a month – which is what Vogue costs; cheap for the price, considering its entertainment value and the cultural (yes, cultural) nous it imparts – that you will find a good selection in every newsagent’s in the Sliema area, the locus for the magazine-buying hali public of women, but almost nowhere else except the airport.
Over recent years, a few of the bigger shops in the larger towns like Mosta and Valletta have begun to stock magazines, albeit with trepidation – but everywhere else, it’s a magazine wilderness because people just don’t buy them. In the results of a recent media survey it turns out that, when asked the question “What is your favourite magazine?”, most people said The Bargain. Now, I have nothing against The Bargain. It’s a very useful source of well, bargains – but it’s not exactly what you would call a magazine, in the sense that there is nothing to read in it. It’s an informative collection of photographs of items that you can buy for less money than usual, with prices and telephone numbers attached.
Yet I can see how it got to the top of Malta’s list of favourite magazines. For most of the respondents, it would be the only “magazine” that enters their home, because it is pushed into their letter-boxes. Only a relatively tiny percentage of the population – the most influential percentage, which spends the most money, hence the advertising which sustains this sector – buys newspapers. The rest don’t have access even to the free magazines that come with the Sunday and Saturday editions; hence, their favourite magazine is one that’s popped under their door.
A friend who owns a very popular boutique was recruiting a sales assistant some months ago, and when checking out her suitability for the job, she asked her whether she reads fashion magazines, thinking that the answer might be Vogue. “Yes,” came the reply, and she mentioned a brochure insert that one of the fashion chains pays to have inserted in a Sunday newspaper twice a year, at the start of each fashion season, to showcase some of its clothes. This girl couldn’t differentiate between a chain store brochure and a real fashion magazine. Needless to say, she didn’t get the job, but she is typical of our culture, which is disconnected from the mainstream.
The lack of a magazine-buying culture has created a curious anomaly in which the top 10 list of Malta’s favourite magazines is made up entirely of those which come free with the newspapers, with the exception of The Bargain, which comes free in the letterbox. In Britain, freebies and supplements do not even register as an option with people who are asked what their favourite magazine is – but then, Britain is the historical home of the magazine, and still produces the best ones in the world. Maltese people will read magazines, and even love them, but only if they don’t have to buy them.
While many of the freebies that come with the newspapers in Malta are pure and utter trash, the standard of a few other free magazines is good and rising all the time. They serve the useful purpose of exposing the hitherto magazine-resistant Maltese to the notion that magazines are not such a waste of time, after all, even if they will only read them if they do not have to buy them. I am very pleased about this not just because of my direct interest in the field, but because I am something of a magazine evangelist.
I truly believe that more valuable information can be gleaned from good magazines than from books. My experience of life so far has taught me that those who are regular readers of magazines, particularly the magazines coming in to Malta from highly developed societies, tend to be much better informed and more in touch with what is going on. Book-readers may be better educated, but magazine-readers are better informed. Newspapers cover current affairs, but magazines cover contemporary culture, which is just as important in giving us a well-rounded perspective.
So it’s goodbye to Family Circle, which has died a tortured death on the altar of a highly sexualised society. With sex being used to sell even magazines for very young teenagers, Family Circle had begun to look like an archaic relic of a different world. When I pick up today’s equivalent of the Pink I read when I was 14, I blanch at the explicit nature of the sexual content, including different positions in which to have sex, with graphic diagrams and vulgar terminology. Twenty years ago, that kind of thing would have been seen only in a men’s magazine on the top shelf. Before the ban on Playboy and Penthouse was lifted here, I remember thinking how odd it was that Cosmopolitan, which was extremely explicit, was permitted.
Cosmopolitan has for years after the departure of Ms D’Argy Smith been degenerating into the blatant soft pornography, verging on obscenity, that is today. When I sometimes pick it up at the hairdresser’s, it makes me wonder whether the end result of the feminist movement that spurred the rise of this magazine so many years ago has really been this: to turn women into over-sexualised whores and perverts, who dress and behave like lap-and-pole dancers.
No wonder I cling to Vogue, which seems to be the last bastion of dignity in the British women’s magazine business. Long may it last. Meanwhile, please take my advice, and give your children as many comics to read as you can find among the rapidly dwindling supplies in our shops. The child who will read nothing else will always read a comic, and that’s a good thing.