How time stands still in women's magazines

Women's magazines are still offering us the same take on weddings, weight and work that they were a decade ago. Is it time they evolved? Flicking through women's magazines is like entering a time machine. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian I suppose it's like a failing relationship. That final morning where you wake up and lie staring at the ceiling until the alarm goes, and the first thing out of your mouth is a hoarse "It's over." It feels like a shock, until years later you look back and join the dots – those silent car journeys, the misunderstandings, an odd summer evening where something sort of happened – and you see the path of change. Of things going wrong. Women are at that point, I think, with our magazines. Flicking through one of June's glossy women's mags is like entering a time machine. You look down at a page and lose a decade. The brief for a women's magazine's celebrity interview requires that the writer include information about her diet, what she's wearing and who she's going out with. Sometimes this is relevant; often it is not. But it suggests that their ideas about what a woman should be today appear more limited than ever. As if we're looking at women from a long, long way away. One piece begins: "Between working, writing, moving to the US, dating inappropriate men and making sure to test-drive every cocktail New York City had to offer, I really hadn't given myself a chance to catch a breath." Reading it, I feel the tension of the millennium bug settle upon me once more. I hear Geri Halliwell singing "It's Raining Men". Not only are we in a world where Sex and the City is our go-to "glamour place", but the horror of its second spin-off film is but a twinkle in Carrie's eye. I mean shoe. I mean Manolo. I mean kill me, please, and quickly. Turning the page, a feature about brides' "Big-Day Budgets" from £500 to £500,000 could have been written at any point in the past 10 years. Any time but now, when our poorness makes it seem a bit gauche, when our living standards are declining at the fastest rate since the 1920s. When the hysterical bride has been parodied on every TV channel, the image of their princess dresses so rife we see them on our inner eyelids when we blink. Later in the magazine a piece about sex in long-distance relationships recommends that readers use the internet. The internet – you know? Think of a million leaflets all stacked inside a computer. It's a piece that could've been photocopied from the era of Yahoo! emails. The era of black-cherry lipstick. It's the tone of today's women's monthlies that really seems off. The voice. It doesn't seem to have evolved – it doesn't acknowledge the way we speak now. You know, "the music that they constantly play, it says nothing to me about my life". Along with many publications (yeah, hi), their sales continue to drop, but I wonder if this is in part because they ignore the growing awareness not only that women are choosing to opt out of the life they draw for us, with the weddings, the diets and the sexual attraction to shoes, but that lots of us have found alternative places to chatter about it. On Twitter. On blogs like The Vagenda, which hits such nerves that the writer of their post about body hair was invited to show off her armpits on This Morning. The subjects are often the same – relationships, work, bodies – but the women's magazine take on them seems old-fashioned. We no longer always buy jeans to hide our pear-shaped hips. We are no longer conflicted about our sexuality or hung up on what it means to have a one-night stand. Few girls plan for their one special day now that the concept of marriage has mutated and our expectations have cracked wide open. Absolutes (that you'll marry in a church, marry a man, marry at all) have, happily, broken down. Does this sound huffy? I don't mean to fume. I just long for these women's magazines to change the way they tell their stories. We have more options today than in that Global Hypercolour time they hark back to. Contrary to the narratives they tell, our lives are no longer measured out in wedding cake.