Why do women like the 'Mail'?
Of course, you read it first in the Daily Mail: an interview with a woman who has paid to be cut in half (well, almost) in pursuit of a better figure. "From the outset," confided 49-year-old Lucinda Ellery on Friday, "I knew I could never achieve my dream body naturally."
Seven minor operations later, she was ready for the big one, the controversial – even to the Mail, which has become the house journal of cosmetic surgery junkies – total body lift. I don't want to put you off your breakfast, but this operation involves cutting from the front of one hip, right round the back and ending up at the navel, removing excess skin from the trunk and sewing it all back together again.
The paper records that Ellery almost died on the operating table and she has been left in excruciating pain. Yet her message is that she's been transformed from "an ugly, frizzy-haired, fat girl with no self-esteem" to "a blonde, slim sex siren". Go for it, Mail readers! (Sadly, I have checked my diary and don't think I will be able to find time for this exciting new procedure for several years. Come to think of it, I am already slim and blonde, and anyway I think women who go in for this kind of self-mutilation need their heads examining, which is why I am not a regular Daily Mail subscriber.)
Other helpful advice on getting that perfect body comes from Natasha Hamilton (right), the Atomic Kitten star who revealed the secret that has just won her the coveted (or so I'm told) Rear of the Year award: "That's easy. I just don't eat." Not that the paper condones this kind of self-starvation, any more than it endorses Ellery's £30,000 surgery habit. A favourite Mail trick is to encourage such women to tell their own stories, simultaneously promoting the idea that we should all go to any lengths to achieve the ideal shape and condemning those individuals reckless enough to do it.
That's when it isn't attacking women with younger lovers – a hilarious "toyboy league table" mocked Madonna, Susan Sarandon and Barbara Windsor among others last week – and working mothers who persist in trying to have it all. Allison Pearson, author of I Don't Know How She Does It and high priestess of maternal guilt, was recently given two pages to lament how little time she spends with her children, thus depriving the tots of yet more precious hours she could have devoted to them.
Then there's a long list of Lady Macbeth figures who are always, according to the Mail, the real power behind any successful man. Don't you find it annoying that just because Shakespeare once wrote a play about a weak man and his manipulative wife, every bloody relationship from the Clintons to the Blairs has to be shoe-horned into the same template?
Last week it was Diana Ingram, paraded in the paper as the brains behind her bumbling husband, the "Millionaire" fraudster, Charles. And of course Amineh Abu-Zayyad, second wife of George Galloway, the controversial Labour MP: she is not just a Palestinian academic but a "shapely brunette", so there's no doubt about who's running that particular show.
Last week, when it came under attack at a public debate and on Radio 4's Today programme, the Mail's executives protested that the paper is popular among women readers. This is not as great a paradox as it appears, demonstrating only that, like purveyors of miracle diets, the Mail knows how to exploit female anxieties. Day after day, the paper bombards its readers with articles confirming their low self-esteem, warning them to be on their guard against flab and cellulite and offering quick fixes like surgery and diets. Since the vast majority don't work – diets are a symptom of a disordered relation to food, not a solution – this can only perpetuate a familiar cycle of over-eating, periodic self-denial and guaranteed self-loathing.
I haven't even mentioned the paper's disgusting politics, or its credulous attachment to astrology and conspiracy theories about aliens and the Bible. But what the Mail is supremely good at, above all else, is making women go on feeling terrible about themselves. And it makes perfect marketing sense, when you think about it. If all those Femail readers got the job, the man and the body they aspire to, who then would be left to read articles about women who have just had their legs chopped off at the ankle or their cheeks transplanted to their bums in the hope of looking like Kylie Minogue?
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