Shelter magazines: neither real nor simple

I hate magazines. They make me feel inferior. Every article seems to insinuate: “here’s how you would look, think and act if you were slim, smart and stylish.”

As a magazine editor and publisher, I’m supposed to read magazines all the time, but there’s only one I read regularly: Masthead, a Canadian magazine industry publication. (I read Toronto Life as well, but I don’t want to mention them because we compete for some of the same advertisers. It makes me feel inferior too, but it’s well written.) Other than that, I’m fairly good at ignoring all the magazines that fill my world. And fill my world they do: we subscribe to about 10 at work because it helps keep our advertising sales staff up to speed on who’s advertising where. At home, I subscribe to the Globe and Mail, which means I get an extra five to 15 magazines per month as inserts in the paper.

If I don’t have a novel on the go or I’ve already read the paper before I find myself in a situation with time to kill (planes, doctors’ waiting rooms, kids’ after-school lessons) I sometimes buy a magazine. This puts me in a difficult position. As a good Canadian, I don’t want to buy American magazines; Canadian magazines, however, are my competition, so I don’t really want to be out in public with my nose in one, suggesting that these publications deserve attention from a smart-looking cookie like me.

With gardening magazines, the truth goes a little deeper. With gardening magazines, articles that gloze too quickly over interesting topics make me feel unpleasantly, pompously superior, while articles that I might consider good simply leave me feeling disappointed that they aren’t in my magazine. With gardening magazines, there is no level of comfort for me. I stopped reading them years ago.

When I buy a magazine, I’m most inclined to pick up People. Yes, really. No need to think, plenty of eye candy, and they don’t tend to print hurtful or untrue things about the rich and famous. (With hopes of being rich some day myself, I support the magazine that supports them!)

Well. A couple of weeks ago I had not brought lunch to work and was going out to a restaurant by myself, so I grabbed a copy of a big, fat, popular Canadian shelter magazine. (That’s what the industry calls all the magazines about spiffing up your home.) I’m pretty confident about my home, having toughed out extensive renovations and gone further in to debt for furnishings. I figured I could handle it.

I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be ashamed to admit this, but I don’t have a garage attached to a 5,000-square foot home, and if I did, I just don’t think I could put the time, effort and money into installing ceramic tile in that garage. My closets are serviceable, but if I were to install a modular system—actually, if I were to make my younger daughter move into her older sister’s room and turn the vacated room into a closet with a modular system (closets in shelter mags are huge)—it would not look like the pictures in this magazine. For one thing, I have more than three colours in my wardrobe. The “closet” in the magazine contains the extremely limited wardrobe of an individual who wears only tan, white and light blue. I know it’s staged, but this fictitious person haunts me.

This imaginary individual, I might add, irons everything before hanging it. She probably takes the laundry out of the dryer the moment it buzzes, too. I bet she flosses her teeth every night, always makes nutritious meals for her family, reads to the kids then jogs before going to bed at 10 so she can get up early. Which she does without hitting the snooze button even once.

Me? I iron on an as-needed basis. I turn off the dryer buzzer because it’s annoying, but leave the clothes inside. They have to cool down, right? I floss a couple of times in the week before a dental appointment. I don’t buy prepared food, but I don’t necessarily cook a great meal every night either. My husband reads to the little one, who will soon be able to read to herself and give Dad a break; my bedtime ritual with Claire is watching recorded re-runs of Law and Order. (But no SVU—I have standards.) The only jogging I do is of my husband’s memory when the garbage starts to smell. If I go to bed at 10 I can’t drift off, so there’s no point turning in until I’ve fallen asleep on the couch during Letterman. I try to get up early; I never hit the snooze button—it bugs my husband, so instead I just turn off the alarm and go back to sleep.

About 10 years ago, there was a backlash against Martha Stewart. Normal people don’t decorate cakes with sugared violets and bake their own croissants and stencil a four-colour plate rail in the dining room and freshen the guest room linens with lavender water—certainly not all in one day. Who knows for sure how much of any of that Martha Stewart actually does—she does seem to be quite driven. I’ve got no problem with her being as she is nor with her demonstrating her talents for the public through her multiple media venues. Martha Stewart Living is about being better at everything than anyone else. That’s the unabashed theme.

It’s all these other magazines that purport to have a theme of helping the average Joe or Jane but offer no realistic advice. Why did the backlash against Martha Stewart just seem to drive the other shelter magazines further into fantasy?

The homes covered in the magazine I mentioned were really mansions. How do you achieve a mansion? Not by lying around reading fluff, that’s for sure. And the interior of that garage with ceramic floors? They painted it white. Because, you know, wiping down the interior of your garage is something you do all the time. Then they accessorized the work bench with a palette of apple green tools and a basket of Granny Smith apples. Do you have apples in your garage? Are they colour-coordinated with your watering can? Should they be?

I get that magazines don’t cover the average home because readers don’t aspire to be average. Ontario Gardener doesn’t cover the average garden—we look for gardens that are remarkable, in part because the writer needs to remark on the garden for about 800 words. But the gardens we cover are real, and there is never a shortage of them.

When your garden is profiled in Ontario Gardener, you don’t get a list of instructions on how to prep starting two weeks ahead of the photo shoot. The “team” that shows up for the photo shoot is usually me, though sometimes one of my kids comes along for the ride. I come with nothing but my little $800 Nikon and a spare charged battery. I got a tripod for Christmas, so I guess I’ve got “gear” now.

In polls, consumers say they turn to magazines for information and advice. Obviously, they also look for something beautiful and inspiring. But if the beautiful and inspiring isn’t real, if it’s staged, how much information and advice can you really take from it? And why aspire to something unattainable?

These magazines make me want to give their editors and publishers a shake. The world is a magnificent place and there is beauty and inspiration all around us. Go ahead and make something new and call it art—I love art! But if you call it a magazine, use your power and influence to illuminate the real world.