This month has seen a flurry of action around the women's glossies.  "The September Issue" documentary is in theaters, providing the public a chance to ogle behind the scenes at Anna Wintour's high-fashion Vogue empire. SELF magazine, the weight-loss glossy/self-improvement bible with occasionally meaty features got slammed by a massive chorus of bloggers last month for its overly-photoshopped cover of Kelly Clarkson.  SELF's editor later said the slimmed-down image showed Clarkson at her "best"--even if that was visibly different from reality. Racialicious has documented an endless stream of problematic images of women of color in magazine spreads, photo shoots and advertisements. And just last week, in response to riotous, widespread applause for a single photo of a plus-size model, belly included, Glamour, the least elitist of the mainstream mags, is going to feature a boatload of plus-size models in their next issue (Kate Harding points out that plus-size models are "still tall, well-proportioned, clear-skinned, shiny-haired, able-bodied and usually white, on top of only being "fat" relative to size 0s.")

The typical formula for these magazines is this: two or three interesting features, a ton of beauty and fashion advice, a decent but conventional and heretonormative sex and relationships section, and some health stories, all bookended by ads galore: ads for jeans, ads for diets, ads for birth control, ads for makeup and shoes. The relationship beween these magazines' content and their ads is an ill-kept secret--it's widely discussed that the mags' more typically-reproduced content is a result of trying to please their advertisers.

Still, we remain fascinated by the ladymags. The never-ending brouhaha that these magazines are capable of eliciting, to borrow Glamour's signature section, for their own "Dos" and "Don'ts" reminds us that they still have a powerful relationship to the female collective psyche. Naomi Wolf talks about this phenomenon in The Beauty Myth--how women's magazines despite being hawking grounds for patriarchal products like cellulite creams and diet drugs--also afford women a kind of powerful group experience. They're the magazines we all read at the gym, at the air airport, under the blowdryers or on the subway.

This need to keep up with the lady-mags leads to a sort of devils' bargains made by many of their avid readers. Women allow "their" magazines the usual litany of transgressions: tons of skinny models, "articles" about beauty trends that conveniently tout products by the magazine's advertisers, celebrity puff-pieces, and so on. They are happy to accept these sometimes fun, sometimes pernicious features inherent to the medium in order to read health news aimed at them, take quizzes, check out new styles and read in-depth features about remarkable women or political and social trends that affect their lives. But when the magazines break this bargain mold by photoshopping too aggressively, not photoshopping a woman's flaws away, or publishing something out of the ordinary the emails start flowing in en masse --and it becomes clear that a lot of these readers have keener sensibilities than we give them credit for. They want something more genuine out of their magazines.

At a panel at last year's Women, Action and the Media conference, journalists Ada Calhoun, Lynn Harris, Rebecca Traister and Kara Jessella talked about writing for women's magazines. All feminists, they felt that the good stories about reproductive rights, women's health, violence against women and women's stuggles worldwide produced by magazines like Elle, Marie Claire, Self and Glamour (Cosmo and Vogue are both slightly different and less redeemable creatures) balanced out the diet, makeup and fashion spreads that can range from shallow to pernicious. The panelists encouraged young feminists to write for and read the good stories in women's magazines, saying that in a small field of publications, these publications were a key vehicle for getting progressive-minded stories out and getting paid for them. Jesellla, a former beauty editor and co-author of How Sassy Changed My Life, talked about sneaking such articles into her regular beauty coverage. Glancing at Glamour's guide to the election last fall reminded me that the consistent pro-reproductive rights coverage these magazines engage in is bold and important.

If we accept their advice, feminists should view the lesser content in these magazines as a necessary evil and train our focus on bending the popular newsstand publications towards a better result, leveraging our voices getting the women's glossies to publish more good articles, more realistic and normalized photos of women of different shapes, sizes, backgrounds and physical types. But how much success will we have? As Erika Kawalek writes at Double X, "is it wise to seek redress from a mainstream publication?" Perhaps we should leave them to their inevitable decline and replacement by lady-websites.

It's a hard question for me to judge personally, because I quit reading ladymags years ago, and I never regret that choice. I found that although I enjoyed reading them, and stacked neat piles of them in my travel bag, they always made me feel dissatisfied when I was done. Even post consciousness-raising when the endless dieting and weight loss stories had less effect on me, those magazines always made me feel as though there was something I lacked--whether it was the right pair of shoes or proper salon-going routine, or on a deeper level the resilience and inner light that one of the many heroic women profiled in the dramatic features always seem to have. I'd argue that the magazines are designed to make readers feel a sense of need or incompleteness, a need which will lead them to buy the magazine again the following month as well as pay heed to advertisers.

As for our ability to influence them, I don't know how many times I've opened a women's magazine to the editors letter and read a sentence along the lines of "we've heard you and we're going to change X." But of course little actually changes in the formula described above: more features mixed with beauty and diet is what we'll get. Furthermore, the internet, and sites like Jezebel and The Frisky and the expansion of the Bitch website all have allowed writers to take on some of the magazines' traditionally more fun topics like sex, TV, celebrities and fashion without really losing their feminist/critical voice--a really important development.

The paradox of women's glossies sums up a lot of where American women have come in the mainstream. The magazines, like TV shows and movies, largely acknowledge our progress and rights in terms of our workplace, sexual freedom and reproductive rights without delving deeply into the sexist dynamics and expectations that inform those issues, partiularly the critical issues of body image and mainstream beauty norms and gendered power dynamics in personal relationships. How to approach the magazines, then, depends on our relationship to them now--if we are active readers, we should fully engage them and push their coverage towards a more progressive end, accepting that they'll never be truly progressive. But if we prefer to get our mix of fun and features elsewhere, there's no need to turn back to the ladymags, until the next time they do something scandalous, that is.