..to feel a failure compared to the women in my magazine?

[rufussmum]

Just read my usual middle-aged mum's monthly Woman and Home. All the women featured in it either 'live their adventure' and sail away to Greece on new yacht or have started their own 'consultancy/fashion' website with their best friend. Not one poor, unemployed single parent in sight. And don't get me started on the house makeover features. Are these people normal? If so I'm worse off than I thought.

Count the total number of them.

not normal!

You are BU and reading the wrong magazine. Quickly go out and buy a copy of Take a Break and your equilibrium will be restored.

I wouldn't think they're in a majority! And they're all copycats doing the same thing

You can sit about wishing you had what others have or you can make yourself successful & fulfilled with your own life.

Money doesn't automatically mean happiness & envy is a terrible thing

"normal" or "ordinary" people don't make good magazine features.

Stop reading women's magazines, they all make you feel like I shit. I feel so much happier since I stopped buying them

I am envious of your halo, lauriedriver .

I used to be a magazine addict but haven't bought any for a while due to budget cuts. Sat in the hairdressers the other week and read about 15 and felt utterly dejected afterwards wishing I had a nicer house, better wardrobe, money to do a job I enjoyed, nice holiday booked etc, I would consider myself a confident and positive person. So may lay off them from now on!

It's an aspirational magazine, designed to make you feel like you're missing out.

.....designed to make you buy associated stuff, in particular.

But Good Food or something.

Just don't read any magazines - they are designed to make you feel shit so you go out and buy a load of shite.

It's the poor sister of Good Housekeeping I always think. Will switch to The Lady.

I can't even spell yatt.

You're not alone.

Wot's a yatt?

They're not real, let alone normal.

You should be it's platinum & my shite smells of roses

I used to read Red every month. One month, when I was feeling tired, boob-leaky and unglamourous I realised that my monthly 'treat' was just making me feel crap about my (perfectly nice) life.

I changed my subscription to Intelligent Life (published bi-monthly) by The Economist. I now get to read about interesting men, women, places and ideas from all over the world and feel positively virtuous afterwards

hi OP

I had exactly the same experience with Woman & Home. All the women are expensively dressed, v glamorous for age and seem to have loads of money from businesses that seem to be nothing but a service to other women who are as well off as them. As I looked round my house (bombsite) and brushed some jammy dodger off my charity shop clothes I felt pretty depressed.

Only way to deal with it is to realise that the magazine is NOT TELLING THE WHOLE TRUTH.

Maybe all the same women are looking at each others style consultant website and paying each other the same money among themselves for style advice. Or maybe they can't do maths. Or maybe one of them has rich husband who is paying for them all. Or maybe they are just made up by the editorial team at Woman and Home.

I have stopped reading such mags and now just flick through through old copies of Thomas & Friends instead.

magazines do make you feel like shit

i was reading glamour mag today and suddenly realised how utterly depressing it was looking at pages and pages of young, impossibly beautiful, skinny models

interesting what another poster said about them being designed to make you feel shit so you buy stuff

and also interesting that at the back of glamour there were pages and pages of plastic surgery ads :(

This whole thing of women's magazines stinks. Misogynistic rubbish. They make you feel like rubbish so you buy lots of the rubbish they advertise to make yourself feel less rubbish, and then you read another magazine and the whole cycle starts again.

Read a book or a newspaper or an intelligent magazine that is not aimed at women

Very true Wuldric. Can you imagine a men's magazine where it's supposedly interesting that a man has a website and even went on holiday while simultaneously wearing this season's tee!

Strangely Women and Home uses young, beautiful and skinny models to show off clothes when the magazine is aimed at mature, average size 16 women. Are we supposed to believe that if we buy this stuff we too will become young, beautiful and skinny? And sexually fulfilled, intellectually stimulated and MD of our own on-line business?
In the back pages there are ads for comfy shoes, incontinence pads and walk-in baths. And vibrators. And psychics/tarot readers.

Yes, I agree with the others who suggest buying an alternative magazine. Women's magazines do appear to be designed to make their readers feel crap, for some reason.

Intelligent Life is good, as is the Economist (reading the Economist always cheers me up, for some reason). I do quite like Good Housekeeping once in a while .