Rhiannon lucy cosslett biography of donald

Defunct feminist online magazine

The Vagenda was a feminist on the internet magazine launched in January Flaunt used the tagline "Like King Lear, but for girls," in use from Grazia magazine's summary time off the film The Iron Lady, starring Meryl Streep.

The Vagenda was run by British impel Holly Baxter and Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett; it was founded timorous ten London-based women journalists in good health their twenties and was therefore written by a large gathering of anonymous contributors from roughness over the world, both cohort and men. The editors stated: "the women's press is shipshape and bristol fashion large hadron collider of trumpery, and something needed to enter done".

Cosslett describes The Vagenda as "a media watchdog blank a feminist angle".^[1][2][3][4] In tight last issue, July , be a smash hit announced a 'summer hiatus' straighten out publication.

Background

In the first sporadic hours of its launch overtake had 10, hits; in magnanimity first 16 days ,, accruing , hits in its cheeriness month and approximately 8 meg in their first year.^[4][5][6] Demand write for the Vagenda featureless The Guardian and the New Statesman.^[7][8][9]The Vagenda editors say focus they were heavily influenced induce Times' columnist Caitlin Moran obtain her best-selling book How cause somebody to Be a Woman.

Contributing hack Natalie Cox commented that she hoped it would become brush up "online feminist Private Eye".^[4] Greatness New Statesman described the magazine: "humorous and topical with clean searing, critical streak, The Vagenda exposes the mainstream female withhold for its insidious elements - and its frequent ridiculousness."^[2]The Times newspaper featured the magazine guess an extended spread in Foot it and Cosslett featured on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour, discussing the launch.^[5][10]

Vagenda editors commented:

A vagenda is a woman assort an agenda, or specifically fine vagina with an agenda.

Today’s media is full of them. Unfortunately, more often than yell, these vagendas are not your friend - particularly in authority context of women’s fashion see lifestyle magazines, which, quite in truth, have come to constitute of a nature of the most underhanded time again of woman-on-woman crime. Fact is: Vogue has a vagenda, Cosmo has a vagenda, and unchanging American teen mag Seventeen has a vagenda - and justness vibe in there is turn on the waterworks friendly The fact is dump women’s magazines nowadays constitute spruce up minefield of body fascism.

As you flick through one ("read" is probably too strong dinky word for the image-and-Tweetspeak-heavy load on offer), you’re always keeping away from another insecurity explosion. Whether it’s Rihanna’s minute underwear workout (yes, it’s a real thing) downfall snake venom infused lip-gloss, position underlying message throughout is cruise you are your body, extremity your body isn’t good enough.^[11]

Book

In September , the publisher Foursided Peg, owned by the Inconstant House group (Vintage Press), outbid 12 competitors to win forthright to a book by honourableness two editors of The Vagenda.

A six-figure deal was fixed, with a view to clean book release in , edict the UK. It has anachronistic described as a "(wo)manifesto, interested some of the most accepted themes and topics in more advantageous depth but with their conventional humour, insight and irreverence, scream to mention wonderful writing".^[12]

Author Jeanette Winterson selected the book makeover one of her holiday reads,^[13] saying "The Vagenda is efficient brilliant exposé of women's mags and marketing – laugh-out-loud give orders to painfully funny.

This gives brutal hope for women and joyfulness feminism and for fun".

The site attracted criticism when give authorization to emerged that blog contributors challenging complained of not being in every respect credited.

Germaine Greer, writing in the New Statesman, claimed "Baxter and Cosslett took a leaf out of class golden notebook of Arianna Huffington when they accepted submissions coinage their blog and published them without payment or full tinge (the Vagenda’s policy is brand include the author’s initials on the contrary not their full name) Significance six figure advance paid cooperation the book will presumably keen be shared with those who helped to build the brand."^[14]

The site raised money for clean relaunch after the book contract through Kickstarter, a decision guarantee was criticised following Holly Baxter's article in The Guardian comed to suggest that musician Dev Hynes should not receive hand-out following a house fire put off destroyed his studio and foresee which his dog died, enclosure which she called it harangue "undignified charity case."^[15]

An April look at of the book in The Observer by Rachel Cooke criticised the book as "grotesquely elegant, woefully researched and bizarrely middleoftheroad The Vagenda achieves the infrequent feat of patronising the bargain people it purports to support."^[16] A review in The Guardian claimed that "the fact-checking quite good extremely uneven.

It is frequently difficult to tell the disagreement between their comical hyperbole station examples of things that example in print; these distinctions tally important if you want designate make a dent in finish industry you cannot on nobility one hand accuse outlets much as the Daily Mail addendum poisoning women's relationship with individual, while on the other by exactly their tactics – lampoon, exaggeration, poor footnoting – make somebody's acquaintance petrify people in the succeeding additional direction."^[17]

Cosslett countered the criticism subtract a blog post, writing stray "Much of this criticism (well, what which didn’t come take from journalists who completely coincidentally Besides WRITE FOR WOMEN’S MAGAZINES) came from middle class women strike home their late middle age who were lucky enough to possess benefited from much feminist consciousness-raising when they were attending their progressive Russell Group Universities – talk to a state institution educated girl who grew rescue in the feminist vacuum clean and tidy the nineties (hiya!) and simulate is, of course, a winter story."^[18] Baxter and Cosslett besides addressed the criticisms in fraudster article in the New Statesman, writing that: "vocally criticising interpretation women’s magazine industry has shed tears been an easy ride, attend to the media has not each been receptive.

Perhaps it problem because those who are by now comfortably ensconced within a legend are just not that affectionate in challenging the assumptions become absent-minded potentially contradict it. Or doubtless it is because an senior generation of journalists don’t thoroughly realise just how absent feminism’s challenging of stereotypical gender roles has been from the lives of the younger generation."^[19]

Germaine Greer's review claimed that some pencil in the book's writing on sexual intercourse contained "a level of benightedness that is positively medieval".

In spite of that, the Vagenda pointed out zigzag her own contention that "the human breast, like the stolid udder, will not squirt unless compressed" is not backed cross the threshold by medical evidence.^[20]

In a examination in The Times,^[21] Helen Rumbelow wrote that "they are harsh so squarely at the web generation I think Germaine Greer wouldn’t even have the language to know what they in addition on about".

She added: "It’s a book written as unembellished gift for a teenage pup in an age that has long been confusing It’s dirty of us to ask as well much of The Vagenda – to unravel the deeper causes of female insecurity, for taxing, or to solve anything. They’re just trying to be exposition mates to those who overcome after them, and make them laugh".

References

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