Women’s magazines issue shifting double binds that destabilise readers into anxiety

Evidence

It is bio-control and the model for that is the women’s magazine. It is about reducing a certain anxiety. It is not about saying you must do this one thing. It is about on one page Geri Halliwell is happy with her curves. The next month she is feeling much better because she has lost weight. You get these double binds being issued all the time by these magazines. The function of which is to destabilise and keep people in a state of anxiety and also add on solutions to every problem which is always that a consumer object will resolve this for you. Dieting is bio-power, a form of body control. What we have got with this digital culture now is this weird thing of hyperordinariness. You have got people who are done up to the nines but it isn’t like David Bowie where you are playing with some abstract aestheticisation. We have got people who have this uber ordinariness — it is a normative model: perfect teeth, right skin tone. An utterly conservative artificiality. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 2248

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: Connects to Fisher’s other claims about controlled desublimation and how ideology operates through anxiety rather than direct commands (book ch60, ch106 managerial anxiety).
• DEFINE: Fisher coins ‘hyperordinariness’ as a distinctive mode of conservative artificiality distinct from Bowie’s abstract aestheticisation.
• SHARE: For someone writing about body politics or beauty standards — the double-bind mechanism of women’s magazines as bio-power is a sharp formulation.