How to Please Your . . . Readers

It’s been almost three decades since the women’s movement began changing everyday reality for American females, as well as how they think about their lives and loves. Yet after all these years, women’s magazines still promise readers “Secret Strategies to Make Any Guy Propose” and “We Help Fix Your Every Couple Catastrophe.”

But not every couple catastrophe can be fixed, especially by following some generalized rule book, which is why marriage counselors and marital therapy researchers are critical of magazines that hype easy answers.

This isn’t just a turf war between the academics and custodians of the 50-minute therapeutic hour versus the media. The experts who are in the trenches, helping couples on the road to a breakup hang a U-turn back to happiness, think the magazines’ emphasis on women manipulating men and sex tricks that ignore the particulars of a relationship can be more destructive than helpful.

Magazine editors explain that they’re only giving women what they want. “Our readers love our marriage and sex advice,” said Leslie Jane Seymour, editor in chief of Redbook magazine, which has 2.25 million readers. “It’s no accident that there are very sexy headlines on the cover right now. There’s a desire for more sexual material. I think it’s the mood women are in.”

Sex does sell, but it doesn’t heal all wounds. According to marriage counselors and marital therapy researchers, it takes more than chandelier-swinging sexual acrobatics to guarantee closeness.

“What’s wrong with the sex advice is the assumption that there are a set of procedures and techniques that universally work on every man and every woman, as opposed to the notion that men and women have very individualized sexual turn-ons and turnoffs,” said Andrew Christensen, a UCLA psychology professor who specializes in couples therapy. “The other fallacy is that it’s primarily technique that wins the day with sexual arousal and response, not something more interpersonal. The emphasis on technique ignores what’s going on between two people.”

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John Gottman agrees. He is a psychology professor at the University of Washington in Seattle and director of the Gottman Institute, which offers couple workshops and trains mental health professionals. “Most of the problems that the sex therapists I know see are really a spillover of relationship problems,” Gottman said. “The reason things don’t work in bed is because they don’t work in the kitchen, or the dining room.

“If you’re not connecting with your partner, it doesn’t matter what you’re wearing or how you smell or what you say. It’s about the quality of intimacy in the relationship. That’s not saying that if you have a good relationship, some of these ideas about spicing up your sex life won’t work.”

Many women are loath to admit it, but magazine sales suggest they are hungry for relationship remedies, from improved communication skills to lingerie. “Women say they don’t like it when we write about how to please your man. They know it’s politically correct to say, ‘What about how to please themselves or a man making an effort?’ But every time we write about that, it bombs,” Redbook’s Seymour said. “And every time we write about how to please your man, it sells. Magazines are a business, and my job is to give a woman what she’s really interested in, not what she thinks she’s supposed to say she’s interested in.”

The godmother of sexually explicit advice is Cosmopolitan magazine. During the 30-year editorial reign of Helen Gurley Brown, the magazine’s mission was to tell women yearning for love how to find it. Brown envisioned her readers as “mouseburgers,” drab little creatures who could snare Prince Charming if they would just acquire the right wardrobe, hairdo, sexual techniques and conversational skills.

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That approach drew a phenomenal readership, now 2.5 million, and caused something of a revolution. The traditional women’s magazines such as McCall’s, Ladies Home Journal, Good Housekeeping and Redbook began to wonder: Once the Cosmo girl married and had children, did she lose all interest in “How to Talk Dirty in the Bedroom” or “How to Escape from Birth Control Hell”? Their conclusion was absolutely not, and their content began to reflect it.

“Some of the older women, who have been reading Redbook for a long time, send us grateful letters,” editor Seymour said. “They tell us they don’t approve of the sexual stories, but if they’d had that kind of information when they were younger, it would have helped their marriage.”

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The October issue of Redbook heralds, in bright coral letters: “HOT NEW SEX POSITION--Guaranteed to bring you closer.” Seymour said, “That’s my hottest cover line yet, and it’s been our bestselling issue so far. Sex still sells.”

Fashion magazines are the other major category of magazines directed at women. And while Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Mirabella, Allure, Mademoiselle, Glamour and W continue to concentrate on style, beauty, health and pop culture, they also are including more frank articles about women’s personal lives--evaluating antidepressants or considering whether extramarital affairs might be beneficial.

“I would never condescend and say that any question that a reader has isn’t worth answering, but we don’t do those kind of ‘how to keep your man’ stories, because we think that they’re basically exploitative,” said Roberta Meyers, editor in chief of Mirabella. “We’re as interested in the question, ‘Why do you want to keep him?’ We’re much more interested in the interior lives of women.”

Experts say the advice that’s most off the mark is based on the idea that a woman can change a man or improve a relationship all by herself.

“My experience is that to change a relationship takes two very committed and aware people working really hard,” Gottman said. “I don’t think you can improve a relationship by yourself, unless you’re the Dalai Lama, maybe. Making women think that they can change things on their own lays a guilt trip on them. It’s saying that, ‘If there’s something wrong, it’s your fault, and if you were just smart enough, you could fix it.’ ”

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Gottman is also critical of the American mania for quick fixes.

“A lot of the material out there gives the idea that you can fix your relationship in very little time,” he said. “The people who write these stories call me and ask me for tips. Something you can do on your cell phone when you’re driving home, in 30 seconds. It’s the American question: How can I do this fast?”

Redbook editor Seymour said magazines do offer quick tips for complex problems, but it’s usually because readers tell them that’s what they want.

“The better the tips, the more unique the tips, the more readers like them. Women are very isolated today. It’s an odd kind of irony in the age of communication, but the more we women do, the less time we have to talk to other women. So we started asking real women what their expert tips are. How do they get their husbands psyched up?

“We’ve increased the amount of advice we give from real women, which makes the magazine more of a forum,” Seymour said. “What does some professor in Iowa who wrote a book know that an experienced woman doesn’t?”

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Mimi Avins can be reached by e-mail at mimi.avins@latimes.com.