Baxter Holly - The Vagenda

To our mums, for their unwavering emotional support; and to our dads, for their technical support.

We could not ask for better or more hilarious parents.

As students, Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett and Holly Baxter spent a lot of time laughing at newspaper and magazine articles entitled things like 50 Sex Tips to Please Your Man. Particularly the ones that encouraged bringing baked goods into the bedroom, or instructed on how to remove cellulite from your arse using coffee granules.

But when they stopped laughing, they started to feel a bit uneasy.

Was this relentless hum about vajazzles and fat removal just daft, at worse a bit patronising or was something more disturbing going on?

Was it time to say NO?
No, this really isnt OK.
In fact, ITS A LOAD OF BULLSH*T!

They thought so. So they launched The Vagenda blog in 2012, and now they have written this laugh-out-loud book. The Vagenda is a brilliantly bolshy rallying call to girls and women of all ages. Caitlin Moran asked How to be a Woman: The Vagenda asks real women everywhere to demand a media that reflects who we actually are.

Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett and Holly Baxter co-founded The Vagenda in February 2012. It was a viral sensation and instant hit and received over 7 million views in its first year. Caitlin Moran described it as Really funny, like really funny; Eva Wiseman said I like this keep doing what youre doing; Rosamund Urwin said Go to their site, its brilliant and Jenny clair said Im so glad youre here. Rhiannon and Holly are journalists in their twenties. They live in London.

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Version 1.0

Epub ISBN 9781448161720

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Published by Square Peg 2014
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Copyright Holly Baxter and Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett 2014

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Holly Baxter and Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the authors of this work

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
Square Peg
Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9780224095808

Back in February 2012, a pair of impoverished graduates launched a blog dedicated to humorously lambasting womens magazines. We called it The Vagenda, a term we stole from a broadsheet article about women in the workplace with a hidden agenda. Of all the stupid portmanteau terms we had come across while reading magazines manthropology, shoemageddon, hiberdating vagenda was the most ridiculous. And we found not only that the amalgamation of vagina and agenda was pleasing to the ear, but that the word perfectly encapsulated the aims of the blog: to expose the silly, manipulative and sometimes damaging ulterior motives of womens magazines.

We were experts only insofar as we had consumed an awful lot of glossy trash over the years glossy trash that had been telling us how to look, think and behave since we first left the local newsagents clutching a copy of Mizz in our sweaty little sherbet-covered fingers. Women buy thousands upon thousands of magazines each year, and, despite the advent of the internet and, for some publications, tanking circulation figures, they remain extremely popular. Its said that women look at between 400 and 600 adverts a day, and with the ratio of advertorial to editorial in magazines rapidly increasing, that number is likely to rise. Magazines editorial content and the adverts that target you with age-specific products alongside it (lip gloss for tweens, padded bras for teenagers, plastic surgery for twentysomethings, overpriced shabby-chic sideboards and Le Creuset kitchen paraphernalia for the middle-aged cohort) have been an unavoidable part of the female consciousness for most women raised in the Western world since the 1930s.

Even publications that used to celebrate womens liberation in the seventies and eighties have been increasingly watered down and replaced with easily recycled, oversexed content pandering to an advertising team whove got your money on their mind. Nowadays, it can feel as if their index fingers are pointing accusingly at you from behind the page, primed to deliver you a hefty shot of insecurity to complement your morning Botox.

As tweenagers, we graduated from the romance comics, spooky stories and I kissed a boy during my first period, am I pregnant? problem pages in Shout, Mizz, Sugar or Jackie, dependent on your age, to those with a more mature demographic such as Just Seventeen (later rebranded as J-17). For our own generation, J-17 (which everyone knows you read when you were 13 and hid from your scandalised mother, lest she find the bit about 69ing) was the go-to magazine for sex advice, trading as it did primarily in information and revelations about boys in the same way that Jackie traded in romance and engagement stories in the 1970s. But these sorts of stories have a sell-by date, and by the time youre a teenager, youre being steered headlong into Cosmopolitan, Company and Grazia. An addiction that lasts a lifetime is born. We havent got past our twenties yet, but were looking forward to the terrifying content of mature magazines such as Red and Easy Living (Do his sperm hate your vagina? Will your consumption of guacamole affect your fertility? Is off-white a suitably calming colour for the nursery of a baby with unconventional sleeping patterns) Alongside all this, the celebrity magazine grew to gargantuan proportions throughout the noughties. Where once Hello! and OK! stood slightly shamefacedly in the corner of the news racks, heat, Closer and a variety of other younger sisters now jostle for room, emanating a combination of disjointed newzac and bilious body snark like the cidered-up drunk on your corner. Is it a baby or a burrito? Our experts decide! scream headlines next to a magnified image of Celebrity Xs stomach. Celebrity Y breaks down over unbearable pressure from paparazzi! proclaims the next headline, with a blurry picture of said celebs hand across a lens as ironic illustration. On the face of it, you wouldnt think that that sort of banal content would reel in a substantial audience yet we fall for it again and again.

If Page Three is the sexist builder hollering at you in the street, then Grazia and Cosmo are the frenemies who smile to your face and bitch behind your back. It worried us that women such as us, reared on a diet beginning with problem-page questions about tampons in