Very Black Friday

I have long been convinced that one should seek the true opponents of women or women’s affairs, family matters or life not in so-called society, not in prevailing governments, not in men, nor in bad habits or traditions, not in radical feminists or the LMBTQ movements, no, primarily not there at all. Conservatives should not point to the radical left wing, and left wingers should not point to Christian conservatives when they want to do good for women, certainly not!

Consumption, that is, those economic players who generate and influence consumption and profit from it, are the most important manipulators of the image women have of themselves and the image society has of women. Those who primarily target women because women hold the keys to the family purse. Surveys show that women also decide about car purchases. We already know that if you want to sell a property, medicine or medical aid, food, clothing, summer holiday, school or course, culture or a healthy lifestyle, you have to convince the women. Thus one finds women’s magazines on the supposedly moribund print market stuffed from cover to cover with advertisements. In the interest of achieving a better result, the advertisements project a picture of an upper-middle class woman’s image that is heavily burdened with social conventions in comparison with the real world.

It is vital to be beautiful – but what beauty is precisely is presented to us through a bounteous supply of images, yet the path to achieving this ideal comes at the cost of excessive consumption.

A healthy lifestyle is also extremely important: to achieve this requires no end of expensive sports gear, dietary supplements, wonder doctors (and real ones!), classes and expensive food.

It is also necessary to ensure that the children have a carefree, untroubled childhood and this, too, requires the purchase of a houseful of things. As far as I can see, there is only one thing more wicked, more manipulative, more immoral than the beauty industry and that is the baby business, with its infant formulas, unnecessary equipment and primarily the ‘good motherhood’ myth, which immediately goes up in smoke once the poor mother doesn’t rush out and buy the very latest useless piece of junk for babycare. We have barely returned home from the hospital and already the post box contains the first promotional literature in the baby’s name from somebody (precisely at the same time as the arrival of a tax and social insurance number).

Women’s magazines have a surfeit not only of beautifully created advertisements but sponsored content, too. One has to be on the ball to spot these, you need sharp eyes and editorial experience. It is no coincidence that a high proportion of the articles in average women’s magazines, particularly those targeting young women, are about beauty, cooking and travel. They assist in the formation of a self-image in defenceless teens in which consumption is a powerful accessory of ‘normal’ life.

If you are a woman, you don’t need an opinion on current affairs, you don’t need to have a standpoint in the defence of your own system of values, in fact, you don’t even need a system of values. You don’t need to belong to a community, only if that community is held together by consumption, a girlfriend is first and foremost a person to go shopping with. Aside from this, the world is just made up of dull things. Anything that one can get absorbed in is boring, dry, a dusty, scholarly thing, which we are tired of in everyday life. Magazines take great care not to speak about these things.

The biggest opponent of consumption is the thinking man. The one who recognises what is valuable and what is not. The person who has an opinion. Who takes a stand. Who is interested not in the world of magazines concentrating on consumption but on the world in its entirety. Seen through the window of magazines, we get only a very narrow slice of this world.

How good it would be to give our children, partner, friends and colleagues thinking as a present for Christmas! The possibility of thought. A book. A periodical. Intellectual experience. Conversation. Theatre.

So, Black Friday. No, please don’t buy anything! After all, you will spend tomorrow – my child would also like Lego, and they love chicken with coconut milk, and I simply must get a few new rags for the pre-Christmas parties. We buy things, that is how it is, this is how we live in liberty. Just let’s all try to preserve a little capacity for thinking! Because anybody who has been weaned off thinking by consumption is easily open to all sorts of other manipulation – power plays, political influence, inhuman mass movements.

We in the editorial office of Képmás are extremely proud that the magazine we make prompts one to think. We respect the thinking person in the reader. And since we determinedly stand by the system of values we espouse, we are not going to plunge those who have chosen us into the darkness of Black Friday just for the sake of our advertisers. We will not sacrifice them to consumption and the advertisers propagating consumption.

In the Christian conservative value judgement, Friday is the day of fasting. I don’t want to be didactic, I won’t continue this train of thought.