A Comics Studies Reader

Jackie and the Problem of Romance

190 Jackie and the Problem of Romance Martin Barker On the U.K. alternative comedy show Saturday Live in 1987 a comedian stepped to the microphone. She launched into a series of jokes about how women are led to look at their own bodies, how terrified they can be about getting overweight. But of course, she laughed (and the audience laughed with her), we all know why—we all read Jackie, didn’t we? That explains everything. “Everyone knows” that magazines like Jackie, but perhaps that one especially, have done long-term damage to girls’ psyches. These magazines have subtly preached at girls about boys, romance, beauty, boys, fashion, their bodies, their desires, boys, everything in fact that will help fit them for a future as worried but passive women, everything “right” to think and think about. That joke crystallises the topic of this chapter. “Everyone knows” these things. This view is remarkably ingrained. This makes it very hard to challenge without simply inviting the wrath of women who are rightly concerned to identify those things which are influencing girls into a “feminine career.” Nevertheless I do want to challenge this radical commonsense about Jackie, which has been expressed in a thousand jokes, a hundred articles, and quite a few academic analyses. I don’t wish to present the magazine as a source of hidden virtues. Simply, I think it is far more complicated than the critics have made out. My worry has several aspects. First their methods of understanding how an “ideology of femininity” might be embodied in such magazines are grossly unsatisfactory . Second, there are politics implicit in their accounts, tightly related to those inadequate methods. And third all the accounts I have looked at just cannot account for the enormous changes that Jackie has undergone. There is a total absence of history in all the varieties of feminist work on teenage romances—and that is both disturbing and revealing. My way of working has been, in each case, to revisit the particular issues of Jackie (or other magazines) discussed, to see how critics’ methods make them work on the texts. But doing so has brought to the surface two major problems. First, typically, critics do not bother to give proper references when they criticise popular materials of this kind. Yes, we will find a nice list of academic secondary sources. But all too frequently I have had to hunt through many months’ editions in order to locate, say, a small piece of dialogue Reprinted by permission and adapted from Martin Barker, Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics (Manchester University Press, 1989), 134–59. JACKIE and the ProBleM of roMance 191 presented as decisive evidence. I had thought of simply footnoting a rude remark on this. But I now think it is of quite critical importance since it reveals a cavalier attitude to the material—as though it hardly matters since “we all know” what dangerous junk it is. Then, almost invariably I would find that a story was either only retold in part or, if fully recounted, was done in a way that already fitted it to the assumptions of the critic. But that would be all we had to go on. There was no way to check whether the evidence really did support the critique being (usually) so powerfully expressed. We are thus very dependent on the manner of retellings. This double dependence has effects. Since we only get fragments of stories, we tend to “fill in” what they must be like to qualify for the critics’ outraged response. Here, we are told, is a story which restricts girls, or stereotypes them, or enforces a powerful ideology of femininity, tells them that a boy is the only important thing in life and other girls are never to be trusted. Very well then, let’s play that game. In researching these chapters, I sample-read one month of every year of Jackie since its start in 1964. I was able to identify some fairly typical story-openings. I have chosen two and I invite you, my readers, to complete the stories so that they become attempts to “stereotype” girls, restrict them to feminine careers, enforce an ideology of romance on them. My characters Jane and Peter are now grown up a little and of course (in the light of what they might get up to) not sister and brother. Our story opens with Jane wondering what she should do. She is in love with Peter, but . . . (flashback...