Things I Saved From a Skip: 1 – Jinty Annual 1981
Given the (rather amusing) collapse of the global financial system, 2009 should prove a big year for rummaging through skips. While I endorse the activity, I don't welcome the competition. Uncontested skip-rummaging has been good to me.
Today's post concerns a recent find – a 27 year old Jinty annual thoughtlessly tossed away by a heartless owner. On page 24 of said volume is "Make friends with your Mirror!" – a jolly (but evil) feature designed to make young women feel cripplingly shit about themselves.
After being warned of the heartache caused by over-sized spectacles ("She's the Girl with the Big Glasses!") and the fashion disasters that befall those who don't check their rears in mirrors ("She's Backing a Loser!"), we're eventually "treated" to a savage attack on careless and "unladylike" sitting.
A trio of girls relax, hang out, and shoot the breeze. A scene that speaks eloquently of youthful days when friendship was all that mattered…unless, that is, you happen to work for Jinty…
Take that, Penny. Boys could be watching. Unsympathetic mirrors could be nearby (waiting to deliver damning critiques). You can't be too careful, especially when you're "ten pounds too heavy to look elegant".
Neither of her pals escape Jinty's withering gaze either. Sara (centre) gets it in neck for being too lanky & self-conscious while Di (right) gets roundly tut-tutted for sitting astride her chair in an unbecoming act of tom-boyish defiance. The Jinty ideal is obviously an unforgiving & inflexible one. Living up to it would take oodles of hard work, plenty of determination and (crucially) buckets of self-loathing.
Roy of the Rovers never treated us with this kind of contempt.
December 31, 2008
9 responses to Things I Saved From a Skip: 1 – Jinty Annual 1981
“Sara (centre) gets it in neck for being too lanky & self-conscious”
What a weird and sad mobius strip of cruelty and awkwardness:
“You girl! Yes you, the self conscious one!”
“Er, no, actually, this is just the way I sit. I didn’t even know you were looking at me, judging.”
“Well I was. And with posture like that you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Now stop being self-conscious, you dreadful, awkward girl!”
Har! Yes, it’s nasty shit alright. The cure for that (growing into one’s body) gangly, self-consciousness is obviously plenty of allegedly “helpful” criticism. It doesn’t matter if you are self-conscious, as long as you don’t look self-conscious.
The cool lookin’ “tom-boy” on the right is told (though she might think otherwise) that she doesn’t look “dashing”. Seriously – “dashing”. That’s the exact word they used.
What young girl in 1981 aspired to dashingness?
haha brilliant, iv never saved anything from a skip but I did rescue an intire set of “DIY” encyclopedias…. iv never used them and are now cut to bits in the aid of my Art college needs!!
Oh my.
The shitting on women begins so early, doesn’t it? I’m all for stringing up the assholes who wrote this.
happy new year, Fustar
I had never heard of JINTY (what exactly does the adjective mean in Brit/Irish English ?)
I appreciated the cover illustration in the wiki link.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jinty_cover_19_August_1978.jpg
The Human Zoo:
On The Planet of Two Suns, They Treat Girls Like Animals!
very scary stuff … not exactly the same tone as Star Wars (released around the same time for boys), where life on Luke Skywalker’s Tatooine (the planet of the two suns) stimulates curiosity about ecology and economics
see ya IRA
Medbh, I’ll try and find out who the guilty parties were. They’ll probably never be brought to justice alas, and may in fact have already fled to South America like absconding Nazis. Bastards.
Ira, And a happy new year to you. “Jinty” is merely a (girl’s?) name, I think. Though given the content above we might well start using it to mean “cruel and judgmental”.
Lette, What do you mean you’ve never used them? Cutting them to bits “in the aid of [your] Art college needs” is a perfectly legitimate and creative use of “skippage” (to, possibly, coin a term). They were destined for landfill. You made them, in some broken down form, live again. Fair play.
I think Jinty sounds rude.
Well, clearly it is rude, but I mean in the other way.
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