Many Years of Spiritual Advice

O, The Oprah Magazine, celebrates its tenth anniversary this month with practical advice, spiritual enlightenment, an exhortation to "Live Your Best Life," and cake. Lots of cake.
For 10 years, O has been cheering on its (mostly) female readers, telling them to break free of negative thoughts, embrace their potential and, most of all, boost their self-esteem. As the cover of the August 2008 issue announced: "YOU ARE AN EXCELLENT WOMAN (major breakthrough, page 206)."
My first thought on reading this headline was, gosh, that's an awfully nice thing for Oprah to say, considering she doesn't even know me.
My followup thought was a little more ambivalent. I mean, does the glossy magazine approach to self-affirmation really work? After reading the big anniversary special, along with back issues full of articles about self-care, self-meditation and self-empowerment, I actually ended up feeling a lot less excellent. Paradoxically, the unremitting selfiness of Oprah's magazine can have an oppressive effect.
The so-called "Seven Sisters" -- traditional women's mags like Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping -- tend to cram their pages with tips for caring for other people and tending homes, gardens and pets. O bucks this trend by staying consistently me-focused, with Oprah herself leading the way. Lady O is featured on the cover of every issue, and while her dress size waxes and wanes, the Oprah brand of positive energy remains alarmingly consistent.
O deftly avoids charges of narcissism by using the same tack as the airlines. Just as you need to put on your own oxygen mask before assisting others, you need to love yourself before you can extend that love to other people. The O equivalent of the oxygen mask ranges from the spiritual (Eckhart Tolle's solemn invocation to breathe in the present moment) to the material (buying a crisp white shirt for $90).
So, how does O's you-go-girl approach work in the real world? Robyn Okrant, a 37-year-old Chicago-based yoga instructor, undertook a one-year experiment to "walk the walk with the queen of talk." In her 2009 book Living Oprah, she recounts how she did everything Oprah told her to: She bought leopard print flats, watched Oprah-endorsed movies and read Oprah-endorsed books, cooked low-fat turkey burgers, adopted a cat, had over-scheduled, over-analyzed sex with her husband, and -- in what could be a visceral metaphor for Oprah-esque self-obsession -- examined her poo, looking for the Oprah-sanctioned S-shape.
Okrant spent $4,700 and 1,200 hours on her quest to be all things Oprah, and frequently questioned whether she was living up to Oprah's peppy, positive mantras. In the end, Okrant admits, she just felt "really sad." (This, despite O's monthly insistence on jettisoning regret, trusting your intuition, embracing failure and learning to say no to impossible demands.)
As Okrant's experience suggests, Oprah's empire might actually increase chronic feelings of dissatisfaction and inadequacy rather than alleviate them. Peek under O magazine's New Age surface and you can see the familiar dynamic of the old school woman's mag: Offer advice for self-improvement and lots of before-and-after makeovers, thus fuelling insecurity that requires even more advice for self-improvement and before-and-after makeovers. Repeat.
And Oprah actually makes the whole thing even trickier, by adding self-actualizing, gusto-grabbing, living-in-the-moment spiritual radiance to the already impossible requirements of ideal womanhood. Turns out that excellence is exhausting.
alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca