The mag cover that made Mia Freedman stop buying the last of the weeklies.

I walked past this magazine cover last week and I had to stop and take a photo:

WHO Weekly was the last remaining connection I had to magazines as a reader.

I always liked the way it covered celebrity news – fact-based and tone-free instead of ridiculous gossip from “a source close to Angelina”.

If they have some photos of a celebrity, they just publish the photos, they don’t make up a story to justify them, which is how other celebrity mags work.

For years I’ve tried to ignore the way Who has gone more and more into selling female insecurity by running endless, ENDLESS covers and stories about weight gain and weight loss and “half their size!” and “fears for [insert skinny female celebrity here]” and bodies after babies.

Honestly, it makes me want to punch myself in the face.

It’s old and tired and mercenary and cruel (to readers and celebrities) and bullshit.

That body bullshit obviously sells better for them than any other topic so someone’s buying it, in the same way alcoholics buy booze I guess…

So anyway. As Who Weekly has gone increasingly in that direction, I’ve stopped buying it. Stopped reading it. Even on planes (thank you airlines for allowing you to keep using your devices on flight mode during take off and landing so now I can read all the articles I’ve saved to my Pocket app and also all the samples I’ve downloaded to iBooks).

Rushing through an airport last week though, this cover stopped me. I stood in front of the newstand for a minute and just… looked at it.

In 2016 to have four straight skinny white women on the cover of the “most beautiful” issue seems just… utterly tone-deaf.

Not to take anything away from any of the four individual women. They ARE beautiful and I’m not TEARING THEM DOWN.

This is not about them. Not even remotely.

This is about the arbiters of such labels as “Most Beautiful”; the publications who compile such (absurdly objectifying) lists and then choose who from those lists they will put on the cover.

Because what does this cover say about the mainstream media? Everything. It says that thin white straight beautiful women are the top of the tree. Still. This is not news. They have always been there and I suppose we should be somehow pathetically grateful that they aren’t all 22 years old.

The coverline does say “beauty at every age” because why else would a woman as old as Rebecca Gibney be on the cover, huh?

Gibney must be in her 50s by now and Megan in her late 30s? Still, the message is that even “at any age” beauty is cateogrised as thin, white, straight and abled.

Surely I can’t be the only one who’s hungry for a society that celebrates a broader spectrum of what’s considered “beautiful” enough to be on the cover of a magazine.

In the wake of the #oscarssowhite controversy, when the sight of a sea of white nominees without a single person of colour made Hollywood cringe with shame and embarrassment while looking down at its shoes and mumbling about how things had to change… have media organisations learned nothing about the importance of diversity?

Did nobody at Who look at the shot and think… hang on? No, because in the mainstream media, a woman over the age of 40 is about as far as the diversity spectrum can stretch. And it’s a big stretch.

What I felt when I looked at that cover was a sense of exclusion for all the women who could not ever remotely see themselves in the magazine’s (and in the mainstream media’s) definition of “beautiful”.

Women of colour. Women with disabilities. Women of different shapes and sizes. Women who don’t conform to a traditional long-haired pretty, slim stereotype of what it means to be female.

Perhaps women like this are inside the magazine. I will never know because I didn’t pick up that issue. It felt as alienating to me as a men’s magazine or a sports magazine or a gardening magazine.

I knew there was nothing in there for me and that made me sad for a moment.

And then I remembered that I work at a media company the celebrates women of ALL shapes, sizes, skin colours, abilities and sexualities. A company founded on a commitment to showcasing a diversity of female experiences and appearances and was founded on the very principle of making women feel good and included and reassured.

And so I put my phone in my handbag, left the magazine cover behind me and got back to work.

Mia founded a media company that celebrates ALL women. But what’s it like to do it with her husband?