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...over-educated and under-experienced, or so they say...

Monday, June 11, 2012

Trolling Through Tripe

Oh yes, my friends, I just can't let this go.


"Girlie Decor That Won't Freak Him Out" and totally freaking me out. "He's more likely to hang if your place doesn't ooze estrogen."


God help me...
God help us all...
This tripe annoys the hell out of me.  


Yes, I'm still receiving the stupid Cosmo magazines and I was a bit irked since I thought my  forced subscription would end in June but... I apparently have July to look forward to.  So I thumbed through it and ran across stellar advice like the importance of choosing the right shade of pink so when the man you're interested in comes to visit your home he won't be put off by it.  I learned that a man that puts his hands in his pockets and leaves his thumbs sticking out of his pockets and pointing toward his groin while talking to me, or anyone else, is apparently quite eager for me to know he doesn't have a rabbit in his pocket and he may be interested in being happy to see me.  And my favorite was the "Bonus" page where I got to answer yes or no to questions like, "Would you give up a year of your life to sleep with Ryan Gosling?" and "Would you lick the entire end zone to get to swipe Tim Tebow's V card?" and my personal favorite "Would you vomit in front of your crush in exchange for a free Louis Vuitton bag?"  (And right here, in stellar Pandora style, this is where I say:  WHO ARE YOU PEOPLE?!  WHY ARE YOU READING THIS?!?!)  


So I started ranting about this in my head on Friday.  By Saturday I found myself skimming through men's magazines to see if they were even remotely close to this stupid.  I trolled around through Esquire and while I found an article about Michael Fassbender outshining Ryan Gosling simply because he grew a new beard, I also found, unlike Cosmo, a News&Politics section with nice tid bits written by the same fellow who came up with this gem:  [politics] ...according to Aristotle, a truly veteran scribe, is the result of humans being the only herd animals capable of speaking to one another. Or shouting at one another, or giving to each other the ol' bazoo, for all of that, although there is no translation for "bazoo" in the ancient Greek. Thus, for our purposes here, this blog will be about politics in its most basic form — to wit, how we speak to each other for the purposes of governing, or choosing not to govern, ourselves as a small-r republican political commonwealth. It will be the policy of this blog not to treat ignorance with respect simply because that ignorance profits important and powerful people. It will be the policy to operate on the principle that, while there may be two sides to every question, rarely are they both right. If this blog sees a man walking down the street with a duck on his head, it will report that it saw a man walking down the street with a duck on his head. It will not need two sources for that. It will not seek out someone to tell it that what it really saw was a duck walking down the street with a guy on its ass. It will be the belief of this blog that, as Christopher Hitchens once said, the only correct answer to the question, "Is nothing sacred?" is "No." And there will be fun.  -- Charles P. Pierce
(Yes, I love the gentleman that wrote that little bit there.  I spent much time reading through his blog.)

I actually wasted a good portion of my afternoon today reading through the stupid Cosmopolitan magazine from cover to cover just to make sure I wasn't missing some hint of intelligent writing in there somewhere.  And nope, nothing... I came up with nothing except for perhaps a few diminished points in my own IQ because I think I permanently injured certain parts of my intellect in reading the thing.  I will never forget how important it was for me to read that a man loves his own penis so much that it is mathematically impossible for me, as his woman, to ever satisfy him as often as he has spent time satisfying himself.  Oh yes, they didn't teach me that one in college!  And I will always find useful the tid bit of how deep freezing my undies will be an "excellent and sexy" way to stay cool during the summer.  Wow... I wish someone would've told me that when I first moved to Phoenix 12 years ago.


So as I was ranting about this on the phone to another gentleman friend of mine, he asked me if I had checked other magazines just to make a more fair and complete comparison.  I got off the phone and went straight to Maxim because, in my memory, that magazine may be as close to the male equivalent of Cosmo there is.  What did I find?  Oh sure, I found Hometown Hotties and Helpful Hotties and Haha Hotties, but even in the midst of the more rock eating tripe I noticed that there were still some valid and interesting news articles like Navy Seal Hunt for Al Qaeda.  


From there I trolled through Men's Journal and GQ and found every single one of them had a section for news and politics and articles about successful businessmen and adventures, even in the midst of "spice up your bedroom" articles and racy pictures of famous women.  And I started having this moment where I wondered if all women's fashion type magazines were this ridiculous.  


I checked Elle magazine which had a portion for "news" but apparently "news" is Alicia Silverstone going green with her makeup (oh yes... this is important information... I'm so glad I ran across that because I'd actually forgotten who she was until she joined the religion of going green and still found a way to keep her makeup sacred).  I looked at Red Book and, while it also appeared to be a few steps up in terms of content, there still was little more beyond what one might consider "the woman's physical world."  


I mean... are we really made up of nothing but fashion and makeup and fumbling around in the dark trying to figure out what to do with this man's bing bang?!  And... has it ever even occurred to you to  ask the man himself what he'd like you to do with his bing bang instead of try to read it in some stupid magazine that's probably giving you incorrect advice anyway?  I mean, think about, if it's mathematically impossible for you to satisfy his needs for his own bing bang more than he's satisfied that need himself well... seems to me like he might be a pro and tell you exactly what you need to know but... guess that's expecting too much from a woman that needs to pick the right shade of pink pillows so the poor guy doesn't freak out when he comes over for some dim sum.


...sigh...  I digress...


Anyway, just as I was about to throw in the towel, I remembered Vogue.  And maybe it's because I was so discouraged and depressed by the lack of truly engaging material, or maybe it's because I really do think they have a well put together "fashion magazine," either way, Vogue Magazine wins Pandora's Pick Of The Night award.  


I wasn't interested in the "fashion" or the surface hoopla, I was merely trying to find something that, well, perhaps the same guy that reads the Death Race 2012 articles in GQ (before or after he's done looking at nearly naked pictures of Jennifer Anniston) might find interesting.  I was seriously having this moment where I thought it was quite possible that all editors of women's magazines think very little of our capacity to enjoy, retain, and discuss something other than our appearance and our apparent need to constantly please a man.  When I found this article about Danny Boyle as the art director for the Olympics, followed by this interview with Usain Bolt, Jamaican Olympic Runner, and then what ultimately rang my winner's bell was when I read the following sentence in a letter from the editor: For an industry that should be about empowering women of all shapes, sizes, and ages, too often the image of attractiveness it has projected has been entirely at odds with that message.  


So... I have no doubt that the same minds that read Cosmopolitan magazine have ZERO interest in the articles I just linked you to, but at least I know (particularly as a woman that doesn't read fashion magazines of any kind at all until they are forced upon me because a friend of mine thinks it's funny) for my own personal well being, there is at least one magazine out there that has something of interest for the more discerning and intelligent female reader (and there may be more, but I pretty much met my lifetime quota on the reading of fashion/tripe/sexcapade magazines today) and knowing that there is at least one does two things for me: 


1) lets me know there are women out there that instinctively know not to buy hot pink pillows and zebra print throw rugs in an attempt to keep a man from running and... 
2) means I will sleep much better tonight knowing that the astrologer for Cosmo assures me, and every other female Leo on the planet, that on June 27th Venus is going to tell me to invite a man over for a candlelit dinner and we will do much bonding.  


(...sigh... dear God ladies... we can't all be having candlelit dinners on the same night... and... you may need to make sure you're not oozing too much estrogen because that isn't good for bonding... 
I, on the other hand, may be oozing too much testosterone since I'd rather read about The 50 Most Powerful People In Washington, choose basic Earth tones for my house, and then have a meeting of the minds over a glass of wine at the dinner table because that's really where the foreplay begins, ladies... but, you go ahead... deep freeze your panties and worry about those damn pillows....)






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