Cultural decay, in magazine form

[sabotabby]

The Second Cup has these new lattes that are raspberry and dark chocolate and basically bourgeois, foamy, sugary goodness. They come with free magazines. If you're a girl, they give you Elle, if you're a boy, Canadian Home & Garden or some shit. I guess. I don't know any boys who would drink a raspberry and dark chocolate latte. Boys miss out on all kinds of great things. Anyway, I put the Elle in the loo along with the latest Vice and Industrial Worker. (My bathroom reading is eclectic. My real reading is eclectic, but more tasteful—at the moment, I'm reading Settlers by Sakai and Perdido Street Station by Miéville.)

So I ended up reading Elle for the first time ever. I occasionally read shitty fashion magazines at the dentist's but this is so much worse. It's particularly bad in contrast to Vice, which, for all its libertarian sexist and racist garbage in the past, cobbled together a really fantastic issue on "Girls" that made perfect bathroom reading.



My main problem with these kinds of magazines is that I can't tell when the ads stop and the articles begin. Well, it isn't my main problem, but it's annoying. Most of the articles are about a paragraph long and really offensive. Here are all the things that shocked my delicate sensibilities.

1. Cover "The latest in plastic surgery," along with some woman named Kylie. Or Kylie! actually, with an exclamation point. I guess I am expected to know who that is, but I don't.

2. Editor's note. First sentence: "Recently I was at a fundraiser for Gilda's Club, an international organization that provides support for those living with cancer."

I bet with a sentence like that, you'd expect the editorial to be about cancer or something. It isn't. It's about how Jeanne Beker (is that the person from CityTV?) looks really hot in a short red dress. And how the party was a "boob fest." I guess they didn't invite people with breast cancer.

3. Letters Tiffany A. Siu, via e-mail, raves about how the monthly Radar section reflects the country's multicultural society and is a step toward diversity. I flipped ahead to Radar and everyone in it was white. Oookay.

4. Style "Messy hair shows that you're not trying too hard to impress."

This, according to Elle, is how you get messy hair: "Wash and condition the hair, then massage a hair-thickening lotion and a mousse into the scalp to starch up the hair and hold the style. Blow-dry the hair, using fingers to lift it away from the scalp. Gather it into a ponytail, and fasten it with an elastic. Twist the pony into a loose bun, securing it with pins. Mess it up by lightly running your hands from the bun toward your face, freeing stray hairs."

According to me, this is how you get messy hair: "Lie down for a bit. Have sex. If you aren't into really athletic sex, maybe go for a walk on a windy day. I just saved you about $100 in hair care products."

5. Style "Coco Rocha is gawky, not gamine. She has a snub nose and a slight overbite. She's also the model of the moment...Rocha says that in school, she was never Miss Popularity. Gotta love those ugly-duckling stories."

I never got the hang of vomiting into a toilet, unfortunately. Seventeen years old. Is that child abuse?

6. Tactics Someone named Susan "intuitively" tells Moody Blues to dump her depressed boyfriend. "If you continue on this path, his negative energy will become yours...I think you will leave him and find new romance. The new guy will either sail or like water sports."

I hope you like being peed on, sweetie!

7. Love "For the Love of Money" tells you how to be both "well-shod and well-heeled."

Put it this way. If you can't stop yourself from spending $1,000 on shoes during a single shopping trip, you are going to be first up against the wall come the revolution anyway. So don't worry about budgeting.

8. Love "For the Love of Pets." Okay, Marinetti did have a $10 catnip toy, once, but it was for a fundraising project, and it provided so many hours of amusement because it was shaped like George Bush that it was totally worth the money, all of which went to a good cause.

P.S. Your dog doesn't care if you spend $29 on dog truffles or $695 for a dog collar. It will wolf down the former and probably chew the latter to bits, given how uncomfortable it looks.

9. Fashion If those big puffy dresses make 80-pound models look fat, how do you think they're going to look on a 3-dimensional human?

10. Beauty Actually, making a line of perfume based on Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind is pretty funny. (The movie sucked, by the way.)

11. Beauty "Face Odyssey": Finally, I got to the promised article on plastic surgery. Unlike most of the articles, it was several pages long and listed pros ("little or no pain") and cons ("possible redness, blisters and bumps and, in rare cases, some surface irregularities"). The absolute best part, though, must be reproduced in its entirety.

African Queen
If you've always dreamed of getting up at sunrise to watch giraffes cross the African plain and of getting new breasts, now you can have both. South Africa's Surgeon and Safari [website] offers package deals that include a pre-surgery safari, your choice of a five-star hotel, and an assistant to accompany you to surgery. Rates for lifts, augmentations, resurfacing and tucks are almost a third of what you'd pay in Canada.

Racism, sexism, colonialism, and mindless capitalist indulgence all in one! Die in a fire, plz thx.

The whole thing ends with a picture of the Prince of Wales and some cancan dancers.

The rest of the weekend was spent in meetings, watching La Chinoise (like Raspberry Reich but without the gay porn), and messing up my hair.

Comments

[jenlight.livejournal.com]

I read those magazines. I read Vogue and Cosmo. I don't read them religiously or subscribe, but every-so-often I buy them, get angry then cut them up and make collages. I have this tendency to try my hardest to stay in contact with popular culture out of fear that if I do not, I will not save the world.

[sabotabby]

I like to feel outraged by them. It gives me even more of a smug sense of moral superiority than I get from buying organic fair trade coffee.

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

Jeanne Beker (is that the person from CityTV?)

Are you serious? You must be the only person in Toronto not watching this show. I know they cancelled the Sunday evening re-run, but still!!

I'm partly tongue-in-cheek, but it's a really entertaining show, and there IS some really cool stuff every once in a while.

[sabotabby]

It isn't worth moving the keyboard and putting up with all of the static to watch CityTV. I need to get rabbit ears or something.

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

You'd think that being in direct line of sight with the CN Tower, rabbit ears would be enough for us to get good reception, but no. We have to move them for most channels. I've been looking for years for the properly electrical adapter that would power up the base of my rabbit ears, to no avail.

[sabotabby]

I used to get amazing reception—seven channels or so—with a coathanger. Not no more. :(

[bike4fish.livejournal.com]

I think I need to go check out the latest issue of Bitch. A magazine that has a monthly item devoted to snarking about Jane can't be all bad.

[sabotabby]

I think I need to check it out too. That sounds awesome.

[frandroid.livejournal.com]

I should make my own wire antenna. If your antenna has the same length as the wavelength from the station you want to get, you get like perfect reception. Something like that...

[goodlookinout.livejournal.com]

That's my favorite magazine... I buy it every month! :)

[goodlookinout.livejournal.com]

You're hilarious, as always :)

I cant deal with reading this stuff... I used to occasioanlly buy cosmo, just for the hell of it... but it made me so mad I had to stop. That African Queen thing... wow, just wow.

[sabotabby]

I can't decide whether the "assistant" thing implies that you get your own slave. I should check out the website, but I'm afraid.

[misfratz.livejournal.com]

I hope you don't have that messy hair method patented, because I'd probably owe you lots of money by now... Although now you mention it, I normally find that just 'sleep, get up' produces adequately messy hair for daily use, so it can be even simpler.

Perdido street station is very good but I was terrified of moths when I finished it. Yeah, perhaps that was a bit of a literal interpretation.

[sabotabby]

I've already had one PSS-related nightmare. zingerella, who loaned the book to me, has apparently had several. I'm duly warned, but for me, reading Miéville is approximately like having really good sex, followed by chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, so I'm still excited about it.

[bike4fish.livejournal.com]

http://www.bitchmagazine.com/

The bitch_magazine LJ community evaporated a while back.

[xturtle.livejournal.com]

Put it this way. If you can't stop yourself from spending $1,000 on shoes during a single shopping trip, you are going to be first up against the wall come the revolution anyway. So don't worry about budgeting.

This brightened my day immensely. Thank you.

[chailash.livejournal.com]

I had no idea that messing up one's hair took actual work and a styling process. Usually, I just get up and forget to brush, and that does it for me. And who are these girls trying not to impress? They could go the extra mile and put on some body-odor-scented deodorant.

Also, I need one of those George Bush cat toys. Kitty would love it.

[seanmonster.livejournal.com]

I would drink a raspberry and dark chocolate latte.

But, you don't know me in person, so I guess that doesn't count.

[jenlight.livejournal.com]

Exactly!

(Except I don't buy Fair Trade coffee.)

Honestly, I think it's just that I'm pissed off that I'm not skinny like the models. Yes, I am very shallow.

[jenlight.livejournal.com]

Oh goodness I hate Bitch. Too second wave for me. Ms is pretty good, however -- sometimes.
It's funny, as a feminist I tend to be more harsh on feminism than anything else. Maybe funny is the wrong word.

[bike4fish.livejournal.com]

I have a bunch of old issues. But my dissertation started eating my brain a while back, and I haven't been doing as much recreational reading as I should.

It is entirely possible that I became aware of Bitch because of a comment in your old journal.

[burkesworks.livejournal.com]

I don't know any boys who would drink a raspberry and dark chocolate latte

Don't you have any metrosexuals in Canada, then? :)

[fannishnonsense]

Heh. I used to read magazines like that when I worked nights (it was really boring, and they were free). Good to know that some things never change. Well, maybe not so good actually.

Also, I much prefer your method of getting messy hair.

[99catsaway.livejournal.com]

I used to read those magazines on planes, mostly for the "Embarrassing Moments" stories, and the cute clothes.

But the clothes aren't that cool. And OMG $700 collars?!

Back when I very first read Seventeen (long ago in a galaxy far away), it actually had some stories of substance. I don't think it does anymore.

And, haha, my I metaquote your #4?

[goodlookinout.livejournal.com]

Are you serious? Bitch is SECOND wave? haha
Im seriously confused because Bitch is so the opposite of that in my mind where as MS. is so "liberal feminism" it hurts and pisses me off a lot... (I read both almost every month).