I may be in the minority on this—which would be a nice change—but it should be clear to most of humanity that men’s magazines are unquestionably superior to women’s magazines. A brief comparison of GQ, Esquire and Maxim to Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, Mademoiselle and Marie Claire should eliminate any doubt.
A guys’ mag is a pretty well-organized booklet of articles and health tips. Sure, preference is given to college basketball coaches and obscenely hot models, but flip through the pages and you’ll also find genuinely newsworthy exposés on everything from the Taliban to declining civic community. Throw in some specs on the latest cars and gadgets, maybe a recipe and a wine of the month or a piece of short fiction and—ba-da-bing—you’ve got a men’s magazine.
Let’s flip the script and turn the binoculars to a few women’s magazines. What kind of schizo put this crap together? Right in the middle of a sea of dieting tips will be a page on a triple suicide. I feel like the writers and editors of these journals are paranoid nymphos with rock-bottom self-esteem who are missing the piece of their brain that discriminates between “interesting” and “totally not important.” I mean, the top features are either “How About Now: Am I Orgasming?” or “560 Ways to Apply Mascara.” And let’s not forget the all-important horoscope, which I hardly need remind everyone is a piece of superstitious crap.
It’s not that men’s magazines don’t address health, fashion and beauty. But they don’t do it with the obsessive-compulsive sexual bipolarity of Marie Claire. And ultimately, I don’t know any girls that are really like the magazines that claim to represent them. Sure, sure—I don’t know anybody who epitomizes GQ, and if I did I’d probably agree with everybody else that he needed a good cockpunch. But judging from the girly mags, you’d think every American female could only talk about either tampons or penises. Where’s the journalism in these women’s journals?
