My family has a neighbour who is quite
possibly one of the nicest old ladies on the planet. Always coming
over for a cup of tea and (in between my long-suffering Mother
helping her out with her washing machine) always with something to
talk about.
Just today she came over with a bundle
of old Woman's Day magazines to give to my mum. A nice
gesture, of course... for my mum at least. But unfortunately for me I
was bored as hell today and, after our good neighbour left, I decided
to poke around in one of them out of desperation.
“I've got nothing to do... I think
I'll see if there's anything interesting in this mishmash of
photoshopped pictures and ludicrous sensationalist headlines!” Big
mistake.
Flipping through the glossy pages and
skimming over the less-than-flattering photographs of the British
Royal Family, I could quite literally feel my IQ level dropping. I
started feeling increasingly more and more stupid every time I turned
a page, and less than five pages in, I could take it no more.
I was instantly reminded of memories
that I may or may not have repressed: visiting boring people my
parents knew, and being forced to read Take 5 and That's
Life! out of pure boredom. Saccharine feel-good stories and Cheap
Recipes for Families On the Go®, usually accompanied by a picture of
the cook, a fake white smile plastered on her face. “Win a Car!”
the stock competition proclaimed, with a picture of a pile of money
sitting next to a generic Korean hatchback that no-one would buy
anyway.
Oh, and there was the matter of the
anonymous young woman on the cover. In a nice dress, robotically
posed and with another fake smile. But here's what really got me: she
had absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the magazine's content.
There was nothing relating to her, nothing even acknowledging her
existence. She was just... there. For no reason at all. And looking
like an android to boot. That pissed me off.
I have since come to the conclusion
that I hate women's magazines, quite possibly to a greater extent
than modern pop music. And modern mainstream pop music is to me what
Luca di Montezemolo is to F1 fans. It makes me breathe fire and grow
long claws.
I'm thinking the target audience for
these magazines is 30-something stay-at-home housewives who take
their children to soccer games, tennis training or piano lessons.
Why? Because only these hapless souls may be bored enough, or jaded
enough, to find any of the crap in these pages interesting. These
women devote all their time to other people, not least their children
– which is by all means a noble pursuit – but it also means that
they don't have any hobbies. You know, interesting things to do.
I have hobbies. They include, but are
not limited to: Playing video games, reading good novels, writing
these columns, drawing/painting, and buttering my cheese
ignore that last one. As a result of this, I have more pressing
things to worry about than whether a socialite couple are engaged or
not, or whether a new dress some barbie-doll actress is wearing is in
fact disguising a baby bump. I just couldn't give a rat's tail if I
tried, which I'm not too keen on doing.
Maybe
the market for these magazines stems from the unfortunate fact that
some people have an almost perverse interest in the lives of famous
people they don't know. It may somehow remind them that the beautiful
people they see on TV and on those inane celebrity gossip websites
are, in a somewhat twisted way, just like them. They are normal. They
are human beings. They possess the ability to have kids and care for
them as any responsible adult would. They, shock horror, have to BUY
FOOD AND FEED THEMSELVES.
Perhaps
it's counselling for the fact that famous people are famous in the
first place. By bringing them down to our level, magazine readers
console themselves with the deluded notion that their lives might not
be that different to those of celebrities.
Because...
let's face it, it's in our nature – who wouldn't take being
well-known over an anonymous, humdrum suburban existence?
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