Self Fesses Up to Faking It

Game’s up, Self!  We haven’t finished reading the whole issue yet, but this tidbit from “Fitness Q & A,” May, caught our eye:

Q: I exercise almost daily, but I still lose my breath whenever I walk up stairs.  What the heck is going on?

A: OK, I have a confession to make.  This question is actually from me.  I, Meaghan Buchan, fitness director of Self magazine…

Really, we gave up on the idea of readers submitting questions long ago. For starters, Self doesn’t even bother to fabricate names and cities for their Q & As, which heads off the slightest idealistic suspicion that the questions are genuinely reader-generated. 

And if we’re truly supposed to buy that the questions come from readers in desperate need of gym-bag guidance, then Self could put some effort into making these queries believable.  We flat-out refuse to accept that someone would actually write to a magazine to ask what orthotics are  (also page 114) instead of using Google or a dictionary or some other method of research that, you know, actually guarantees a response. 

Still, we appreciate the confession.  But why bother?  That a staffer wrote it doesn’t render this particular question any different from any of the other questions in this issue.   

Comments

[Emily]

I did an internship at a womens' magazine and one of my tasks was to compose the problem letters- it was really tough, it had to be 50 words or less for each problem, difficult to get any kind of complexity or nuance across, so they were terribly boring... so for a few I resorted to inserting hot-button adjectives like 'Muslim', 'vegan', 'asylum-seeking'- the subeditor looked at me like she thought I was kinda taking the piss out of them but that she understood my predicament.

I also had to find some fun sexual facts- did you know that a pig's penis is shaped like a spiral-perm curling rod, and a whale's penis is called a dork?

[Glossed Over]

Ha! Just as we suspected. Finally, an explanation for all those women who have incredibly vague yet desperately urgent woes.

Also, we bet those facts are a huge hit at cocktail parties, though we're mighty curious (though a bit scared) about how you worked that kind of stuff into a question.