Glossed Over

The Fifth Annual September Vogue Liveblog

Good morning! Welcome to the fifth annual liveblog of the September issue of Vogue. Five years! 

The rules: I have not opened this issue, nor have I read any blog posts/articles/embittered rants about its content. I will, however, admit to watching Racked try to smash snack foods with this sucker. It's heavy! The liveblog goes in chronological order; refresh the page to see the latest updates.

Oh, and one more thing. As I mentioned in the video, I will be tweeting during the day using the hashtag #vogueliveblog, and I would love for you to use that hashtag too! As a small token of my gratitude for all of you out there reading along with me, I'll be giving The September Issue on DVD to three randomly selected people who tweet a link to this site and the hashtag between 10 a.m. today and 5 p.m. Eastern on Friday. (This is not a sponsored giveaway, just me spending my own money to send three lucky people a movie. US and Canada only, sorry.) Remember, your tweet must include both a link--you can use http://bit.ly/vogueliveblog11--and the hashtag #vogueliveblog to be eligible to win.  [Contest now closed, winners declared.] Thanks for being here!

Now let's get going.

Lowest Common Denominator: Lucky, September

981: According to the cover, the number of “ways to look amazing this season”

Gazillions: Approximate number of words in this issue. For better or worse (and, in the case of the never-ending article about drunk shopping, it’s definitely worse), there is now actual text in this magazine.

24: Items retailing for less than $50 featured in “Classic Pieces for Every Day”

116: Page on which Jessica Alba’s “Post-Baby Shape-Up Plan” appears, almost entirely devoid of context. I know Lucky is new to this whole writing-complete-sentences-and-forming-paragraphs thing, but they couldn’t follow up on Alba’s statement that she drinks a lot of water because she’s “starving”?

$60: As listed in “City Guide,” the price of a “Carrie Bradshaw-style pink tutu” sold by a store in Los Angeles, like a “Carrie Bradshaw-style” anything is a good thing.

$375: Price of a satchel that is, according to “How To: Wear Color,” the “easiest way to add a shot of color.” 

Zero: Explanation of how “easy” it is to spend $375 on a neon bag.

1, apparently: Words left out of the headline “Dress Like a French Girl. No, Really, a Real French Girl.” That word? “Wealthy,” unless it’s being French that somehow enables one to purchase a $550 dress and an $860 jacket. In which case, vive la France!

$250: Price of a cat-ear hood that Lucky suggests wearing “with a dose of irony, for the downtown hipster.” Behold the amazingly awkward exchange that ensued when I tweeted @LuckyMagazine about this ridiculous headgear! Veronica, aka @duncandesign, joined in to keep the conversation on track.

3: “Stylish New Yorkers” plucked from “the sidewalks of Soho” to model fall fashions in “Style on the Street.”

100: Percent of those random New Yorkers who are conventionally slim and pretty! Surprise!

Not 2: According to Jean Godfrey-June, the number of people permitted in the dressing rooms at Gilly & Hicks, Abercrombie & Fitch’s lingerie store. She says:

(You can’t both go in [the dressing room]; the surroundings are so...provocative...that liaisons are rumored to have occurred in the dressing rooms, hence, a ban.)

Infinitely: How weird it is that Godfrey-June would mention this, considering that in the story she’s shopping with her daughter.

2: Cover lines on the issue of Lucky Kids stuck inside the back cover that are uncomfortably reminiscent of the controversy over 10-year-old model Thylane Blondeau: “Dresses So Pretty You’ll Wish They Came in Your Size” and “I Want My Kid’s Hair Color!” (Related reading: this article about fashion brands using child models to normalize eating disorders.)

0: Interest I had in pulling Lucky Kids out of the magazine--until I needed something to shield my laptop with during a sudden downpour. 

InStyle Makeover: Rita Hayworth's Ethnic Makeover Was "Worth It"

When I meet someone new and tell them about this blog, the responses I get usually fall into two categories. Most often I hear, “Oh! Totally! I stopped reading those magazines years ago.” And sometimes I get, “Well...what kinds of things do you write about, exactly?”

From now on, when someone asks the latter, I’m just going to hand them “The Hollywood Hot Machine” from InStyle Makeover’s September issue. This single page manages to include pretty much everything that’s wrong with women’s magazines: obsession with the male gaze, extreme beauty regimens, impossibly strict diets, and a dash of shocking ignorance. Handy!

The article features six actresses who’ve made major adjustments to their appearances to launch their showbiz careers. We aren’t talking about going from a side part to a middle part here, you know? If the fact that these women had to dramatically change their hair, faces, bodies and even their names--or at least felt they had to--isn’t maddening enough for you, maybe you’ll hate the breezy tone InStyle uses to describe their transformations. I sure did!

For instance, the article says Joan Crawford (née Lucille LeSueur) used “rigorous diet and exercise” to become “sleek.”

Reportedly, she even chewed gum in an attempt to sharpen her jawline.

Apparently no celebrity plastic surgeons were available to comment on the merits of Orbit as a cosmetic technique. Try it at home, readers!

The article goes on to mention haircuts and wardrobe changes for Marilyn Monroe and Diana Ross, and says of Jane Fonda:

Fonda’s first husband, Roger Vadim, directed her schoolgirl-to-sex-kitten makeover. He’d done the same for previous wife Brigitte Bardot.

And a man habitually directing his wives into “sex kitten” makeovers isn’t creepy or predatory at all!

Oh, and what about Jennifer Aniston?

Yoga, hairstylist Chris McMillan, and a salad for lunch almost every day for 10 years helped Aniston morph into this honey-dipped goddess.

So we again have a man to thank. And of course there’s that salad-a-day for a decade thing. Is that a healthy diet, a reasonable approach to eating, or just something Aniston’s publicist made up? Who cares? The real message here is that she’s whippet-thin, as anyone who’s seen her wearing scanty underthings in Horrible Bosses can tell you. 

But I’ve reserved the bulk of my outrage for the Rita Hayworth entry, which reads:

Painful but worth it: In two years, Margarita Cansino raised her hairline almost an inch with electrolysis. And when she went red, a star was born.

“Painful but worth it”? WHAT THE HELL. Do InStyle’s offices not have access to Wikipedia? I have to assume that’s the case, because obviously no one at the magazine knows why Hayworth had that electrolysis: at the behest of Columbia Pictures, to make her appearance less Hispanic and therefore more marketable. That’s also why she dyed her hair red and bleached her skin. 

(Incidentally, that second link has a context-sensitive ad for a skin-lightening treatment that reads “InStyle Award Winner!” Wow.) 

Celebrities change their appearances for all kinds of reasons, but praising a racially motivated, excrutiatingly painful cosmetic procedure as “worth it” is, at best, insensitive. (And at worst? I really don’t want to break out the “r” word.) Did Hayworth look better than Cansino did? That’s subjective. But there are some ugly, ugly implications attached to glorifying a makeover designed to hide Hayworth’s heritage. I mean, what’s the reader takeaway supposed to be here? That everyone looks better as a white person? That the agony Hayworth must have gone through was “worth it” to not look Hispanic?

This is tricky territory, and InStyle could have provided context or sidestepped those implications entirely. But they didn’t, and that’s the problem. Articles like this propagate the idea that beauty is pain--and that beauty is determined by men, and it requires expensive, painful treatments, and it demands extreme, restrictive diets, and that only certain kinds of women (namely thin white women) are beautiful. Perhaps expecting InStyle Makeover to acknowledge as much is ridiculous. 

Still, it’s been more than 80 years since the picture of Lucille LeSueur on this page was taken. Eighty years after LeSueur tried to reshape her face by chewing gum, and Jennifer Aniston eats arugula every day. Eighty years. That’s a long time for so little to have changed.

People StyleWatch! Is! Really! Excited!: Five Fast Facts About the World’s Most Enthusiastic Magazine

1. They love exclamation points. They loooooove them. The first time I bought PSW, I was in a terrible funk. I flipped through an issue at the newsstand and saw the exclamation points, the pink arrows, and the pages almost entirely devoid of text, and I was like, “How cheerful!” Except that when everything concludes with an exclamation point--there are ten on the cover of the June issue alone, four in a tiny blurb about a juice drink--it comes off less like genuine enthusiasm and more just plain manic. (Yeah, yeah, I use a lot of exclamation points, too, but I use them sarcastically. Glass houses, etc.)

2. They also love irrelevant actors. This issue is packed with the likes of Camilla Alves, Emmy Rossum, and Rachel Bilson. And they! are! excited! about Camilla Belle, who I’m convinced is a publicist’s fabrication and not an actual human being. Has anyone ever seen her in a movie? Doesn’t matter, because PSW has devoted an entire page to her clothes and is looking forward to her upcoming roles in Breakaway and Zebras. Both of which are real movies, I’m sure.

3. They think they have moneybags readers. And perhaps they do. But foolishly, I’d expected PSW to be a low-end counterpart to Lucky. What was I thinking? There’s no advertiser payola in that! While the magazine does feature a decent mix of affordable styles (“Under $25!”), there are also the typical tone-deaf suggestions like “Celebs Love a Deal.” I’ll grant them Kirsten Dunst’s $50 dress from Express, but I refuse to budge on Vanessa Hudgens’ $71 scarf. Come on! It’s a scarf. Did kittens weave the scarf from their own freshly shed fur? No? Then no deal.

4. They run the worst celebrity ads ever. Admittedly, I’m behind on my reading what with moving across the country and job-hunting and all, so perhaps these ads (“celebrity mom Brooke Burke” for Suave, Patricia Field for U by Kotex) are in all the mags. But I want to discuss this Jessica Szohr ad for Dove antiperspirant: it’s THREE PAGES of her in the most awkward, armpit-revealing poses ever committed to print. In addition to pictures so bad they’re not even comical, the ad includes obviously fabricated quotes about the preposterous outfits she’s modeling. For instance:

My hip fedora tips this knit tank bohemian.

Did you have to read that sentence three times before you figured out which word was supposed to be the verb? Me too! Also:

Rocking sleeveless styles makes me feel powerful and feminine.

Uh, it’s a sleeveless top. Where does the power come from? Your hairless underarms? I am so confused by this conflation of armpits with, you know, ACTUAL EMPOWERMENT. I could go on, but I’ll just say this: Dove is merely a deodorant. It’s not a substance that magically confers equality when you apply it. Feminism will not emanate from your powder-scented armpits. Okay?

5. They employ hilariously meaningless statements about fashion. It’s the Lucky syndrome: when you have to describe everything, you’re backed into some truly absurd statements. And I know whereof I speak: in a former job, I had to describe 75 different pieces of lingerie every month, without using the word “sexy.” Try it at home some time. You’ll want to beat your head against a wall, or make friends with a thesaurus, or both!

About a pair of J. Crew espadrilles:

They’re so easy to slip on and off!

Good, because putting on and removing shoes is usually so challenging!

About a JC Penney elephant-pendant necklace:

Adds a unique, global touch!

Because nothing says you’re independent and cultured like wearing a $10 necklace from a national department store chain.

And on Taylor Swift’s tunic:

A drapey top worn off the shoulder adds a flirty, offhand touch.

Offhand? Is it supposed to look like you didn’t try at all? Fashion, you confuse me.

So that’s the June issue People StyleWatch, in approximately the same amount of words that actually appear in the magazine. I’ll save you the trouble of counting: I used twelve exclamation points in this post, not counting the title, and only three of those appeared in quotes from the magazine. Use the comments to castigate me as you see fit.

Link-Packed Filler Post, Plus a Brief Discussion of Cosmopolitan's Hayley Williams Profile

Hi! So I’m a little frantic right now. I’m moving out of my apartment on Saturday, I’m hyper-caffeinated to work on a writing project with a looming deadline, I’m getting on one-way flight to New York on Wednesday, and I may or may not have spent all afternoon reading my high-school journals. (I’m moving! I have to go through my stuff!)

All of which should suffice as an overdramatic explanation for why posting will be slow around here for another week or two. 

I did manage to read the most recent issue of Cosmopolitan, which featured Hayley Williams of Paramore. 

Let’s discuss that Cosmo article, shall we? In particular, the passage about how William’s bandmates (male, of course) used to pull up her pants and write “Shave Me” on her legs. Which is indescribably awful, but you wouldn’t get that from Cosmo’s retelling, which relates this oh-so-charming anecdote as part of a “Hayley Williams becomes a woman” narrative, instead of in a “Who the hell are these guys to try to physically enforce beauty standards on a professional colleague?” way. 

The punchline, if you can call it that, is that Williams now has a tattoo of a razor on her leg “as a little reminder.” And if I have to explain how many millions of kinds of twisted that is, well, are you sure you’re reading the right blog?

So probably nothing I read in the next, like, fifty years is likely to top that, but here are some good things I’ve read in the last week. Hopefully, I’ll regain my normal thought processes once I arrive in New York on the 27th. 

• Anna Wintour wore hideous clothes in the 90s. Here’s proof.
  
  
• “‘Oh my God, if I dress my baby in the wrong thing, they’ll grow up perverted’”: Smithsonian magazine on the rise of gender-oriented colors.
  
  
• Cosmo embraces kink with its typical brio (along with a dose of slut-shaming and terrible advice). The Evil Slut Clique breaks it down.
  
  
• It’s that time of year! Allure has once again convinced a handful of vaguely famous women to pose nude in the interest of self-promotion -acceptance. Popsugar has the pics.
  
  
• The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority responds to accusations that a Miu Miu ad model was unhealthily thin, determining that her gaunt appearance was actually due to makeup and lighting.
  
  
• Comma ‘N Sentence has a lovely reflection on the first bare-legged days of spring.
  
  
• The Hairpin’s take on Marie Claire’s man blogger made me LOL. (And, BTW, their Friday Bargain Bin posts are pretty much my favorite thing on the internet right now.)
  
  
• And finally, my Twitter, where I share articles like this and other important things, like which painfully outdated song I’m currently obsessing over. 

Lowest Common Denominator: Glamour, May

26, 22, 24: Ages of the actresses appearing on Glamour’s multiple May covers (Freida Pinto, Emma Stone, and Ashley Greene, respectively)

39, 40: Ages of Amy Poehler, who’s profiled on page 214, and Tina Fey, whose book is all-too-briefly excerpted on page 72

8: Women in swimsuits depicted on page 32 as the epitome of “total confidence we all envy”

50: Percent of those women who are professional actors or athletes

$45: Price of a dress from Express suggested for its similarity to the D&G dress Stone wore on her cover

$1,395: Price of Stone’s actual cover dress

2: Letters published complaining that size 12-14 model Robyn Lawley, whose photo accompanied March’s “97% of Women Will Be Cruel to Their Bodies Today,” was too “perfect”

Zip: Amount of acknowledgement from Glamour about the same readers’ pleas to include all shapes and sizes in their photos (though they did interview Lawley about the readers’ criticism, as if that’s Lawley’s fault)

98: Page on which Glamour recommends a $132 t-shirt screenprinted with a cat’s face 

5: Tricks cited in “What Helps Reese [Witherspoon] Look Like Reese”

0: Mentions of genetics in “What Helps Reese Look Like Reese”

10: Items writer Josh Aiello’s girlfriend carries in her purse, according to “Inside Her Bag: The Final Frontier”

8: Number of times Aiello busts out a girls-are-so-strange stereotype in his commentary. Women carry a lot of stuff! How do they find things in their bags? “I have hands. Do they need cream?” he asks about a tube of L’Occitane lotion. The aneursym-inducing conundrum of differentiating between lip balm and lipstick, he says, “boggles the male mind.” Sheesh.

$20: The “highly affordable” fee for a lap dance, according to “What’s Up with the Stripper Thing?”

None: Despite the claim on the cover and the NSFW tag on the article, actual photos of naked man parts in “The Ultimate Guide to His Man Parts” (There are two models with bare buttocks, but that’s hardly what Glamour’s trying to imply by boasting “with pictures!” on the cover.)

2: Couples who got engaged after the woman cooked “Engagement Chicken,” according to “7 Dishes to Get You Everything You Want in Life”

Thousands: Approximate number of Google users searching for the term “engagement chicken” who've landed on this blog since I first posted about it in 2006. Is my shameless ploy for Google traffic better or worse than believing that a chicken dish can compel a man to propose? You decide!

Magazine Masochism: Reading Lucky's May Issue

When I was sixteen, I went with two friends to see Merchant-Ivory’s The Remains of the Day. It was a poor choice for three teenagers shit-faced on Sour Patch Kids: much of the subtle period drama was lost on us. We sat in stunned silence until the end, when one of my friends turned to me in the dark and blurted, “WHAT WAS THAT?” 

That’s how I felt reading the May edition of Lucky. Admittedly, this most crass of magazines is nothing like the nuanced film. But my reaction to this issue was the same as my friend’s to the movie.

Everything about this issue just seemed off. I mean, exclamations like “best doorknob accessory ever!” (page 132) technically make sense, even if decorating doorknobs, let alone determining what sort of overpriced trinket could be crowned the best doorknob ornament ever, never occurred to me. Am I supposed to care about this stuff?

And sure, there’s at least one office on the planet where the denim blazer and yellow micro-shorts pictured in “Four Girls, One Lace Top,” deemed “perfect for work” by accessories designer Meghan Asha, are actually appropriate. That workplace is probably Lucky HQ, but it still counts, right?

But my most profound confusion came from the cover. Check out the lower right-hand corner: this image, from the Lucky Facebook page, says “Dress for Curves: Ginnifer Goodwin shares her styling know-how.” My newsstand copy says:

How to Dress for Curves by Ginnifer Goodwin

OH COME ON. Even allowing that “curvy” is a completely meaningless word, how on earth is Ginnifer Goodwin an expert on this?

Let’s go to the text! From “Southern Comfort,” page 58:

Goodwin’s comfort with her curves [this is where I paused to inspect the three photos of Goodwin on page 66 all Sherlock Holmes-like, seeking evidence of said curves] is largely due to her stylist, Penny Lovell, who introduced the star to tailoring. “I’m three different sizes,” says Goodwin, gesturing to her tiny waist, narrow shoulders and what she calls her “womanly” hips. “I buy things that are big and tailor them down.”

Where do I even begin?

First: Goodwin came to terms with her body “due to her stylist”? How fortunate for her! How unfortunate for the rest of us!

Secondly: being three different sizes doesn’t necessarily mean you’re curvy. It means you’re not a dressmaker’s mannequin. This is not an affliction limited to one particular body type, as anyone who’s tried on a Go International dress at Target well knows.

Next: Your hips are “womanly” because you’re a woman. They’re supposed to be that way.

Finally: Buying clothes to fit the largest part of your body and tailoring them down? This is neither revelatory advice (especially not to anyone who’s seen a single episode of What Not to Wear), nor is it exactly dressing to flatter your body. Also, it’s an utterly unhelpful tip if you’re a discount shopper. If I have to spend an additional $40 to tailor a pair of Gap pants, then I probably can’t afford them.

Now that her clothes fit better, Goodwin is braver about fashion… “Things look better when I embrace my body.”

Aw, what a lovely sentiment! Not so lovely? After recommending a Memphis specialty chocolate store, Goodwin says this:

“If I lived here, I’d be an elephant!”

Yeah, I’m having a little trouble reconciling all the curve-loving euphoria in the previous paragraphs with dehumanizing garbage like this. Eating chocolate—even eating chocolate every day—might make you heavier. It will not make you an elephant. People who weigh more than Ginnifer Goodwin are not the world’s largest land mammals.

The Goodwin article comes to an all-too-merciful end shortly thereafter, but I could go on for hours about this issue. There are the reader quotes that sound exactly like everything else in the magazine. There’s the “smoky-wood-floor” scent Jean Godfrey June describes. There’s the fact that a gainfully employed copyeditor considers “retro-ifies” a valid word, because it appears on page 112. And there’s my growing suspicion that only people with tons of money and zero taste could enjoy this magazine.

By the time I reached the final page, I was cranky, exhausted by the lengthy strings of hyphenated descriptors, and just plain numb. Lucky, please explain yourself: WHAT WAS THAT?

Vogue Liveblog 2010: The One with Halle Berry on the Cover

The other day someone asked me why I still do the liveblog. After all, I've done it three years in a row. Isn't it time to move on? To which I say: Definitely not! I've been so focused on my day job lately that I'm barely finding time to read anything. (Alas, snarking on fashion magazines does not pay the rent, though I'm willing to entertain offers.) If not for this liveblog, I might never read September Vogue. That page count is intimidating!

As always, the rules: I have not opened this issue of Vogue. I have not read what any other writers thought about this issue. I'll be looking at everything except the cover for the first time. The liveblog happens in real time, so just hit refresh on this post to see the latest entries. And I'll be posting periodic updates on Twitter and Facebook throughout the day, too.

Here we go!

Jessica Simpson Gets Lucky, Learns to Love Herself

I’m almost ashamed to admit this publicly, but I was actually intrigued by this cover line on the September issue of Lucky:

Jessica Simpson on finally loving her body

The celebrity-learns-to-love-herself tale is a tough sell. On the one hand: isn't appearing on magazine covers confirmation enough that you've conformed to society's beauty standards? Am I really supposed to empathize—or worse, sympathize—with the skinny woman with flawless skin smiling at me from the pages of Lucky? On the other hand: the fame that lands stars in magazines also leads to unwarranted scrutiny, like the massive uproar Simpson faced when she had the audacity to go on stage in a pair of high-waisted jeans. No one cares if I show up to work with a fresh pimple and undereye bags (which—heads up, co-workers!—I totally will be tomorrow), but the bar is set much higher for celebrities.

How does Lucky address Simpson's transformation?

She stopped fighting her hourglass silhouette, for instance, after realizing that “we all obsess over looking like the perfect Barbie type, and that’s not always what’s beautiful. It’s about making peace with yourself.”

Which is great and all, but I think the key point here is not that she arrived at that conclusion, but how she got there. How did she make peace with herself? Therapy? Yoga? Perhaps a steadfast refusal to read women’s magazines?

This sea change came out of her globe-spanning journey for her VH1 show, The Price of Beauty—a trip that also provided the tools to diversify her wardrobe.

Because, you know, picking up some accessories is totally on par with learning to love yourself. That is one twisted sentence, Lucky.

The paragraph goes on to list exactly what J. Simps found so compelling about foreign cultures, and her highlights are exactly what you’d expect: Bright colors! Caftans! Bangle bracelets! Which means all that gallivanting could have been scrapped in favor of a trip to the local newsstand, because brights, bangles, and caftans are exactly what every fashion editor in the history of women’s magazines considers “exotic.”

There are precious few other details to parse—are we to believe that Jessica learned to love her body because of the caftans she so admired in Morocco?  Who knows? Instead we get another reinforcement of the Eat Pray Love-style message that empowerment is best acquired via globe-trotting. I don’t mean to downplay the powerful shift in perspective that international travel can provide. But neither should we codify a privileged traipse through India or Morocco or Bali as a surefire remedy for flagging self-esteem. Such messages only reinforce the consumerist lifestyle magazines promote to begin with—that happiness and beauty are best achieved by spending money.

It wouldn't be fair to expect Jessica Simpson to serve as the female paragon of healthy self-esteem and cultural sensitivity. (Although there is an interesting discussion to be had on that topic, particularly if you want to consider where the $98 shoes bearing her name are manufactured, and whether she visited that country on her show.) But by twisting “Jessica Simpson loves her shape” into “Jessica Simpson went around the world for a TV show and ended up with an awesome wardrobe,” Lucky’s turned self-acceptance into a trip precious few of us will ever take.

Allure's Rhyming, Sexist Ode to the Women of Fox News

Dear Allure:

Just because David DeNicolo wrote a rhyming ode to the women of Fox News doesn’t mean you had to publish it. Was there a point to this other than blatantly objectifying and belittling the network’s female on-air talent?

The slideshow (apparently not at all ironically called "Fox News Anchors: Hot or Not?") is introduced with a lengthy verse that includes this reminder of what’s really important in television news:

Sure, Rachel Maddow has the smarts

But can she work her giggly parts?

Wait, let me point out even more flagrant objectification before I lose consciousness in a rage blackout. This is about Martha MacCallum:

The TV lights catch every facet;
Golden domes are quite an asset.

And this couplet manages to both infantilize and leer at Jamie Colby, and top it off with a creepy reference to incest. Quel accomplishment!

The dress so short, the smile so glad—
Is that her cohost or her dad?

Oh, hey, did you know all you have to do to be a woman on Fox News is sit on a couch?

Further rightward daily lurching,

On a sofa deftly perching.

I’d normally be the first one to decry the journalistic standards at Fox News, but I'm quite certain being a TV anchor involves at least slightly more intelligence, talent, and effort than “deftly perching” on upholstery.

This could have been an interesting launching point to explore the double standards in television news. (No, that jab at Rachel Maddow doesn’t count.) It could have been a beauty article about makeup techniques or fashion styling for television, which would be well within Allure's purview. It might have even included men!

Instead, it's just blindingly sexist, ill-conceived, and unfunny, which is strange, considering a publication targeted toward women would theoretically want to avoid disparaging them. But times are tight in print media, so I guess Allure is trying to expand its appeal—to chauvinists and jerks. I hear they buy a lot of magazines.

No love,

Glossed Over

Thanks to reader Annie for the tip. As she said in her email, "Oh hell naw."