Glossed Over

We Read It So You Don't Have To: Elle Pairs a Pop Star With a Primate

Okay, we say that we read it so you don’t have to, but really, no one should have to read “Wild Thing,” in Elle’s July issue.  It’s only four paragraphs, but it just doesn’t make sense.

Normally, we’d be pretty jazzed about Fergie.  Not because we like her music (because we don’t, though we’re strangely fascinated by “Fergalicious”), but because it gives us yet another opportunity to trot out our stories of how we grew up in the same town and we were a thrilling one degree removed from her in elementary school and junior high.  Our friends were friends with someone on Kids Incorporated!  What can we say?  That was super-exciting when we were ten.

Anyway.  Other than the pics where she poses with an orangutan for no apparent reason—and the orangutan that, in the opening photo, cuddles an Armani bag, here’s why the mercifully brief article still made us want to jam a letter opener into our eyes:

Though fans speculate about the anatomical reference in the title of her hit single “London Bridge,” let it be known she hasn’t exposed hers Britney-style.

Oh, come on.  Not flashing the paparazzi is now a mark of distinction?  To be sure, keeping your bits covered is a good thing; but there’s such a thing as setting the bar too low, you know?

…[songs] delivered, if you have the good luck to see her live,...

Which makes it sound that being in Fergie’s audience is as difficult as getting an audience with the Queen.  Hey, writer Michael Sonnenschein:  anyone can have “good luck”!  She sells tickets!

[Wearing] bright red heels, earth-tone jeans, suspenders, and a porkpie hat—an outfit inspired, she says, by the boy in Madonna’s “Open Your Heart” video…

WTF?  Strangely, this part of the article appears to be completely serious.  As does the conclusion:

Let’s hope that as she ascends, Fergie stays Fergie.  The divasphere needs a real girl.

And nothing says “real” like simultaneously wearing Gucci and cuddling a primate!

Fergie images from Popsugar

We Read It So You Don't Have To: Lindsay Lohan Gets Melodramatic in Allure

Some of the utter lunacy in Allure’s Lindsay Lohan profile, May, has already been making its way across the internet, but we only received our subscription copy on Saturday.  And it was totally worth the wait, too, since we received the added bonus of a booklet introducing us to the vendors behind every single one of the beauty lines QVC carries.  Oh, the joys of being a subscriber!

Still, we had no idea how much of a treat we were in for when we arrived at page 280 and saw this:

Coming of Age

From the beginning of her successful career, Lindsay Lohan has aspired to be a modern-day Marilyn Monroe.  Is she starting to resemble her tragic idol?

Sounds like someone’s taking Lindsay just a wee bit too seriously.  Don’t have the stomach to endure the entire wretchedly earnest thing?  Here’s the gist of it:

“I feel like a second parent in the sense that I helped raise my family,” she says of her younger three siblings.  “And I was put between my mother and father a lot.  Well, I would put myself between them to try and keep the peace, and I felt good doing that.  For what it’s worth.”  A rueful shrug.  “Now they’re divorced.”

Despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary (like, say, her parents’ divorce), Lindsay nonetheless believes she has the power to keep people secure.

“When my friends have left me—I’ve just seen everything collapse,” she says.  “They’re not safe without me.”

Which we think explains why her father’s in prison!  Either she really is incredibly powerful, or she’s dumb enough to make threats to her pals via a reporter.

On to the topic du jour:

“It’s so weird that I went to rehab,” she says.  “I always said I would die before I went to rehab.”

Well, yes, that’s typically how these things work.  And we thought her mother had no sense of irony!

“I say [I idolize] Marilyn Monroe, because if I were blonde, that’s who I’d want to be like,” she demurs…“I use everything she’s gone through when I’m upset.  That’s what I take from her.”

Because, you know, it all worked out so well for Marilyn. 

“I never passed out in my life!  I never vomited from having drinks.  Like in public.  I would never do that.  Well—” she amends, “a few times.  Well, everyone does in high school.  I’m not saying everyone.”

Whoa, Lindsay is so out of touch, so used to life in the spotlight, that the distinction between vomiting in public from drinking too much and vomiting in private from the same cause is actually meaningful.  Why would she even bother to deny drinking to excess when, hello, she discusses going to rehab in this same interview?  (And, if we can be sincere for a microsecond, how sad is this?)

But writer Judy Bachrach saved the best for almost last, creating a chilling culmination of this entire overwrought article.

“It’s like when you’re doing a movie, and it ends.  Then you don’t see the other people for so long.”  Lohan says that she weeps when the filming stops, every time.  For her, it’s like losing family members.  Yet again.

And for us, this straining-for-drama story is another sliver of our lives lost to Allure.  Yet again.

We Read It So You Don't Have To: A Bazaar Boost for Lindsay's Mom

Apparently, it isn’t enough for Lindsay Lohan and her pants-less exploits to be plastered across every tabloid and reproduced in high-res on every gossip website.  Nope, Lindsay’s mom has to get in on the act, too.  Despite a total lack of merit other than her notable offspring, Bazaar features her anyway, in “Lindsay’s Mother on Living La Vida Lohan,” April. 

Dina Lohan speaks out about Lindsay’s rehab, life as a single mom, and how she’s living the American dream—whether her critics like it or not

Translation:  Bazaar couldn’t get Lindsay (or, obviously, anyone else of consequence).  Bazaar 0, Dina 1.

Between her insanely overblown mother-hen persona and Bazaar’s liberal sprinkling of italics throughout,  Dina comes off as downright delusional.  Which we’d normally assume was the point, except the whole article by Phoebe Eaton is straining for drama—it’s replete with bated-breath sentence fragments and a tone so maudlin as to be stultifying amateurish.  For instance:

She wasn’t even supposed to marry [Lindsay’s father] in the first place.  “I’d met a gentleman in the movie business,” she says—a grip working on The Cotton Club.  Her fiancé.  Only then he died in a car crash.

But if that wasn’t enough to make you stop reading (we’re masochists—we muddled through to the end), here are our three favorite bits from the article:

1.    “Oh, the party mom, the party mom, the party mom!” she chants.  “Whoever said that, my ex-husband or whatever, I’m not the party mom!  You throw enough pasta on the walls, some pasta’s going to stick, okay?”

2.    “…Paris [Hilton] is a really smart girl, and she’s come really far.  They’re the American dream.  They’re the Trumps of the little world, these kids.”

And topping those is hands-down the most fatuous statement to appear in Bazaar (or at least in this issue), which combines Dina’s practiced bombast with Eaton’s desperate attempt to make this piece seem at all meaningful.

3. ...Dina won’t let her two youngest [children] ride in Lindsay’s car.  “Look at me,” she says, making deepest, darkest eye contact.  “Diana will happen again,” she says.

Which is a bold statement, and might even come across as genuine concern if Dina’s very appearance in this article didn’t brand her as an attention whore.  Posing with her dress hiked up to her crotch while an assistant applies a spray-on tan?  Sure, lady, this is clearly all about your daughter.

Are we being too harsh?  Indeed we are, intones Eaton at the article’s close.

Until you walk in her Jimmy Choos, do not presume to judge.

Ooh, burn!  If only there were a way for her to avoid negative attention, like, oh, not using her daughter as an excuse to appear in magazines?  Try throwing that pasta at the wall, Dina!

We Read It So You Don't Have To: The Boring Things Men Do When You're Not Around

In case yesterday’s glimpse into the “secret language of men” wasn’t revealing enough, March’s Glamour offers a look at “The Secret Lives of Men.”  Whoa—it’s not enough they speak a different language, but they have entire clandestine existences?  They’re, like, spies or secret agents or something.  Maybe men really are from Mars!

Alas, if guys were truly conducting operations straight out of a James Bond movie when left to their own devices, it would result in an article approximately a billion times more interesting than this one. So one dude eats Chinese food when he escapes his girlfriend’s health food fanaticism?  Who cares?  Even his girlfriend probably doesn’t care.

Here’s what else the men admit to:

1. Men watch porn, fantasize about inappropriate partners, go to strip clubs, and wonder if their wives will leave them.  Yes, and...?  Also, we may be old-fashioned in our preference for face-to-face communication, but we don’t think a magazine article is the way to reveal to your girlfriend that you’ve been thinking about her sister as something other than a future in-law. 

2. Men like Rachael Ray.  Boring.  Dreams about Paula Deen coating you in butter?  Spill it.  But since Rachael Ray is a cute woman who cooks, it’s not  a stretch that men would be fascinated by her.  Next!

3. Men do boneheaded, non-gender-dependent things like fritter away money and lie about their SAT scores.  On second thought, maybe that lie is gender-based—it’s the same sort of overcompensation that results in monster trucks with six-foot-tall tires tailgating in the fast lane during rush hour.  Come on, guys, we know you’re trying to make up for something other than your shamefully low score on the math section.  Ahem.

4. And…you know what, we can’t bring ourselves to read any more of this.

The only confession that veers anywhere near fascinating is Josh Robertson’s revelation that he forgot he has a child, if only because we were pretty sure such a thing wasn’t even possible.  Sure, he didn't actually carry the kid in his body for nine months or give birth or anything, but he forgot about the existence of his son?  Really?  Worse (for the story, not for his son) is that Robertson’s forgetfulness doesn't result in anything more dramatic than a whole lot of introspection (only a tiny fraction of which made it to Glamour’s pages, we’re guessing).  We aren’t suggesting he abandon the kid on the subway or anything, but at least that would have been worth reading about. 

Next time Glamour aims to reveal the “secret lives of men”, it first ought to be sure those secrets are actually worth reading about.

We Read It So You Don't Have To: Jane's Guide to Quick Cash and Petty Lawbreaking

In the February issue, Jane goes with a service-oriented piece (sort of).  In “Make $1,000 in Five Days,” we follow the adventures of writer Annemarie Conte, who needs to garner a grand, stat.

When we read the story’s title indicating her urgent need for cash, our heart flooded with sympathy.  Poor thing, we thought.  She’s so desperate for money, she must be facing a terrible quandary…like a plumbing catastrophe, or an emergency vet bill, or a last-minute plane ticket to visit a sick family member.

Well, no.  See, Annemarie needs the cash to buy a 22-year-old diesel Mercedes.  Which she’ll mine for spare parts for the 22-year-old diesel Mercedes she already owns.  Did we mention she’s buying the car off Craigslist?

But who are we to judge how she spends her cash?  We’ve certainly dropped some dollars on foolish things like, say, this issue of Jane.

Here’s how Annemarie’s quest shook out.

1. Pet-sitting nets $40 for three hours.

2. Testing a new foundation brings in a robust $120.

3. An office bake sale garners $60.  Of course, this method only works for people with the ability to walk around their office building selling homemade baked goods instead of, you know, actually working.

4. $15 for an hour of babysitting.  Turns out caring for another human being pays only marginally better than caring for a dog.

5. $50 apiece for transcribing an interview and $50 to pick her parents up from the airport in her 22-year-old car.  Yawn.  Is this Seventeen?  Is she going to mow her neighbor’s lawn and wash her big brother’s car next?

6. Annemarie decides to deliver furniture from Ikea to the city in a friend’s borrowed car and makes $315.  Afterwards, she opts out of refilling her pal’s gas tank.  She may be flush with cash, but she’s awfully inconsiderate.

7. $60 for selling two homemade lasagnas.

8. A $10 cut of the proceeds for letting friends bet on how quickly she’ll manage to get drunk at an event.  Classy!  (Oh, and she managed to guzzle eight beers before failing her pals’ hand-eye coordination test.  We’re sort of in awe.) 

9. $100 for selling friends’ stuff on eBay.  So now she’s feeding them, caring for their offspring, entertaining them by letting them bet on her liver, and selling their stuff?  What do her friends do all day?

10. Undisclosed amount for selling alcohol at work.  Because, of course, it’s legal to sell booze and socially acceptable to partake in the workplace.  On the other hand, if drinking is a regular thing at Jane HQ, it explains an awful lot about the magazine.

11. $120 selling homemade t-shirts at a Giants game, once again skirting the law by neglecting to secure a permit. 

At the beginning of her money-making marathon, Annemarie writes

I will not whore myself.  I will not whore myself.

which implies there were some laws she wasn’t willing to break in the interest of a good story.  Still, wouldn’t “magazine writer turns tricks for a grand” (or sells drugs for a grand, or auctions spare kidney for a grand) have made a far more compelling story?  We think so. In fact, if she’d been selling plasma to earn cash for the car, we might have even chipped in.

We Read It So You Don't Have To: Allure's Guide to a Merry Mercenary Christmas

It’s that time of the year when caution (and credit card debt) is thrown to the wind. As if Christmas-themed luxury-car ads weren’t maddening enough, Allure’s “Getting the Goods,” December, chimes in with some truly depressing tales of women “who know how to work the system.”

What system is that? Oh, you innocent! It’s that time-honored tradition of shaming your significant other into giving an expensive gift, of course.

Since the article already reads like a manual for aspiring gold diggers, we’ll boil it down to its most important (and most vomit-inducing) points:

1. Men cannot be trusted to purchase appropriately pricy jewelry.

“Never let a man buy you jewelry, never! Like, the stone on the ring is minuscule, and you end up with a chip on your finger! You have to pick it out.”

2. Your friends don’t want crappy presents either. Don’t even think about re-gifting.

“I can tell you what subtlety gets you: a nylon Prada bag…I can’t carry this! This is like everyone’s first Prada bag…I was so pissed, I tried giving it to friends. They didn’t even want it.”

3. Salespeople will happily collude in your money-grubbing schemes—they’re on commission, after all.

“I get a lot of jewelry pieces I would never dream of asking for…including this incredible large aquamarine ring from Verdura, which is so fabulous I can’t tell you what it cost. Well, OK, it cost $30,000. It was the salesman who suggested it to my boyfriend.”

4. If you subsist solely on gifts, you’re absolutely not a whore. You’re just a “successful recipient.”

…the most successful recipient I know…does nothing much for a living except get showered with love—and lovely things: a diamond ring from Van Cleef, Hermes scarves, Bulgari necklaces.

5. Don’t kid yourself by thinking you’re above this sort of behavior.

“Because, I mean, like, I don’t want to sound superficial or anything, but you’re giving me a book! For my birthday?”

6. There’s never an occasion too solemn to practice your exacting gift-receiving strategies. To wit:

“…when he proposed, we were on a beach at night—and I didn’t want to say yes until I took the diamond ring into the light to check it out…Probably I would have married him. But I wanted to know exactly what I was accepting.”

Just follow these six easy steps, and you’re well on your way to a lifetime of expensive gifts and  insatiable rapaciousness.  Now the only question is whether there’s time enough to put these strategies into action now, or whether the truly greedy should resolve to undertake this endeavor in 2007.  Everyone needs New Year’s resolutions, right?

WRISYDHT: Someone's A Little Too Excited About Breast Cancer

For this installment of We Read It So You Don’t Have To, we sat down with Self’s “A Legacy of Strength,” October, wherein Brittany Murphy, Christina Applegate, and Mya dicuss their family histories of breast cancer. In doing so, they spout every cliché that has even a slight bearing on the situation: take each day as it comes, take care of yourself, don’t be afraid—the same tripe that makes it into every article about breast cancer except perhaps those printed in the New England Journal of Medicine.

However, there was one bit of dialogue that made our drudgery worthwhile. Because we cannot possibly paraphrase the brilliance of this moment, we’ll reproduce this heartwarming exchange between Murphy and Applegate in its entirety.

Christina: Thank God we have good-looking boobs in my family.

Brittany: Oh, I can attest to that! We did wardrobe for the shoot today. Your boobies are gorgeous.

Well, that was, um, sweet of Brittany to immediately interject her appraisal of Applegate’s physique—because, you know, no one would ever believe that Applegate was telling the truth without Murphy’s eyewitness testimony—especially since she chose to use the word “boobies,” which, last we checked, was the exclusive domain of fourth-graders.

Naïve fourth-graders, even.

Still, whatever her motives, Murphy’s completely off-the-wall statement was the only thing that kept us awake as we read this hackneyed conversation piece.

Cancer isn’t amusing, but neither are these yearly rehashes of the same trite platitudes about taking care of yourself and loving your body. We say: next year, Self, let Brittany Murphy write an essay about “boobies.”  Hey, let her draw pictures of them in crayon. Not only would that would be more engaging, it might even prove more useful.

We Read It So You Don't Have To: The Un-Lucky Life of Jean Godfrey-June

We hate to admit it, but this week’s installment of We Read It So You Don’t Have To will only save you the time it takes to peruse one page of September’s Lucky.  Still, it’s an egregiously obnoxious one page, so we’ll forge ahead with our summary of Jean Godfrey-June’s “Beauty Spy.”

This month, just like every other month, she initially doubts that she’ll like the product she’ll eventually promote. Is the fragrance too strong? Can any anti-aging ingredient live up to the dramatic claims of its manufacturers? Will the results really be worth the thirty seconds a day it takes to apply the product?

Then, also like every other month, she relates a dull anecdote only vaguely related to the product in question. She rides an elevator with someone who comments on the way she looks and/or smells. Her kids and/or husband question her religious use of some new-fangled device. Or there was this one thing that happened a very long time ago that, through a highly dubious sense of which topics are related, she manages to connect to the product in question.

And—you guessed it, just like every other month—she falls irrevocably in love with the item, cost be damned, and she hoards enough to last through a nuclear winter.

At this point, if these columns are to be believed, the woman must own enough beauty products to stock a Sephora.  And have you seen her on TV? She doesn’t even appear to wear makeup. What is she doing with all of this stockpiled stuff? Should we organize an intervention? Is Lucky complicit in her addiction by depicting her as a charmingly slender and well-dressed cartoon character each month?

But never mind all that negativity—it’s not important. We choose to look at the upside of this potentially disastrous situation: if Jean Godfrey-June continues to trot out these tired tropes month after month, we won’t need to bother reading her page. And we don’t have to relate a boring tale from our childhood to know that skipping this nonsense is something we can recommend to everyone.

The further adventures of Jean Godfrey-June: Lucky Sets New Standard for Passive-Aggressiveness, Long Lashes; Now Which Staffer Will Take Care of Her Hair?

Photo of Jean Godfrey-June and her ever-increasing collection from the News and Observer

We Read It So You Don't Have To: Marie Claire's Sexy Shocker is Shockingly Old

By special request, this week’s edition of We Read It So You Don’t Have To tackles the article touted on Marie Claire’s August cover as “The Erotic New Trend (Everyone’s Trying It…).”

The “erotic new trend” is fresh, hot, and boundary breaking—or at least it was three years ago. The dated phenomenon MC so breathlessly promotes is this:

Would You Kiss a Girl?

The magazine reveals that 55 percent of its online survey respondents would be intimate with another woman, an answer that shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s seen an episode of The Real World wherein the cast members get drunk. (We realize that pretty much every episode involves the housemates drinking, but that only proves our point.)

More galling than the fact that this topic is no longer interesting is the awkward juxtaposition of  two women who recount their personal experiences with same-sex kissing. One woman is straight and makes out with her friend while drinking at a nightclub. The other woman is a lesbian. Because, you know, a woman kissing her pal to get male attention at a club is totally the same thing as two women kissing because they’re dating.

A caption in the article reads

Madonna did it. Will you?

We say: Madonna did it three years ago. Will you stop writing about it already?

We Read It So You Don't Have To: Cosmo Aims for Funny, Manages Only Insipid

Today marks the debut of a new feature here at Glossed Over: We Read It So You Don’t Have To. Self-explanatory, right?

The initial recipient of the WRISYDHT treatment is “Hilarious ‘I Work at Cosmo’ Tales,” from August’s issue of—yes—Cosmopolitan. As you might have divined from the over-reaching title, the tales aren’t remotely close to funny. To save you both the trouble of reading the measly one-page piece and the subsequent brain cell death you’ll experience,  here’s what the article boils down to:

When staffers reveal to strangers that they work at Cosmo, their new acquaintances incorrectly assume:

1. they’re oversexed and fascinated by other people’s personal lives.

2. they work in an office straight out of a teenage boy’s fantasy, complete with lingerie-clad editors having giggly pillow fights.

or

3. they’re surrounded by, like, totally hot girls all the time! Yowza! Can you believe the luck of some people?  Models are, like, totally awesome!

Thrilling, we know.

Why was this less-than-insightful article even published in the magazine? Perhaps an actual article—and by “actual,” we mean one that doesn’t focus solely on Cosmo staffers—was canceled, and this was the quickest and cheapest way to fill page 185. Twenty-four hours before the issue heads to the printers? Quick, send out an email to everyone in the office!

It’s not like most readers have any actual experience working at Cosmo and can therefore identify with—or refute—the oh-so-wacky stories recounted. We’re fairly certain the staff doesn’t make editorial decisions in their underwear (if they did, we’d expect the team at Cosmo to be the stars of their own reality show), but it’s still self-important bad form to publish inside jokes and expect the rest of us to be amused. Next time Cosmo promises hilarity, they ought to write about something other than themselves.