My dad is a magazine-aholic. He can't seem to turn down "special offers" for magazines at "50%!" off the cover price. At last count, he has subscriptions to 7 magazines: Time, Sports Illustrated, Entertainment Weekly, Fortune, Forbes, BusinessWeek and Esquire. Plus the Sunday Times. It's not like he's shooting up or anything. It's just that neither of my parents really read English. That's why they get the Chinese newspaper everyday.
According to him, the subscriptions are justified because: (1) they're only __ cents an issue!; and (2) they're really for me. At the end of every visit, my parents pack me a big ol' pile of food and a big ol' stack of magazines.
The most recent addition to the collection is Esquire, which I've been reading through this week. I gotta say, it's a good rag. It's so... wonderfully and refreshingly different from magazines directed at women or at a mixed audience. Virtually everybody is fully clothed - the fashion section, the feature stories, even the ads. ("Virtually" excludes women, of course; the women featured are practically naked and usually in naughty poses.) The clothes featured are things I actually see people wear in public: shirts, suits, pants. No feather boas or puffy sleeves or mini kilts that would get any non-circus employee some serious reprimand. The writing is acerbic, unsentimental, crisp. Four-letter words are casually used and spelled out in full: shit is not crap and fuck is not f**k.
Now don't get me wrong. I love women's magazines. I subscribe to women's magazines. (Ok, fine. I subscribe to one.) But I've never really read men's magazines before. Sure, I'll pick up GQ if Clive Owen is on the cover; but when I do, I get in and get out. Reading Esquire the way I read Glamour was very eye-opening. They're like (or unlike) network and cable television. For all their rah-rah, woman-power hoo-ha, women's magazine treat women like little girls. Coddling our insecurities, encouraging us to obsess about the wrong things, talking down to us by censoring rough language. No wonder male attorneys still apologize to me when they curse in meetings - hell, my own magazines do it! WTF? I mean, what the fucking fuck?!
I'm not going to go all Al Bundy or anything. But I'm definitely going to get some mileage out of my dad's subscription and rethink my own. If anything, I certainly prefer a magazine full of good-looking, sharply-dressed men over one full of anorexic, bizarrely-clad women, even if, every once in a while, I indulge in the lie that men really do prefer women with big thighs and frizzy hair.
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