This is a collage I made from an old issue of “Cosmopolitan” magazine. All of the text you see was taken from inside the magazine, cut out and pasted onto the cover, to give the reader a more accurate idea of the magazine’s contents.
As the owner of a style/fashion/beauty website, I hate women’s magazines like this. Style should be about discovering, inventing and expressing yourself. At the very least, style (as something to learn and explore) should make you feel good. But the messages sent by these magazines lower the reader’s consciousness and increase her myopic self-absorption, at the expense of self-awareness and deep thought.
Another problem I have with these magazines is their scattershot approach to self-improvement. It’s bad enough that they do harm; they ought not to pretend to do good as well. Their so-called “helpful” articles (“Food for Healthy Breasts,” “Your OB/GYN and You,” “Binge Drinking”) have a few facts, taken out of context and endorsed by an anonymous doctor at the Mayo Clinic or somewhere like that. No one can remember these tidbits for more than a few minutes, at best. It would be better, and more honest, to recommend a series of nonfiction books which present this information systematically, such as “The Young Woman’s Guide to Her Body,” “Healthy Food, Happy Life” or “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Alcohol and Drugs (But Were Afraid to Ask).” (These aren’t real books, just examples.)
If you like this collage, you can buy an entire maga/zine in this vein, here. That means 100-200 pages of delicious culture jam, yours for only $10. Read the follow up post here.
