Why I No Longer Love (Most) Magazines

Why I Loved Magazines

I always loved magazines. This might be because I spent the first 20 years of my life without the internet. In the 80's and 90's if you wanted to know which movies were coming out; if you wanted to see the latest fashion trends; if you wanted to learn about politics, current events and news; you could watch TV, read a newspaper or read a magazine. TV shows ran on a set schedule and newspapers had short articles and gray pages, so I favored magazines. They were a small luxury. You could read them in the bathtub without worrying too much about getting the pages wet, or you could cut out a glossy picture and tape it to your wall.

My mom always seemed to be subscribed to at least 7 magazines. Off the top of my head, I can remember her subscribing to: Glamour, Vogue, Self, Working Woman, Metropolitan Living, Country Living*, Vanity Fair, and Utne Reader. I think we also had Time and/or Newsweek for a while. As I entered adolescence, my subscriptions started coming in as well: Seventeen, YM, Mademoiselle, the legendary Sassy**, and Premiere, a now defunct movie magazine which took a middle path between the mainly meaningless fluff of Entertainment Weekly and the almost academic style of Film Comment. Pictures from Premiere were a major part of my teenage decor. For good measure I also had a subscription to The Progressive, a magazine which still lives up to its name.

There was always a sense of excitement when a magazine would arrive. Sometimes I'd stake out the mailbox so I could get at mom's magazines before she hid them away from me. I'd then lie on the couch, eating a snack and turning the pages by turns feverishly and languidly. Magazines were our Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter, Buzzfeed, Slashfilm, but there was only a limited amount of content per month and you had to pay separately for each different type of content.***

In my teenage years I began putting my magazines to dual use. After reading, I'd cut them up and add the pictures I liked to my series of collage boxes - big storage tupperwares filled with paper ephemera. Eventually I learned to stalk free piles, recycling bins and cheap sections of bookstores for more collage fodder. A fine art magazine was always a big score, or a vintage issue of any women's magazine found at a rummage sale. I currently have two collage boxes in Wisconsin, and one lonely collage box waiting for me in a storage facility in Portland, Oregon.

As the internet came in, I relied less and less on magazines for information, but I still used them for art materials and still got that little high every time I'd buy a new issue. I'd largely stopped subscribing by the time I moved to Portland in my 20's preferring to pick up whatever looked good at Powell's. I was still a person who loved magazines, but I became a person who loved Bust and Bitch, The Sun and Adbusters in addition to Glamour and Cosmo.

Up until this last month, in fact, I firmly identified as "a person who loves magazines" or even "a magazine addict." Last year I discovered a method for getting free magazines via this thing called Reward Bee and had acquired free subscriptions (yes, totally 100% free) to W, Glamour, Vogue, Teen Vogue, Entertainment Weekly, Conde Naste Traveler****, Lonely Planet, Cosmopolitan*****, In Style, Allure, and People in Spanish. When the magazines first started coming in I felt as if I had won the lottery. Almost every day a magazine came and I would devour it. But soon they started coming in too fast, so that devouring the magazines started to feel less like a pleasure and more like a duty. I had meals to cook, TV shows to watch, books I wanted to read, a cat to pet, the internet to browse, and now I had to read a magazine too? 

Then I started this 75/25 Create Consume Project and the other shoe really dropped. Did I really want to create art for an hour so I could read magazines for 20 minutes when so much other media was competing for my attention? No, it turns out, I did not want to do that. When I was conscious about consuming media and had to choose every experience with care, magazines dropped to the bottom of the list. I tried taking the magazines to work, my project "free space", and even then reading most magazines felt like a chore. I recently took an issue of Vogue to work and out of the whole issue only found one article that spoke to me (a first-person memoir from Phillip Seymour Hoffman's widow).  It was then that I started figuring out why it is that I really don't need most of the content in most magazines anymore.******

Some of my Reward Bee spoils, soon to find their way to the nearest Little Free Library.

Why I No Longer Love Magazines

1. Magazines, especially fashion magazines, are mostly ads. 

I know, stunner, right? This is right up there with my revelation that movie trailers are just ads, About half of a fashion magazine's pages are ads, and then when you look at the content, most of that is also designed to get you to buy products. I still like looking at a good fashion spread, but if you get right down to it, the purpose of that fashion spread is to sell me that skirt or those shoes. Clothes in magazines are generally accompanied by the brand and the price, unless the price is so high that the magazine doesn't want to scare you by revealing it, and sometimes there's even a section in back to help you find the stores where you can buy the clothes. Travel magazines are much the same, only with hotels, cruises, restaurants and airlines on offer. There are exceptions to this rule: The Sun, Bitch, The Progressive are all either ad-free or have few ads. But, as a whole, most magazines are about half advertising, and the remaining content often still contains an element of advertising.

2. I Don't Relate to the Lifestyle It's Selling. 

Who is reading Vogue these days? Who relates to it? I can't figure out exactly what woman is wearing the combination of overpriced tracksuits and ugly furs on offer in a recent issue. This woman cares about disgustingly expensive society weddings which require the renting of zoo animals and carnival tents. She wants to know about the newest restaurants in Tuscany. She cares about politics, but the name "Bernie Sanders" has never crossed her lips. I'm also not an Allure woman. I don't want a cream to defy age, I don't care about shaping my eyebrows, and I don't want to try a new lip color, because I've been doing pretty well with my own unadorned lips for the last 40 years.  I can't relate to Entertainment Weekly anymore either, because this is the magazine which you consume to learn about more things which you should also consume. It's exhausting just looking at evidence of all the TV shows I don't have time to watch. 

I'm not even a Glamour woman anymore. Glamour was my favorite of my mom's magazine subscriptions, but I can't relate to the career woman in its pages, who is busy negotiating a higher salary with the power of her assertiveness. The Glamour woman's economic life is in her own hands; she has gone beyond needing to worry about minimum wage or forming a union. I am not that woman, and the politics that go with that woman, though very progressive in terms of identity politics and women's rights, can be quite silent when it comes to things like healthcare and minimum wage. I guess those concerns aren't glamorous enough.

3. Magazines tend towards homogeneity. 

I will give magazines credit for beginning to represent more types of people over the last decade. You are starting to see people of all skin tones with natural hair. You are beginning to see women of different body types, and occasionally a woman older than 30 sneaks in, even if she's usually famous and beautiful. But even with this much-needed increase in diversity, there is a sameness to the type of content, range of viewpoints, and questions asked, that varies only slightly between titles. Most women's magazines feature an attractive celebrity face on the cover, often photo-shopped. This celebrity is then interviewed, and you get to learn some combination of the following information: what she eats, her exercise regimen, her favorite designer, her love life, her early inspirations, her new projects, her feelings regarding the other famous people she knows, her feelings regarding being famous. You will probably get a casual observation about the manner in which she enters the hip restaurant and what an informal yet charming outfit she is wearing. I could write a fake celebrity profile right now and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference. This makes me wonder, why did I spend so many years reading this crap?  

Then there are advice columns, health tips, beauty tips, sex tips. I have read countless articles on the importance of sunscreen and recognizing cancerous moles. I have seen all the diagrams of breast exams. I have seen the cartoon people in all the sex positions. I know all the types of guys you should avoid and the dubious science of recognizing these men through their room decor.

Magazines do also have feature articles, but these too fall into patterns. They generally portray brave women doing brave things either in their personal or work life. You are meant to be inspired by this. Instead, I generally feel depressed that I am reading a magazine instead of fighting a fire, raising money for children with AIDS or whatever other worthy feat is on offer.

Of course, other types of magazines host different types of content. But a food magazine, a lifestyle magazine, a travel magazine, often betray the same limited range. They are genre pieces and they hit their marks, and for a time it feels very satisfying but unless someone reinvents the genre you're just reading the same article again and again and again.

4. I'm Too Old For This Shit. 

When you're young, ideally you read widely and explore what's out there in an effort to find your interests, learn about new places and people and forge some type of identity.******* I did that. Magazines sometimes served me well (sex education!; book, movie and music recommendations; stories of how movies got made; feminist think pieces; an innumerable amount of health, fashion, beauty, cleaning and cooking tips that I've somehow absorbed and can spit out at the appropriate moment, though I still can't put on eyeliner to save my life). Other times magazines did me wrong (unrealistic beauty standards, penchant for buying clothes I didn't need, an unhealthy obsession with romance, giving me the idea that grown-ups were always able to afford spa vacations and expensive new boots, limiting my ideas about goals and dreams to a capitalist meritocratic lens). I'm who I am now, for better or worse, partly due to magazines. 

But now, as a pretty fully formed person with internet access, I don't need magazines to show me what's out there.  I have my own interests and passions. I have piles of books to read and scads of movies I want to watch. I have my own goals and dreams and plenty of assertiveness if I ever find a workplace where I can use that to get a raise. I've also realized that I am as old or older than many of the writers and most of the models and celebrity interviewees. Why the hell do I want to know Katy Perry's philosophy on life or Miley Cyrus' biggest guilty pleasure? There is no need for that shit. I think I've got it covered from here.

5. There's Just Better Stuff to Consume.

You have a limited number of minutes in your life. You can read "The Grapes of Wrath" or you can read the latest issue of "Harpers Bazaar." I know which choice I'll be making. And, with some luck, maybe I'll write something that will almost certainly not be "The Grapes of Wrath", but which just might be better than an interview with Katy Perry or advice on the best lip gloss for your skin tone. Here's hoping.

*She could not decide which type of living she preferred. She definitely did not prefer Small Town Living, which is what we were engaged in.

**I used to have a nearly complete set of this magazine, which I eventually cut up for collage fodder, and the rest ended up lost in garbage bags in a terrible mouse-ridden storage facility my dad put my stuff in when he got remarried. 

***Is Ajit Pai secretly trying to bring the magazine industry back with this whole ending net neutrality thing? I mean, if we have to start paying extra for different types of content why not just go retro?

**** A magazine which has really increased my hatred for unregulated capitalism, given that for the cost of one of the $2,000 a night hotel rooms it features I could stay at The Tent in Munich for a month, but I can't, because my salary for a year is only slightly more than one of the gawdy 1%er $14,000 bracelets it advertises to people who have enough money to go to Paris on a whim, but who probably don't speak French or know that you can see two much better Da Vinci paintings right across the way from the Mona Lisa without standing in a huge mob. Bitter? Me?

***** Cosmopolitan, the ultimately guilty pleasure magazine, famous for slightly rewriting the same sex tips each month (although they did actually include a lesbian sex position in a recent issue), but it's always reliably there for you if you want to feel like you're gossiping about sex and fashion and embarrassing things you've done and more sex with an imaginary group of girlfriends. The best in bathtub reading.

****** I want to give a shout-out to  The Sun, however, an ad-free magazine which combines literature, politics, spirituality, memoir, interviews, into a beautiful monthly magazine which has never let me down.

******* Although now that I'm a Buddhist, I'm less certain about the value of forging an identity.