A good reason not to bother is...DUMBTH. That's the term Steve Allen coined for the dumbing down of the culture. Last time I checked some magazines to see if they might be open to freelancers, I found most...weren't even magazines.
It was more like a collection of tweets. More like somebody patched together some Instagram and Facebook pages.
No wonder people would rather surf the Net for FREEEEEE instead of subscribe to even classic magazines like Time or...Cosmpolitan?
I took a PDF look at the September issue of Cosmo. Helen Gurley Brown may be turning over in her grave. She died back on August 13, 2012, and her magazine is brain dead.
As I recall, the idea was to give sophisticated women some lurid sex tips, provocative interviews, and reflect being...COSMPOLITAN.
They might as well change the name of this magazine to MALL RAT.
I got the idea things were less than COSMPOLITAN when I scrolled down to a picture of a brainless bitch with a huge TATTOO on her arm, plodding through a supermarket. She had a huge container of ice cream in one hand, and her face said BRAIN FREEZE.
Like Twitter or Facebook, this wasn't an article as much as somebody's blog, with pasted-in quotes from other idiots. "I follow my fave food bloggers on Instagram..." is one bit of dimwit advice. Jeez, the magazine is encouraging people NOT to buy the magazine.
I figured maybe this was just one page for the clueless lip-readers out there, and the bulk of the slimmed-down mag would be aimed at COSMPOLITAN women. The kind who might not call each other "bitch" at the office, or chortle over the last episode of "Judge Judy" they DVR'd.
Magazines in the Age of Dumbth are short-attention span to the max.
Let's not get involved in anything we might not be able to finish between the 1st and 3rd floor on the elevator.
Page after page offered cobbled-together nonsense either e-mailed in, or grabbed off Twitter. Really? A woman offers a revelation about how often she changes her panties...and COSMPOLITAN prints it?
Another alarming thing about DUMBTH is that magazines have to imitate video games.
The art department must have a constant supply of STARBUCKS coming in, so that every page is jittery and cluttered.
Millennials who have grown up "multi-tasking" by watching TV, a cellphone, and going to the bathroom at the same time, can't face a page of solid text and they love graphs and charts and board-game layouts.
Facts? Useful information? Not so much. The DUMBTH of the COSMO reader is so great, that the obvious is accepted as useful.
Breaking up with boyfriends even faster than Taylor Swift? Get some kewl advice...
Hey, yo, if you need to chill after a break-up, go watch some Bling-crap thing on AMAZON PRIME.
You need to pay for a copy of COSMO to get advice like that? No wonder the surviving magazines are not surviving too well.
The closet thing to a real COSMPOLITAN article was about some vain, brainless fool gushing over her expensive lipstick treatment. Women's magazines are all about this kind of trivia. Women, we are told, should be elected to office. They should be heads of companies. They should be taken seriously. Except if you look at COSMOPOLITAN, you see that all women care about is their idiot vanity. Hairstyles, make-up and fashion and looking at the mirror constantly is what this magazine is about...along with brainless ideas about watching Amazon Prime and checking out "foodies" who might have a good recipe on Instagram.
Put it this way, Ruth Bader Ginsberg didn't get where she is because she didn't know how often to change her panties or what kind of blush to put on her cheeks. Or how to tattoo her lips:
Just to prove that COSMOPOLITAN is not at all for sophisticated city women, here's an utterly vapid page on ASTROLOGY.
Yes, idiot women not only believe in horoscopes, but think that everybody born at a certain time of the year is "extra kinky" or wants to "keep those sex toys clean." (A Virgo cleans her dildo, a Leo does not?)
As Popeye once said when he went down on Olive Oyl, "That's all I can stands, I can't stands no more."
I reached my saturation in the douche world of DUMBTH when I saw THIS ad:
Yes. An ad for a PIRACY cartel from RUSSIA. This ain't a dot.com. There's no COM or NET or ORG with this site. It's RU. For RUSSIA. The sophisticated COSMOPOLITAN woman downloads pirated software, cheats copyright, and is just a few clicks away from 4CHAN, huh?
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