Harper's Bazaar: How Bazaar

The Mr. Dr. handed me a letter from a frequent flier club saying that in 30 days my points would be lost, if not used. Since they didn't add up to much, they sent along a list of magazines so that my company loyalty counted for something.

Being a slave to shelter magazines, I decided to venture into exotic periodical lands. One such choice was Harper's Bazaar. It has been a good fifteen years since any spare time or money has been spent on fashion magazines. Why not a freebie?

Harper's has a method to their fashion madness each month, I've noticed.

• Celebrity Cover airbrushed to perfection
• Fabulous for all ages (famous people of all ages looking fab)
  
• Pictures of Unwearable (for normal people) fashion
• Advertising for ridiculously expensive jewelry and make-up
• Glossy spread on cover celebrity imparting zero insight into vapid psyches
• End with "What's IN, What's OUT"

I truly cannot believe such fluffy wisps of nonsense sell magazines. This mag is obviously not aimed at teenagers--it's aimed at fifty year old women who are still intellectual teenagers.

Distrurbing trends:
Men getting plastic surgery
Pre-pubescent girls who weigh fifty pounds

Plastic surgery, I've decided is a horrible solution almost every time. It is heinous on men. Exhibit A--Jerry Jones. Exhibit B--Karl Lagerfeld. Exhibit C--Burt Reynolds.

Not having cable, much popular culture eludes me. But even Paris Hilton and the now anorexic Nicole Ritchie have penetrated my EST thanks to my nail guy who tapes all shows with said delightful ladies. Thinking that their tiny, boney arms were aberrations, it came as a shock to see skeletons, I mean girls, who were younger and so emaciated that they looked like starved refugees. Horrible! Kate Moss looks positively healthy and wholesome compared to the new models. Watch out Kate! Holograms are the new "next".

Finally, in Bazaar, the "Wedding of the Year", took the stage. Another skeletal woman, Delphine Arnault (keep scrolling down at that link, she's the skinny one in the shimmery silver confection on the right. Scroll down further and you see what old, rich people with too much plastic surgery look like. I love NYC!) married Alessandro Vallarino Gancia in the "famous Chateau d'Yqem in Bordeaux! It is about time that chateau gets some decent use.

The sheer emptiness of it all shocks me. The last time this feeling whooshed through me was at the gambling pit of The Mirage in Las Vegas watching people throw thousands of dollars away within minutes.

Men, in contrast, read mind junk food like Esquire. Funnily enough, the same models prance through those pages--just in menswear. How daring! How cutting edge! How androgynous! But at least Esquire contains some interesting writing. I stumbled across David Sedaris there. Other great writers started their careers there.

But not in women's magazines. Oh no! For the vainglory of it all, these magazines stubbornly adhere to ephemeral nothingnesss.

Maybe MoDo was on to something. She can hardly blame men for objectifying women, wanting to date "secretaries" and other lesser beings (than her). Women do it to themselves. Clinging to some fading, warped visage of slutty youth, women like Ms. Dowd are bound to be disappointed. Turning herself into some plastic, sleazy version of women a true man never found interesting to begin with--except to schtup--she and others like her, suddenly see themselves as they always were: beautiful, empty, promiscuous showpieces. And to think she thought she was liberated when she fell right into the classic female dichotomy: Madonna or Whore. Just a whore.

Harper's Bazaar and all the other female magazines amaze. Not one thing has changed in the last fifteen years except the models are skinnier, more boy-looking and everything is strangely homoerotic. We've come a long way baby.