Women’s Magazines Are Obviously Horrible

…with the “you need sunscreen on your eyeballs now,” and the “here is how to combine egg whites and frozen vegetables in such a way as to briefly distract you from your loneliness,” so I’ve gotten in the habit of just buying men’s magazines at the airport instead (“Outside,” “Men’s Journal,” and “Esquire,” mostly), which worked for a very little while.

Until it became apparent that they have a similar cycle of repeating pieces, some of which all boil up simultaneously in their July issues, like “how to survive a shark attack.” Or a bear attack, or an equipment malfunction while scaling El Capitan, etc.

(Which I think is the men’s magazine version of “here are ninety toning exercises you can do at the gym as part of our ninth yearly issue on Finally Getting In Shape,” which you very occasionally see women bring to the gym, sheepishly, because you can’t REMEMBER THEM, obviously, so they’re yanking out a mat and some five pound weights and then using their iPod to hold down the torn-out sheets so they can vainly flail through some pointless bicep curls.)

But the SURVIVING THINGS articles are kind of great, as a realistic Surviving Things piece for the average subscriber should be more like “your statin is probably doing you more harm than good” and “checking to see who’s just texted you while driving counts as texting while driving” and “if you have any moles that look like these, go see your dermatologist.”

Which you can tell by looking at the ads in the back of these magazines, as, unlike the articles, the ads demonstrate who the magazine believes you to be, not who they’ve found it lucrative to make you think you are.

And the back of “Men’s Journal” is a sea of those small metal-and-plastic devices intended to improve your grip strength, so make of that what you will.