A Buttery Canvas Like No Other

Sold! Materialism's Finest Hour

This is taking a lot of guts for me to admit, so I hope you all appreciate how honest I am being with you. When I'm in line at the supermarket or at some other discount supercenter, I often allow my eyes to wander onto the cover of one of those fashion or gossip magazines for women. Honestly, I think everyone does it. Sometimes, I'll even pick one up - but it's hopeless to try and find an article before it's your turn at the register, even if the family in front of you appears to stocking their fallout shelter. Until today, these magazines have only been a passing curiosity, but that changed this afternoon when I walked into my sister's apartment at lunch with nothing to do for a few hours. There, conveniently situated in an apple box next to her comfy armchair, rested this month's copy of Vogue magazine.

I feel I should stop here for a moment and make a few concessions to be fair. First of all, I have nothing against Vogue magazine in particular. In fact, I applaud them for their fine journalistic practices - such as featuring beautiful women on their covers. I will never fault a magazine for recognizing and taking advantage of what I believe to be some of God's finest work, as long as it is done tastefully and with respect for those women. Seriously, though, they print some fine examples of journalism and art. Secondly, I realize that I may not be the most qualified person to make judgments of a magazine's intentions when I'm clearly not in the people group that is being marketed to. I am a dude and, at the end of the day, I must admit that fashion falls somewhere after preference of popcorn topping on my list of personal priorities. I could make the argument that my opinion holds a certain desired objectivity given my apparent status as an outsider, but I'll give detractors the benefit of the doubt.

Here was my experience and discovery process, related as accurately as possible.

Jennifer Aniston is a striking woman, and on the cover she is wearing a striking red dress which accentuates certain of her striking features. This is the kind of image that must make women think something along the lines of, "Oh, she's so pretty," and makes men look at the magazine in the first place. Behind her head in large type is the magazine's name, VOGUE. It is prominent, being the second thing I noticed, but it artfully takes a back seat to the lady in red. No matter what insanity may exist in the space of the cover, its strong but quiet presence is always there, holding things together.

Four different features are advertised in type around the subject with a fifth, (BONUS!), feature advertised as a banner in the top left. This is pretty standard from what I've seen. The formula seems to be a pretty person surrounded by four features of the magazine with either a banner or starburst emblem serving as the eye-catching bonus article. In this case the banner reads: "EXTREME BEAUTY The Three-Minute Freeze for Younger-Looking Skin." Who can ignore that? In my case it was easily ignored in favor of the red type announcing the cover story which read, "JENNIFER ANISTON 'What Angelina Did Was Very Uncool.'" I love it when celebrities use popular slang.

With mild shame, I admit a certain compulsion to then comb through page after page until I could find what "uncool" action Angelina had taken against the lovely Aniston. I'm not even a celebro-stalker and I was tempted. Unfortunately, finding the article, or anything specific for that matter, proved no easy task.

Have you ever lifted one of these magazines? They are surprisingly hefty - much like a baby cousin you attempt to hoist at Thanksgiving after not seeing for a year. "Woah, kid needs to lay off the yam soufflé" The majority of this bulk comes not from insightful and keenly written exposés of fashion, beauty, and celebrity life, as you might expect, but from paying advertisers. When it took me a full minute to find the first of a series of widely separated tables of contents, I started watching the clock. I wanted to time how long it took an average, reasonably intelligent person to navigate to the eye-catching cover story. Over four and a half minutes later, I found it. Along the way I was treated to a number of ads which are worthy of some notation. Here is as complete a record as I could manage in looking back.

-347 pages total, 207 of which were totally dedicated ad space.
-38 two-page spreads.
-11 mulit-page serial ads, the longest of which was a series of 14 pages for Gap.
-25 Ads for jewelry or timepieces (super expensive stuff).
-28 Ads for fragrances (I got a mild headache from the mixed scents).
-8 Naked people. Mostly Jewelry and Fragrance ads. I guess if you aren't selling cloths, why feature them at all?
-29 people whom I personally believe would look ridiculous if they were in public. Note: this does not include the 8 naked people.
-3 ads which are set in some sort of bizarre fantasy world.
-2 Flyer insert ads.
-1 Fold out ad
-1 series of Nordstrom ads featuring a girl with gigantic hair.
-1 Guy wearing a tuxedo with flannel shirt.
-1 seriously unnerving image of Paris Hilton as a fairy.

It may come as no surprise that 59.7% of the booklet was purely ad space, but what did surprise me was the way in which their features and ads have evolved in co-habitation. For instance, if you were lucky enough to have opened the magazine randomly to one of the feature pages, chances are, it would take you a moment to figure out what you were looking at. All of the lengthy articles and photo-features have been moved to the very back of the book, where they are, amazingly, nearly uninterrupted by single page ads or inserts. If you open to the more valuable front and middle real estate, however, your feature sections are harder to distinguish from the advertisements and they come only once every 3-5 pages. The ads look like the main content, and the main content looks like the ads. Of course, who's to say the ad's aren't the main content? The evidence would certainly suggest such.

Feminist and non-feminists alike have recently taken to acknowledging the way these fashion magazines and tabloids give women a false sense of self-image. I agree. I think I saw two women who would be classified as overweight for a model. One was in a Dove ad, (they have built their campiegn around featuring 'real' women), and the other was artistically featured as a part of the background composition in a Dolce and Gabbana spread. Every other woman was deathly in need of a cheeseburger and/or photoshopped more than a UFO hunter magazine. The collective image of women is, in fact, unrealistic and unhealthy.

Yet they are still popular.

The image thing is legit, but I'll tell you what bothers me even more. Greed. Materialism. Vanity. Blatant consumer propaganda. Perhaps the best example of this is a 4-page ad series smack-dab in the middle of the magazine printed on thick, easy to stumble upon, paper. These are the type of ads people pay the big bucks for. The entire series is, essentially, gold worship. The company is Only Gold and, well, I suppose they really want you to like gold. Three pages are of women just hanging out with their fancy gold jewlery on. The messages on each of them read, "Only Gold is Treasured," "Only Gold Radiates Warmth," "Only Gold is Divine." Divine? The last time that was said of gold was when some people fashioned it into the shape of a calf, or something like that. Regardless of your faith, I think we can all agree open worship of physical matter is foolish, at the very least and a tragedy of mankind at worst. Picking on the gold ad isn't exactly fair, though. This is the same message echoed throughout the publication.

In fact, I challenge you to find more than 3 or 4 pages in succession that aren't promoting some sick level of materialism in one way or another. Speaking of which, how about the Aniston article? Well, it runs several pages with a relatively low picture/word ratio, which was a nice surprise. If you are hoping that it provides a much needed respite from the allure of the glamours life, however, you are sadly mistaken. Nearly the entire first page is devoted to descriptions of Jennifer's 10,000 square foot home, complete with expensive crap that even Anistion doesn't understand the meaning of. All of this uncalled for, vain and materialistic influence - this message of complete and extravagant false need - all of it from the simple curiosity of what Angelina did that was so "uncool." If you're still curious, I'm not going to tell you. It only costs $4.99 + a pit of lies.