The image-consciousness and romantic desperation of your favorite fashion magazines -- now available on the Web!
If you're a woman, at some point on the path to adulthood you probably realized that women's magazines were stunting your spiritual and intellectual growth and swore off them permanently.
Still, you probably have your weak moments -- when you're at the dentist, maybe, or standing in line at the supermarket. A headline might grab you: "He'll Never Lie Again: Getting a Guy to Tell the Truth." You flip to the story, in which the male author tells you that "There are lying guys, and then there are guys with a relaxed relationship to the truth. Women often can't tell the difference." You buy the magazine, curious to see what headlines those clever editors at CondéNast could possibly have come up with to disguise the same stories they've been running every month since 1975 (always some variation on the theme of "How to Club Him Over the Head Without Killing Him -- or His Sex Drive"). You tuck away your naughty little indulgence beneath copies of The New Yorker and Harper's -- far beneath, for fear the pungent smell from the Obsession perfume ad may waft up and give you away as -- gasp! -- the sort of person who reads women's magazines.
But now the best of gender-specific fashion magazines have been brought to your fluff-seeking fingertips, and without the stinky perfume ads and the public humiliation. Welcome to CondeNet's Swoon, where with a single click you can get all the essential information you need on "Dating, mating and relating" (translation: self-deprecating, opposite gender-hating, and we-should-all-spend-more-time-masturbating) It's a world where a quartet of CondéNast's gender-specific titles -- Details, Mademoiselle, GQ and Glamour -- co-exist side-by-side (boy-girl-boy-girl, get it?) in what appears to be an environment of open exchange, where the sexes can be brought closer to mutual understanding. A place where, perhaps, the editors at CondéNast have decided that it's finally time to stop preying on the paranoid insecurities of the lovelorn and instead bring men and women together to demystify relationships and the experience of sex.
Not a chance.
But that's part of the reason I read fashion magazines, to check in from time to time with the trend barometer and see if it's still That Bad Out There in the romantic trenches. But after reading all of what Swoon had to offer -- horoscopes, personals, Q&As, and a plethora of anonymous personal accounts (like I said, only the essentials) -- I realized it's Much Worse.
The first time on the site, I bypassed the personals, went straight to the magazine rack and clicked on Glamour. I then had to choose one of three different sections: Relating, Sex or Men. Dazzled by the vast diversity of subjects, I clicked on Sex, and the following question appeared in bold: "She has trouble climaxing -- is her small clitoris to blame?" This was a new low. Wasn't it enough to create insecurities about our breasts, our buttocks, and our bad breath? I can just see the signs on the display case at Toys 'R' Us -- "Brand New Barbie! Anatomically corrected!" And here you thought if you kept those pesky Trouble Spots in check and correctly decoded his pillow talk, the orgasm would be in the bag.
Undaunted, I turned to the Mademoiselle horoscopes, which promised to reveal my weekly "zodiacal" fate. I decided to find my love match and clicked on "Cosmic Connections." I filled in my sign (Gemini) and for lack of anyone better, I filled in the "His sign" blank with that of an old boyfriend (Scorpio). A skull and cross-bones appeared on the screen. They weren't so far off, really. Maybe there is something to this. I decided to go ahead and try the personals.
"Welcome all seekers of love, friendship, hot times and witty self-actualized prose," it greeted. The hapless love-seekers offered their best personal profiles. This from someone calling herself Jezebel: "I'd be willing to get arrested over violations of human rights . . . I'm an old fashioned girl trapped in a feminist body. I love to laugh, hate describing myself, crave a man who can carry on a conversation, and I'm in no hurry to meet a prince, I find frogs to be much more interesting." Self-actualized prose? Sounds more like self-fulfilling prophecy.
In the early days of the Web, the climate for romance-seeking computer geeks must have resembled Key West and Provincetown in their gay heyday -- a world filled only with people of the same ilk, where romance blossomed freely and flirtation was a harmless pasttime -- that is, until the tourists started arriving in droves.
You can only imagine how it all started. Picture yourself in the boardroom at a CondéNast editorial meeting. Some young whippersnapper raises his hand.
"I have an idea! We could have a Web site strictly dedicated to romance!"
A VP shoots him down: "Steve, geeks aren't our market. Never have been, never will be. You should know that."
But the crusty CEO sees the potential: "Wait a second, the kid's got a point. There's millions of people out there on the Web, and they're striking up relationships, even without our guidance. They are communicating with one another purely through the written language, not physical attraction. It's just not natural! We must set their priorities straight!"
And thus Swoon embarked on infusing the Web with the sort of relentless insecurity that they've sucessfully been selling to newsstand shoppers for decades. Each and every horoscope, personal account, Q&A and health tip is designed to strike fear in the hearts of the unattached. And it's a small comfort that it happens on both sides -- GQ features an account of a woman giving up her single life in Sin City to live in domestic bliss with her boyfriend in North Carolina (the pool is shrinking, better swim fast), Glamour features a story written by a man about how a woman's gestures of love could be misinterpreted as stalking. Par for intercourse, you could say.
So a word of caution before you go Swooning: don't think you'll escape Obsession. Obsession is still what CondéNast is all about -- you can practically smell it.