The Antisocial Socialist

The Second Cup has these new lattes that are raspberry and dark chocolate and basically bourgeois, foamy, sugary goodness. They come with free magazines. If you're a girl, they give you Elle, if you're a boy, Canadian Home & Garden or some shit. I guess. I don't know any boys who would drink a raspberry and dark chocolate latte. Boys miss out on all kinds of great things. Anyway, I put the Elle in the loo along with the latest Vice and Industrial Worker. (My bathroom reading is eclectic. My real reading is eclectic, but more tasteful—at the moment, I'm reading Settlers by Sakai and Perdido Street Station by Miéville.)

So I ended up reading Elle for the first time ever. I occasionally read shitty fashion magazines at the dentist's but this is so much worse. It's particularly bad in contrast to Vice, which, for all its libertarian sexist and racist garbage in the past, cobbled together a really fantastic issue on "Girls" that made perfect bathroom reading.



My main problem with these kinds of magazines is that I can't tell when the ads stop and the articles begin. Well, it isn't my main problem, but it's annoying. Most of the articles are about a paragraph long and really offensive. Here are all the things that shocked my delicate sensibilities.

1. Cover "The latest in plastic surgery," along with some woman named Kylie. Or Kylie! actually, with an exclamation point. I guess I am expected to know who that is, but I don't.

2. Editor's note. First sentence: "Recently I was at a fundraiser for Gilda's Club, an international organization that provides support for those living with cancer."

I bet with a sentence like that, you'd expect the editorial to be about cancer or something. It isn't. It's about how Jeanne Beker (is that the person from CityTV?) looks really hot in a short red dress. And how the party was a "boob fest." I guess they didn't invite people with breast cancer.

3. Letters Tiffany A. Siu, via e-mail, raves about how the monthly Radar section reflects the country's multicultural society and is a step toward diversity. I flipped ahead to Radar and everyone in it was white. Oookay.

4. Style "Messy hair shows that you're not trying too hard to impress."

This, according to Elle, is how you get messy hair: "Wash and condition the hair, then massage a hair-thickening lotion and a mousse into the scalp to starch up the hair and hold the style. Blow-dry the hair, using fingers to lift it away from the scalp. Gather it into a ponytail, and fasten it with an elastic. Twist the pony into a loose bun, securing it with pins. Mess it up by lightly running your hands from the bun toward your face, freeing stray hairs."

According to me, this is how you get messy hair: "Lie down for a bit. Have sex. If you aren't into really athletic sex, maybe go for a walk on a windy day. I just saved you about $100 in hair care products."

5. Style "Coco Rocha is gawky, not gamine. She has a snub nose and a slight overbite. She's also the model of the moment...Rocha says that in school, she was never Miss Popularity. Gotta love those ugly-duckling stories."

I never got the hang of vomiting into a toilet, unfortunately. Seventeen years old. Is that child abuse?

6. Tactics Someone named Susan "intuitively" tells Moody Blues to dump her depressed boyfriend. "If you continue on this path, his negative energy will become yours...I think you will leave him and find new romance. The new guy will either sail or like water sports."

I hope you like being peed on, sweetie!

7. Love "For the Love of Money" tells you how to be both "well-shod and well-heeled."

Put it this way. If you can't stop yourself from spending $1,000 on shoes during a single shopping trip, you are going to be first up against the wall come the revolution anyway. So don't worry about budgeting.

8. Love "For the Love of Pets." Okay, Marinetti did have a $10 catnip toy, once, but it was for a fundraising project, and it provided so many hours of amusement because it was shaped like George Bush that it was totally worth the money, all of which went to a good cause.

P.S. Your dog doesn't care if you spend $29 on dog truffles or $695 for a dog collar. It will wolf down the former and probably chew the latter to bits, given how uncomfortable it looks.

9. Fashion If those big puffy dresses make 80-pound models look fat, how do you think they're going to look on a 3-dimensional human?

10. Beauty Actually, making a line of perfume based on Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick Süskind is pretty funny. (The movie sucked, by the way.)

11. Beauty "Face Odyssey": Finally, I got to the promised article on plastic surgery. Unlike most of the articles, it was several pages long and listed pros ("little or no pain") and cons ("possible redness, blisters and bumps and, in rare cases, some surface irregularities"). The absolute best part, though, must be reproduced in its entirety.

African Queen
If you've always dreamed of getting up at sunrise to watch giraffes cross the African plain and of getting new breasts, now you can have both. South Africa's Surgeon and Safari [website] offers package deals that include a pre-surgery safari, your choice of a five-star hotel, and an assistant to accompany you to surgery. Rates for lifts, augmentations, resurfacing and tucks are almost a third of what you'd pay in Canada.

Racism, sexism, colonialism, and mindless capitalist indulgence all in one! Die in a fire, plz thx.

The whole thing ends with a picture of the Prince of Wales and some cancan dancers.

The rest of the weekend was spent in meetings, watching La Chinoise (like Raspberry Reich but without the gay porn), and messing up my hair.