Why do Heat/Closer type magazines make me feel uncomfortable?

Teiwara i was absolutely disgusted and appalled by Grazias Cheryl Cole cover too.
In fact i was queueing in Superdrug last week for the till and in our local one you have to queue beside their magazine stand.
In front of me in the queue were four very pretty, slim and perfectly healthy looking young women. Two of them were saying how they were fat and needed to go on a diet. They had just been thumbing through the celebrity mags. They were beautiful looking young women and i told them so. I also remember saying to them that the most they should be worrying about is which club they were gonna go to on Friday night. i left the shop feeling very sad and thanking God that im not in my teens/twenties any more. I feel very sad about the pressure and mysogyny that affects young women now.

I walked past them this other week and noticed they were sporting pictures of how you can go on a 2-week diet and look like Cheryl Cole, cue 2 pictures the before in which she looks genuinely lovely and very slim already and the after in which she is starting to look a bit too thin...

It just made me think they really don't give a fuck about how the people reading this will think about themselves do you? To say a woman who can't possibly be more than a size 8 or so needed to go on a diet.

Anyway, they have moved from my harmless to officially evil camp now!

I bought Psychologies for the first time this week.

Not sure how I feel about it. I loathe 'women's' magazines for all the reasons already stated. I thought Psychologies might be a bit different.

It's a tad woo, and I'm really not interested in their fash features with £200 scarves, but there's no woman-bashing.

Just checked this and it would seem the feature in this weeks Grazia (about the man fed up with dating and wanting a wife )has been written for them by the features editor of ZOO magazine!

Pleeeeaaasssseeee do not buy them. Let's starve their women baiting asses into folding.

Printing photo's of a famous woman's knees in order to criticise their appearance is hateful.

Ive just come off the Grazia website. Apparently there is a feature this week written by a man on how hes fed up with dating and just wants a wife.
Well of course he does. He wants a fucking housekeeper.
Do Grazia really believe that women are this thick?

also The Hairpin is a non-vom-inducing online mag. Most of the time. Some of the advice stuff can be vom-inducing in style, but it's a non-woman-hating magazine.
How tragic that 'non-woman-hating!' should be an exciting recommendation!

They are awful, I stopped reading them ages ago. I have to say that I like Jezebel which is an online magazine. It's not perfect and is based in America but I like it so have a look if you want a non awful magazine.

I cant stand those magazines. The other week I was in the supermarket and the woman in front of me was buying a handful of that crap. I so wanted to say to her 'I wondered what kind of idiots buy that crap' but I didnt but I sure though it.

I was in the hairdressers not long ago and was handed the usual bunch of rubbish magazines. One of them though was Woman and Home. I was so surprised, what a refreshing change. It had a great interview with Annie Lennox and had interviews with other empowered women from the world of business etc. It was really good, I was really surprised.

OP get someone to get you a copy!

Because they're crap and assume you are mentally retarded?

OP, I am with you but the sleb mags are a fraction better than the 'wimmins mags' - the dreadful Marie Claire / Grazia / Cosmo, that assume we all obsess about fashion and relationships.

Frankly, I would rather read about Peter Andre's Love For His Kids than look at pictures of £500 shoes and do quizzes on 'What type of Lover are you?'. Insulting tosh.

They are designed to make you feel bad about yourself. They point and sneer at slobs on one page then have an ad for maybelline or some such on the next. It's just to get you to spend spend spend. Look at the staff lists- more work in sales than features.

I find it really insulting being told what to buy, and the glossies are even worse for this.

I think you put your finger on it perfectly, TBH! What makes it (initially) difficult is that magazines are sold as a kind of 'guilty pleasure' so you're being invited to associate the uncomfortable feelings with that, not with the content, which if it were in a different context, would be much more obviously shocking. I find Grazia even more dodgy, the way it juxtaposes genuine issues, some of the feminist, with utter woman-hating tripe ('Kate Moss looks haggard/gorgeous/tarty/sad/excited, we think her marriage is perfect/on the rocks/a scam to sell babies to Martians').

There was a thread a while back about magazines and stopping reading them, it was quite good. I used to buy Vogue every month and Grazia probably every week, and I saved myself a lot of money off that thread!

I like Stylist - it may be capitalist consumer porn full of insanely expensive shmutter, and cosmetic surgery but it never slags off other women. And it's free (thus saving you a quid or two which you can save up for the Louboutins it will brainwash you into).

Just don't but them. Read a book. Read a paper (the Independent is my choice). Read a magazine about gardening or furnishings or horses or badminton or whatever takes your fancy.

Just don't buy a "women's" magazine - even the "better" ones are shit these days. I have stopped bothering entirely.

I get gardening magazines.

They rarely raise the blood pressure too much

I detest them. Utterly utterly detest them. I think they are responsible for so much insecurity, body dysmorphia and angst among girls and young women these days than just about any other single factor.

One day they show an intrusive close up of some sleb's cellulite or tiny 'pot belly' and start making passive aggressive comments about the fact that she is putting on weight, when in reality she's a perfectly normal, healthy and desirable size, and the next day they'll zone in on some painfully thin girl who is held up as a role model for her thinness and ask in a faux concerned way 'is she anorexic?'

I wouldn't wipe my arse on the bloody things.

i always buy New Scientist at the airport for my holidays!

i struggle to understand the whole gossip magazine, tabloid drivel page thing. it seems to be such a massive industry.

Because they are designed to make you hate yourself, OP. Gleeful nastiness is right. They make their readers insecure by portraying impossible beauty standards then make them feel better by tearing down some celeb for failing to meet them. Grim. I havent read one in ten years and I've never missed them!

What shocked me was in the New Year issue of Heat a few years ago, they actually printed the Xmas cards they had recived from slebs. And the symbiotic relationship between Heat and thw slebs was revealed in all its slimey, sycophantic, gut-wrenching glory.

Slebs who had been pilloried for gaining a few pounds writing: "Thanks, guys, for all your support!!! Xoxo"

Slebs who had been the object of ridicule for leaving a gym with a sweat mark on their sweat pants: "Merry Xmas to all the Heat gang! Love ya all!"

Slebs who had been the victim of domestic violence and told thwir story to Heat: "All the best to my best team EVAH! have a good one!"

They're much worse than Take a Break (which is quite good-natured, actually, despite the plethora of My Granny Stole My Boyfriend type stories), because they feed on women's insecurities, and encourage women to judge other women for too much cellulite/wearing a dress they once wore before, etc. There is a tone of savage gleeful nastiness that I find utterly repugnant.

They're horrible.

To me they're part of the same genre as Take a Break, and by extension, those god-awful misery porn abuse survivor stories. Awful. Awful.

I hate the proliferation of celebrity magazines as well - I don't read them. Nasty, pernicious nonsense.

buy New Scientist, Viz and Fortean Times instead; you'll feel much better :)

Because they reduce women to a collection of body parts.