Let me preface this by making clear that I did not subscribe to this fluffy crap magazine. This is just part of the legacy of the ex-husband who thought I’d actually like such a periodical.
So… the new issue came in the mail… among the other subjects on this homo version of Blush magazine was about the winner of their makeover contest and that he was once fat.
slow burn
I read the damn article. They had nothing to do with his weight loss, but they trumpeted it on the cover.
After all, it is the goal of every gay man to be thin and wearing the latest fashions, right?
Unfuck the lot of you at Out Magazine who felt you had to trumpet this on your front cover. Unfuck you further for feeling the need to tell us how he had an anti-cellulite cream rubbed on his love handles(and where were they?!?) which were then slapped to make them go away.
Yes, as you shot a picture of his saran wrapped midsection, the only way love handles could have been found was WITH AN ELECTRON MICROSCOPE!
It is such an irony that the opinion columns of your sister periodical, The Advocate, have been about body image.
So, just like the 100th episode of South Park, you can tell us we all need to be starving ourselves and working out 'til we drop as long as you also tell us how terrible it is with another arm how we shouldn’t conform to an unrealistic body image.
I hope you all go through a dry spell of such epic proportions that your sex lives become more arid than the Sahara desert, you sad pack of superficial, Armani pimping, collagen swilling, insipid motherfuckers.
Think it through, Snoooopy. If any of the editorial staff of Out are bottoms, as seems likely, then Mockingbird’s ejaculation* is the appropriate one for him to use on them.
Yeah, I have just been waiting for a chance to use that verb with reference to an imperative in a context such as this. Why do you ask?
It’s from a George Carlin routine. The idea being, everyone loves having sex, so being told “fuck you” isn’t really much of an insult. Therefore, the opposite, “unfuck you,” ought to be the real insult.
Not really one of his better routines, IMO. I tend to find Carlin’s pedantic literalist schtick to be tiresome rather than funny.
Don’t be silly. This isn’t the goal of every gay man, it’s the goal of every living organism on Earth. Why do you think the troops in Iraq were depolyed with racks of Donna Karen outfits and a C-14 full of ThighMasters? Being thin and fashionable is more important than God, family, or country. It’s true: I read it in Maxim.
Back in the '70s and '80s The Advocate had plenty of “make sure you stay young and pretty” advertisements. These days, the seem to be a more mainstream news magazine that focuses on GLBT issues. They still run “young and beautiful” advertising, but no where near as much as they use to (YMMV).
Now Frontiers! That’s a different story. I’ll never forgive them for cancalling Leonard & Larry for no good reason! :mad:
You lost me somewhere re the rationale for your fury. What precisely did you expect from a magazine whose intended audience is primarly gay men?
For better or worse mainstream gay male culture (whether it’s Out mag or whatever) has never been particularly embracing of fat or a poor fashion sense. I think you would find Bass Master Monthly to be a far more progressive magazine on this issue.
Excuse me? Why would the fact a magazine is marketed to gay men somehow make it right that it’s actively encouraging dreadful body image? I know it’s common; gay bashing is also common, but that doesn’t mean we don’t get to be furious about it.
Matt with all due respect while I am not gay, I have a lot more experience being tubby than you do and yo-yoing up and down between an acceptable “hard muscle” weight of 225 and being the size of a Volkswagen. Being substantially fat is dangerous to one’s health and is not fun in any way, shape or form. Being dangerously fat is becoming a pandemic in the US. We are becoming nation of grotesque, overfed blimps waddling from one fast food outlet to another. If Out magazine wants to glurge about how good someone looks because they lost weight more power to them.
What they are advertising is the furthest thing from a healthy way of living or thinking about one’s body. They are advocating a mentality characterized by spending huge amounts of money on gyms and cremes and protein, and it’s not so you can have better cardiovascular health, it’s so you can be an A-list pretty person and be cruised at the fucking White Party.
To review, it has got nothing to do with health and everything to do with highly profitable poor self-image. And it’s not directed towards people who are actually obese, but to gay men with ordinary bodies in a culture where the perfect is required.
Yeah, I had the same reaction. Why on earth did they take two (the runner-up chick was also pretty damn good looking on her own) really attractive people and make them over? Makeovers are for utterly unfashionable schmoes like me who couldn’t apply eyeliner properly if Helen Gurley Brown herself had a gun to our heads.
But really, what do you expect from a mag that, as near as I can tell, does nothing but interview extremely popular straight actors about what it was like to play a gay character in their latest project?
Now, if anybody wants to lament the decline and fall of Bust magazine, I’ll be weeping silently in my room.
I do not agree, and thus have vented my spleen here and in a letter to the editor of their magazine.
And to assume that this is what gay men want or are about is ludicrous.
To add to what Matt said(and very well I might add), there is also the opposite ends of the spectrum: those who are fat and those who are mega skinny.
Generally neither of these types can expect to look like the image they are being sold and told is the thing they should be.
It is oppressive and pervasive to be sold an image using a fear appeal to make us believe that if we don’t fit this image, we will be alone and sexless for life.
I know many of my friends and many that I have talked to about this sort of issue do agree with me. The problem is that most of them would not take the time to speak out because they don’t think they could make a difference.
