Although I work for a fashion-industry publication, it hasn't (so far) changed my long-held opinion that the fashion world and any non-ironic writing about it are superficial by nature. Admittedly, my interest in fashion, like my interest in all popular culture, screeches to a halt in 1968. But the content of this magazine—which, to avoid libel charges, I'll call Candida—is so superficial that it makes the publication I work for seem like National Catholic Register.

I know it's silly to get worked up over a publication that simply contains slightly exaggerated takes on subjects that are rampant within the contemporary women's magazine world. To paraphrase Ann Landers or whomever, I should wake up and smell the Starbucks. But, not owning a TV, I explore the Candida side of the world so rarely that it still has the power to get my dander up—dander which no doubt may be eliminated by some of the products advertised in that same magazine.

I think I wouldn't mind the magazine's all-sex/all-liberalism/all-the-time attitude if the writing were better. But I can't abide a magazine that's ostensibly for women my age, which reads as if it were a learning-disabled version of Sassy. (Sincere apologies to learning-disabled people.) It was truly an embarrassing experience, as I rode the PATH train yesterday, to have to keep flipping the pages so people wouldn't see that I was reading articles with titles like, "I Worked at a Clothing-Optional Workplace."

And don't think it's just the sex that bothered me. It's the politics. J.R. Taylor, my former colleague at New York Press (who is still there and writes a very funny column on nightlife), has shown me that it is possible to write abot sexual topics without assuming a giddy, brain-dead, knee-jerk liberal standpoint. (He's yet to convince me that porn stars are by and large conservative, but he has at least demonstrated that they include a number of professed Republicans in their ranks.) And it's not even the politics so much as the gleefully juvenile way they're expressed. (I do give them half a point for gleefulness—if you're going to be juvenile, you might as well enjoy it.)

A blue-state bastion like Glamour will at least have thoughtful, sensitive, and articulate features on why women should kill their babies (at least, it did back when I used to read it), Candida's political savvy is limited to an article on how the President of the United States resembles every lousy ex-boyfriend they ever had. The article's copious footnotes criticize the president's religious conversion for causing him to stop acting out sexually. Such self-repression, it claims, is behind his opposition to Roe vs. Wade. In other words, give me Clinton, and give my babies death!

Throughout, Candida's language and prose is so utterly moronic that it almost makes me ashamed to be part of the nation—no, the gender—no, the species—that created such a thing.

"But, Lord, why did you allow your angels to cast a huge portion of humanity into the bottomless pit, where the fires will never be quenched and their worm will never die?"

"Because they were part of the global community that produced such articles as, 'Do You Screw Like You Drive?'"