The Cosmopolitan girl

Odd. Very odd. There's a definite purpose to the oddness, and every so often a glimmer of deeper meaning shines through, but still. This is a strange little book, and I will do my best to put my finger on just how so.

Now, I don't have that much experience with reading the Cosmopolitan, but it's pretty clear that the focus of this book is on the satirization on the pop pulp regularly churned through the publication. The money, the sex, the sorts of 'revolutions' that are in fact rather ridiculously useless when compared to the issues of deep oppression that are not only condoned, but in fact propagated by the atmosphere of fifteen seconds of fame. The more bigotedly outrageous and virulently hateful, the better. In fact, the only moments show more when the book touches upon reality is when one of its main characters, a Rush Limbaugh stand in who pushes the limits of the poisonous spewing vented forth on radio stations (Or not. It may actually be that bad.), has his moments in the spotlight. All of the other entries, whose total amounts to 145 and whose content spans from short clips of sentences to a couple of pages of so, is concerned with the sort of clichéd banalities one finds in horoscopes and the majority of serial magazines.

It is this use of banalities in context with the a wide range of pop culture events where the work shines. These linguistic methodologies, so easily twisted and able to convey the weirdest of situations in the most misguided of terms that normalizes the strange and sensationalizes the usual, make for a variegated display of the sort of poor quality that provides most of the volume for today's articles. What marks the difference between the writing of this book and that of real publications is the author's intentional pushing of weird situations on the reader, weaving back and forth between the 'normal' and the 'grotesque' in a show of just how contrived these standards are when faced with the language of popular magazines. When one is far more accustomed to viciously spat out rants of extremely prejudiced radio hosts than harmless absurdities, one must ask how much meaning there really is in all this vacuous blathering floating around in both the written word and the air waves, and just what sort of message is being conveyed to the passively receptive public.

When it comes to the US, we laugh at the oddities of Cosmopolitan tips and take hate mongering as a matter of course. Says some concerning thing about the state of the culture, don't you think? show less