Maghag is a blogger, but unlike most blogs, she’s penetrated the thick heads and skins of suburbia’s original sacred cattle: The super-big fashion mags. Not famous for their sensitivity, or sanity, the supermags loathe her.
Even scarier, unless you’re really into that sort of biology, she’s after the magazine editors. It’s like necrophilia by mail. Her blog is called
4incheelsonly, which refers to a compulsion by magazine staff to wear huge heels as part of their identity.
(The link on the article doesn’t work, for some reason. This one does)
The Sunday Telegraph:
According to MagHag, one magazine editor reads a novel under her desk before nipping off for a "chardy'' at a three-hour lunch.
And most of the staff, the blogger writes, spend too much time having Botox injections to make an appearance in Sunday social pages.
The revelations are so close to the bone that insiders say the magazines have launched a witch-hunt to identify and sack MagHag.
But in an email exchange with The Sunday Telegraph last week, MagHag said she couldn't care less.
It takes a while to realize she’s talking about the Australian magazines, but the principle could be applied to any of the rag trade rags, anywhere.
"I found it very interesting that so many girls are now on it discussing things I touch upon, like unpaid work experience and the horrible jobs they have to do, or how certain editors are happy to receive things from designers like Chanel and Prada but can be heard taking the p*** out of some unfashionable gifts.''
A letter sent to 4inchheels last month warned: "You are being investigated.''
MagHag is thought to work for ACP (Australian Consolidated Press, major publisher) Magazines on level five where Cosmopolitan, Shop Til You Drop and Harper's Bazaar are based.
As you can see, it doesn’t really matter where they are, the fashion mags are pretty much the same. Being investigated by people with fossilized craniums sounds like it might take a while.
Cultural note: Women’s mags are one of the great fortresses of the wonderful, warm, loving humanist benevolent society we all know and respect so much. They may be beyond hope, but they’re also beyond criticism. You’ll never see a battered wife, a campaign about deadbeat dads, a women’s shelter, a women’s rights issue, any gay issues, or the word “empowered”, except as a thematic typo, because they don’t know what it means. Whole generations have been raised in their image.
They’re the Wal Mart of the soul. Everything’s off the shelf, is based on market, not human, values, and it was made somewhere else, too.
So MagHag has achieved a lot, to penetrate the boorish bovine world as deeply as she has.
Raising the dead would be relatively easy.
Witness ye this episode:
I
n the email interview with The Sunday Telegraph, MagHag said she was not overly concerned about losing her job or her identity being discovered.
She said she had not been warned by ACP executives to stop the blog, but had received ``catty comments'' from colleagues on her site.
Cosmopolitan beauty editor Leigh Campbell posted a public letter to MagHag on Friday morning, condemning the site.
Her comments followed a blog titled "The perils of the freebies'', which criticised beauty editors for using face peels, Botox and collagen to look like a Mattel Barbie and gain coverage in the Sunday newspaper social pages.
"If you had any sort of knowledge or idea, you would know that beauty editors are just as hard-working and passionate as any other journalist,'' Ms Campbell wrote.
"Right now your negativity is poisoning you and the world has no time for pathetic people.''
“…beauty editors are just as hard-working and passionate as any other journalist.”
Yeah, I was wondering how Vogue ended world hunger.
That’s what “passionate” means to other media. Not to these fossils.
“Passionate” means being prepared to praise a lip gloss in public.
Indeed, I’ve frequently wondered how a literal forest a week of glossy irrelevance managed to be so spiritually aware.
Speaking on behalf of the world is apparently habitual. We’re talking about the merits of criticizing Botox, remember, so important social issues are involved.
If these people couldn’t get drunk and show up in the social pages wearing the remains of their upholstery, nobody would know who they were.
That’s why negativity is so awful and wrong, and criticizing anyone who might, one day, know how to sit behind a desk as if alive, is so terrible.
Generations of little girls wouldn’t know they’re supposed to grow up like animals, and use toxic materials as a form of pheromone. Thousands of women whose exposure to fashion and beauty is defined by tedious alcoholic trolls wearing Chanel seconds might develop styles of their own.
Terrifying thought, isn't it?
