I read the April issue of Elle magazine this morning and got upset in a way I haven’t felt about a magazine in a while, maybe because I haven’t read a magazine — besides the random stack of ‘94-’96 New Yorkers that constitute the only way to procrastinate in the Moscow apartment, so please go ahead and ask me any questions you may have about the OJ trial or Roseanne — in a while. I know that an entire website exists now to call out women’s magazines’ foibles and (sorry Anna! Sorry Sadie!) I haven’t read that website in a while either, so for all I know they’ve already gotten around to all this stuff. But I don’t think I’m writing in the spirit of “you should know about some instances of disingenuous bad ‘feminism’” or “glossy monthlies aren’t making such a good case for their non- obsolescence,” although you should, and they aren’t. Partly I am trying to figure out why I can’t get over it when arbiters of taste undermine their credibility by stamping their approval on things that are blatantly not in their readers’ best interests. Maybe this is a thing that will always piss me off. Mostly, though, I am saying that it’s sad that a magazine that could be great is so neutered and boring. Page after page in Elle, good and interesting stuff alternates with fatuous filler, so reading it feels like working on a knitting project that never gets any bigger because you unravel every stitch you knit.*

A coverline promised that the magazine would contain megabestselling Eat Pray Love author Elizabeth Gilbert’s thoughts on success. Exciting! Seriously. For everyone female under 50 who makes her living by writing, Elizabeth Gilbert’s success is like the hot-buttonest topic possible, and she’s pretty hot-buttony for non-writer women too. The editor’s letter explained how this article came to be: somewhere in a previous issue, a contributor had made fun of “the gestalt”* of Gilbert’s memoir of travel, spiritual self-discovery and romantic fulfillment, and then Elle’s editors had to sit down and figure out how Elle felt about Gilbert. The conclusion? Gilbert is important because she represents the aspect of “modern feminism” that emphasizes that “women’s pleasure” is important. Again: Gilbert represents an aspect of “feminism,” so she is okay by Elle.

And then a few pages later there is the de rigueur page about the products and objects and musics listened to (the White Stripes and Jack Johnson, from Reese Witherspoon’s own iPod) during the cover shoot. The uncredited — and thus voice-of-magaziney — text alongside these images mentions that Witherspoon’s boyfriend Jake Gyllenhaal stopped by the shoot unannounced, and that the couple danced together to the music. The text then wonders when we will hear “wedding bells” for these two.

Then there were a million ads for clothes and makeup interspersed with photo-heavy pages of fashion items. That stuff has never really been my bag so I habitually skip over it, but I know some people are really into it and from what I could tell it was laid out very prettily. I am not at all holier than thou about shopping and cuteness, I am just a tactile person and looking at pictures of stuff in magazines doesn’t get me off, I like to go to stores and fondle things. So I skipped to the back of the book, eager to get to what I knew I would find there: the alarmist beauty/health trendpiece, the alarmist relationship trendpiece, the token political piece that focuses on a superficial or celebrity-inflected aspect of politics, and the celebrity profiles.

Oh also I should mention the books section, though. I didn’t read it this time but in the past I have always appreciated Elle’s books section a lot. There is really nothing else like it — seriously, try to find serious, non-trendy book coverage that isn’t just shoutouts to authors who are hot right now/who the editors know in any other glossy monthly, you won’t! — and it reaches a lot of people and I wish it long life. Their picks go way beyond the book club lady comfort zone and their reviews, even when they’re short, are substantive and trustworthy.

But my pedicure was almost over and I had to get to the Gilbert profile, so I hustled to the alarmist health and beauty story: A young woman’s skin erupted into cystic acne overnight, and after a lot of confusion and not having health insurance she finally discovered that the cause was polycystic ovary syndrome. In conclusion, the writer lauds the young woman’s new ascetic lifestyle and her tough but not hardened survivor’s attitude, and decides to stop putting so much sugar in her coffee, even though her own skin’s pretty much okay.

The alarmist relationship story was by Leslie Bennetts, whom I love unreservedly, and it was about how men who make less money than their wives might sometimes try to subtly undermine them. Hiding office supplies, picking fights the night before important work events, and having “angry sex” were all cited as symptoms of this condition, which according to one of the experts Bennetts cited can be blamed on “the patriarchy.” Bennetts ended the article by quoting that expert, or maybe another expert, saying that “There’s a lot of hope,” but nothing else in the article — or in, you know, the world — really supported that conclusion.

The politics lite story was by Ariel Levy and it was about Michelle Obama’s fashion sense. I’m sure it was good and full of genius Levyisms, but I skipped it because, well, yay Michelle Obama’s fashion sense but what fucking ever.

The Reese Witherspoon profiler, as per Reese Witherspoon usual, had to try to make a story out of how Witherspoon has become an expert at being completely opaque to reporters. They met in a courtyard outside Reese’s production company, Reese was late, there was some confusion about salads, one assistant ushered the reporter in and another told Reese when it was time to leave, and in the meantime they talked about absolutely nothing. Witherspoon made studiedly boring truism-filled allusions to her divorce and current relationship. They could not exactly talk about the craft involved in her most recent role because it was in Monsters vs. Aliens, though the reporter gamely made an attempt to pretend that this movie was somehow relevant to Elle’s readership by saying it was “not just for kids” and that Witherspoon’s character, a ‘girl who takes on the universe,’ is similar to Witherspoon herself.

And then after all that the Gilbert profile was actually pretty great. Without exactly positioning herself as a Gilbert apologist, the writer gave plenty of examples of why we can’t dismiss her massive success as a fluke. And Gilbert’s quotes made her seem down to earth and fun and self-possessed.   She would rather go to the Renaissance Faire than crank out 75 books like Philip Roth. Her next book is about marriage, which she had at one time been opposed to, but it sounds like she did a lot of research — she doesn’t think that ‘being a complete failure at something makes you an expert in it,’ which is exactly the kind of breezy aha! ha! epigram that makes people love her writing so hard — and now she is into it. She threw out an entire completed version of the book, took the summer off, then embarked on a new one. The way she talks about her relationship with her now-husband, who she met at the end of all her eating and praying, is verrrry interesting, focused on “companionship” and “niceness.” She says “fucking” in a very offhand way. And she is unapologetic about her antipathy towards being a Mom in a way that her audience — you’d think? — will find hard to relate to. ‘I don’t notice any shortage of kids,’ she says, after explaining that she had to “mourn” the kids she once imagined she’d have. She also cops to not meditating or doing yoga every day — “Right now I have to finish this book.”

So: a great profile, thought-provoking, mind-changing, all-the-right-notes-hitting. But finding it at the end of a magazine about how you will not have good skin until you start being a better person, or a good marriage until — wait, what do you mean you’re not married? — etc, etc … is kind of like finding that one of the pieces in your box of chocolate laxatives is a real chocolate.

*possibly this is a better metaphor for how it feels to read Bust, ha ha.

*I left the magazine at the nail salon so all the quotes are reasonably accurate approximations from memory. “” indicates something I am 98% certain of. ‘ ‘ is more like 85%.