Today’s modern magazines for women
number in the thousands, and the most popular ones include
the likes of Vogue, Marie-Claire,
Good Housekeeping, Ladies Home Journal,
and the giant of all women’s magazines, Cosmopolitan,
published in at least three hundred countries in forty-seven
different languages. For the younger set, there is Seventeen,
Bliss, Sugar, and in Pakistan, we are
treated to local magazines She, Women’s Own,
Visage, Fashion Collection, and Asian hybrids like
Asian Woman and Libas. In contrast,
men have exactly four magazines: GQ, Maxim, FHM
and T3: Toys for Boys (Playboy does not count,
although all men’s magazines always feature scantily
clad women in front of sports cars).
Like most girls, your mother probably
indulged you and let you buy the teenybopper magazines
when you were thirteen. In it you would read how to
apply your first lip gloss, how to resolve those pesky
disputes with your friends, and what boys really meant
when they said, “Yeah... I’ll call you.”
But chances are that your mother was too strict to allow
you to buy a copy of Seventeen until you were
actually twenty-one, despite the fact that everyone
wants to read Seventeen when they are thirteen,
and Cosmopolitan when they are seventeen.
We can all remember the thrill of reading the oh-so-grownup
articles in the school library, or sneaking around a
copy of the magazine that your most liberally raised
best friend was allowed to buy under the desk in math
class. Strangely enough, no matter how old you get,
the magazines are still full of articles that tell you
how to apply your lipstick, how to
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