Women's magazines: making my gender look like a bunch of morons is all they are good for

I am no fan of fashion magazines. Sometimes if I'm getting my hair done I'll flick through one at the hairdresser's, but most of the time I avoid them because they tend not to contain information that I consider interesting on any level. I don't really care that much about what's fashionable right this minute, besides which I would rather spend my money on books and meals out than the latest must have dresses/sock suspenders/fake glasses accessory*. I don't wear much makeup or spend all my time obsessing over my weight, and I really do not give a shit about which celebrities are sleeping together/breaking up (in fact, I’d be hard pressed to name most of the people I see on the covers of these magazines in the supermarket, but then I don’t really watch TV or many movies). 

Now I'm not saying that people who read these magazines are shallow and intellectually vacant. I never actually said that, and you can't prove it. Everyone needs their mind candy, and I know that there are plenty of smart, switched on women who read these things. My choice of mind candy is books by Terry Pratchett and PG Wodehouse, and there’s nothing inherently better about my choice (pssst: I’m lying, my choices are obviously better). I did buy Cleo, Cosmo and the rest fairly regularly at one stage, but it’s been a long, long time and I can honestly say that I’m happier without them. I can't even enjoy them on a kitschy level anymore, and I just find them repellent these days.

All of which is an introduction to me saying that today I have been on the Glamour magazine website, after I was directed to an article there by another website. And sweet zombie jesus, it's even worse than I'd remembered. Looking at that website was simultaneously hilarious and horribly, bleakly depressing, sort of a mix of mumsy passive aggressive nagging about doing something nicer with your hair, and obvious padding written in a sort of desperate ‘aren’t we having fun!’ tone. The overall result reads like what would happen if you fed every copy of every fashion magazine from the last twenty years into a computer and had it randomly spew out headlines based on what it had absorbed. The sentences make sense, in that they are usually recognisable as sentences, but that’s about as much as you could say for them. These are some of the fascinating 'articles' featured in the online edition;

• The Crazy Place to Apply Blusher That Will Have You Looking Ubersexy in Seconds! 
• Daily Outfit Idea: Try Sneakers With Your Skirt This Weekend
• Which of These Eco-Friendly Outfits Would You Wear on a Date?
• Can Oversized Sunglasses Be TOO Big?
• Why Blue is Now the Official Eye Makeup Colour of the Week
• Yet Another Way to Wear Lavender This Season

Bread and circuses, mascara and shoes. This is why humanity is doomed, and on the basis of crap like this, that might not be that much of a tragedy. 

* By the way, I know that this isn't as much of a trend as it was a few years ago, but I'm still outraged. When did it become OK? I wear glasses, and am pretty much blind without them. I don't like contacts and am not a candidate for laser surgery, so glasses are my only option. I actually don't mind wearing them most of the time, but let's be frank here - my crappy eyesight is a (very, very minor) disability. So why is it OK to be all 'oooh, glasses are cool' and pretend to wear them? Seriously, you wouldn't wear ornamental braces or use a crutch from Sportsgirl, so why pretend to have a problem that you don't have?