There are two main reasons that I bought Closer magazine
this week, one of which was the cover line ‘BIZARRE REAL LIFE: My boyfriend
dresses as my twin sister!’ Like, does it mean that he dresses as if he were her twin sister or does it
mean that he dresses exactly the same as her
current twin sister, meaning that whenever they go out they actually look like
triplets? Is this woman the ultimate narcissist? Or is she so generic-looking that anyone would look like her twin sister if they wore her clothes? Is she, in fact, the everyman?
I had to know.
The other reason is that it was cheap.
Once I opened the magazine, I began to realise that this
wasn’t a normal Magazine Reading Session but instead an Incredible Journey of
Self-Discovery. Come ride with me on the Journey of Self-Discovery. Come sip on
my vial of sarcasm and savour its bitterness. Come swallow misogyny and
regurgitate it as media satire. Come... well, you get the idea.
So, obvs the first thing I did when I had the magazine in my
excitedly clammy little fingers was to flick straight to ‘BIZARRE REAL LIFE: My
boyfriend dresses as my sister’. Spoiler alert: he just dresses like a girl
sometimes. Which obviously makes him ‘like her twin sister’, leading inevitably
to the sentence ‘Dating Shaun is like having a lover, a best friend and a
sister all rolled into one’. Because those are three things we’ve all been
dying to collate.
I’d also like to point out that at the beginning of this
feature, the point is made that Shaun functions as A REAL MAN IN SOCIETY
despite sometimes wearing women’s clothes, ‘driving a delivery van, going to
rock concerts and playing in a band’. He can drive, you say? He goes to rock
concerts? The specific and exclusive hallmarks of maleness! How anybody
could do such things while also owning dresses just blows my fucking mind.
Next up, appropriately enough, it’s the singer who gave the world the lyrics ‘He’s gotta be so macho’, a song which made us all claw our
brains out of our skulls in the nineties and therefore explains why we’re now all so
stupid that we use hashtags in Facebook statuses. That’s right, folks, it’s
Sinitta. The best part about this article is that it annotates an image of
Sinitta with the incredible sentence: ‘Sinitta wants to reveal all about life
in Simon’s harem’, and other one directly below that straight-facedly states: ‘Simon’s
harem includes (l-r) Lauren, Mezhgan and Sinitta’. No, hang on, I just noticed
that there’s a box in the corner where they’ve wheeled out Samantha Brick to ‘reveal
her fears’ for Sinitta. That's the best part about this article. You could not make this shit up.
Now it’s JORDAN. The gist of this is that she’s going to
write another book, and this time it’s going to be about that cage fighter
bloke. I flick the next page while ordering an advance copy on Amazon (I mean,
ahem, my local independent bookstore.)
Next, ‘Kerry Katona’s been craving takeaways’, plus the shocking
truth that Cheryl Cole might think about one or more of her exes from time to
time. Don’t tell me Closer magazine doesn’t have its finger on the pulse of
human existence.
Time for that god-awful middle section they call CELEB
INSIDER (in LUMINOUS PINK AND BLUE WRITING.) Summary: pictures of Miley Cyrus
humping a can of Vimto; Chelsee Healey (who?) saying that even though she’s a
size 6, she still feels fat; this weird thing: ‘Celeb highs! Mark Wright was
chuffed last week when his stunning fiancée, Coronation Street actress Michelle
Keegan, was voted Hottest Woman on TV by FHM magazine. Well-deserved, we think!’
I literally can’t think of a single reason why the sentence wasn’t ‘Coronation
Street actress Michelle Keegan was chuffed last week when she was voted Hottest
Woman on TV by FHM magazine. Well-deserved, we think!’ Unless winning Hottest
Woman on TV from FHM magazine objectifies you so much that everyone just starts
displacing your emotions onto other associated people around you.
Now it’s ‘POSH: I WANT TO BE LOVED’. Which basically
translates as: Victoria Beckham wants her new reality TV show to be a hit.
Because sometimes, being loved by David Beckham is so vacuous and dissatisfying
that it actually becomes reverse-love that sucks all emotion out your body and
leaves you craving the sort of adoration only the entire British public can
deliver. We’ve all been there.
Then ‘The X Factor Ones To Watch’, a feature so boring that
people have been known to fold it into tiny torn-up pieces and inhale into
their lungs so they slowly bleed to death from loads of tiny papercuts rather
than have to sit and read it a minute longer.
A couple of pages later, ‘LONELY KELLY VOWS: I won’t take
Danny back, but I can’t cut him off!’ This begins a deluge of Women In
Distress/Single Women Fall Apart articles that are so indistinguishable from
one another I’ll just lump them all in this one paragraph.
Vanessa Feltz’s column has an interesting twist with this
little gem tucked in amongst speculations about the outcome on Strictly Come
Dancing: ‘It’s almost become fashionable to accept that any form of locking
people up in psychiatric hospitals is a bad thing. But...’ INSERT DAILY MAIL
OPINION HERE. How...unexpected.
Then it’s an interview with some woman who got pregnant in
her 50s. Obviously the whole point of the feature (which has her posing completely
naked apart from a really strange pale pink silk skirt with a slit up the side)
is meant to be like, EW GROSS PREGNANT OLD PEOPLE THINK OF THE NURSE WHO HAS TO
DELIVER THE BABY FROM HER OLD PERSON’S VAGINA, but y’know, throw in a few
sycophantic hyperboles like ‘incredibly brave’ and you might get away with pink
slitty skirt voyeurism.
Some way down from here, ‘TOWIE girls show off their killer
curves’. This includes one called Chloe who says ‘My new shapely look will help
me find love’. So many words...so little time.
Later on, the experts of Closer
magazine have a ‘debate’ about whether Kim Kardashian should have been allowed
to leave the house after recently giving birth to a Real Human Child.
Conclusion: undecided. Why don’t they just keep those pesky umbilical cords
attached, and then women wouldn’t go wandering away from their spawn all the
time?
Hang on, ladybros, it’s STYLE WATCH! Today, ‘slebs have
their style torn apart by meanies at Closer. ‘Pamela Anderson attracts all the
wrong attention as she channels silk curtains,’ says the anonymous voice behind
SW, ‘We have a matching cushion at home you can have, Pam.’ Tragically, Closer
are betraying their fundamental failure to get
with the times here. Channeling home furnishings and upholstery has been
cool ever since Zac Braff wore a shirt that matched his parents’ wallpaper in Garden State. I totally got your reference, Pam.
Once again, it’s just you and me against the world.
After Style Watch, we’re supposed to care about ‘My secret
life’, confessions from a 2010 MasterChef winner. Unfortunately, I don’t.
FASHION. Apparently ‘everybody’s wearing’ snow leopard print
coats and corduroy dungarees. Finally, my wardrobe becomes fashionable according to the mainstream. A pause for a five-second victory dance.
The most entertaining fashion question is ‘I love wearing my
ripped jeans for the weekend, but is there a way to smarten them up for work?’
The official answer is not ‘Sew the holes up’, which would have been amazing.
Instead, it’s to ‘choose slick accessories’, such as a pair of black Topshop
sunglasses with gold and diamante decoration round the top rims. Because
turning up to the office in ripped jeans and a pair of gold sunglasses says ‘I
slicked up my accessories’, rather than ‘I spent my weekend at a Halloween rave
and now I have a coke habit.’
Next, ‘Beauty Buzz’, where one of their recommendations is
to spend £40 on an Olay ‘skin buffer’. Elsewhere, the board members of Olay laugh
all the way to the bank.
There’s a heinously boring-looking article on fashion here
that’s called ‘Nude meets white!’ You can probably see why I skipped it.
BUT WAIT! It’s a fuckload of diets (so you can fit into your leopard
print jacket and your new pair of corduroy dungarees.) My favourite is ‘The
Daytime Vegan Diet’, where you eat vegan all day (as the name suggests) and
then ‘come 6pm, meat and dairy are back on the menu.’ MIDNIGHT STEAK AND CHEESE
FEAST! Why don’t they just sell this advice directly to doctors who deal with
all that childhood obesity malarkey they’ve been talking about in the news? It’s
gold dust, I tells ya!
Right after the diets there’s a giant picture of a chocolate
cake accompanied by a recipe. Naturally.
’30 SECOND MAN DECODER. WHAT HE SAYS: Let’s just be romantic
and cuddle tonight. WHAT HE MEANS: I really shouldn’t have mixed beer, wine and
cider tonight – my head’s swimming, I feel a bit sick and I really can’t feel
anything below the waist, let alone get it up. I just need a nap.’ And what if
he actually meant he wanted to
cuddle?, I hear you cry. Well, then the answer’s simple: he’s a woman.
Relationship advice: ‘I fancy my friend, but he doesn’t seem
to take the hint. How can I find out if he’s interested once and for all?’ The
agony aunt replies: snog him. If he likes it, he’s into you. Jesus, it’s like
she’s literally looked into a crystal ball and seen the future. Where do they
get these psychologically nuanced, hyper-intuitive geniuses?
We’re at the back pages now, which comprise a TV guide and ‘Spot
The Difference’.
Spot.
The.
Difference.
This time I really am moving to that Tibetan colony. See y’all
there.