Loading a magazine and reading a magazine are such disparate experiences. There’s nothing about them that’s similar, which may seem like an all-too-obvious statement, except magazines pretend to be what the gun range actually is: empowering.
Even the rules of the range are set up to protect the users: to rent a firearm you must be a gun owner or in a party of two or more, treat every firearm as if it were loaded!!!, persons under 18 must be accompanied by an adult at all times, no pregnant women are allowed inside the range.
And so on.
Image if fashion magazines had similar rules: to read, you must use the buddy system as to not succumb to self-doubt!!!, treat every beauty article as if it is a lie, persons under 18 must read with an adult, no pregnant women need to read this, period.
And so forth.
It’s no bull-s**t versus all bull-s**t.
Where guns are powerful in their silence, fashion magazines are as rude and loud as your drunk cousin on a plane (there’s NO escaping him!), and they treat their customer like an idiot who needs to be schooled in the fine of getting dressed or washing their f**#ing face. “How Do You Know You’re Exfoliating Too Much?” Probably if your skin is falling off Walking Dead style. You know you’re being pitched, sold, your vanity and your insecurities exploited, and that it’s impossible to keep up with the Vogues’– financially, emotionally, practically—impossible, and yet 1 out of every 10 American women read Glamour, and Vogue reports 5 BILLION press impressions each month. BILLION!! Why do we do this to ourselves?
Loading a magazine, holding and shooting a gun, is both humbling and liberating. Reading a fashion magazine for the first time, or the five-hundredth, is often one rich in humiliation; an exercise in self-doubt and self-loathing. By the time you close the final page, you’re wondering why you even bothered at all.
See, guns may make you jump out of your skin, but fashion magazines make skin crawl.
When the last of my bullets have been shot, and my orange friend reaches my grasp once more, I admire my not-so-handy work. Even though I’ve technically failed, no Police Academy for me, I walk out the gun club with my head held high, not wondering if I should stick some Botox in it.
I’ll take my orange man over an orange trend any day of the week.
