Modern Primate

Recently our own Curt Rancor wrote an article trollishly extolling the virtues of Fox News’ new lifestyle magazine, Fox News M. “With a layout inspired by Pinterest,” he wrote, “her delicate mind won’t have any trouble navigating features like Brooklyn Decker’s Beach Secrets, 8 Steps to Really Clean Windows, How to Keep Mealybugs out of your Flour, and other articles relevant to her unique lifestyle as a housekeeper and a wife.”

In short, Fox News M is great for tiny ladybrains negatively affected by things like “news” or “thinking.” You know what happens when ladybrains try to think –as opposed to shop–through their problems! They might mean well, but before you know it they’ll be splattering period blood all over your man cave. What a hassle, amirite fellas?

These are actual articles, not Photoshopped

What Curt means, of course, is that this so-called lifestyle magazine (“lifestyle” apparently being the only sphere of female interest and/or influence) reduces the female experience—and they would use a phrase like that—to a handful of tired heteronormative tropes, all of which play directly into the assumption that there is and should be a separate sphere for the fairer sex, who simply cannot stop splattering their period blood all over your man cave. That the site is the brainchild of Fox News only highlights the gross ideological underpinnings, namely that women-folk shouldn’t be encouraged to poke their button noses where they don’t belong.

This is stupid and annoying, for reasons that should—and that’s an emphatic should—be self-evident. That said, I sort of love the site. Not because it’s, you know, good. It’s the worst kind of baby-vomiting, fifty shades of pink insipidity. But if I didn’t know Fox News was bankrolling the project, I would swear it was satire. Because it’s not just that the site universalizes the we-are-the-1% privileged experiences of upwardly mobile white women, it’s not just that the site equates the self-worth of said upwardly mobile white women with the shit they buy (or craft, as is increasingly common amongst upwardly mobile white women with lots of time on their hands), it’s not just that the editors define themselves in terms of their husbands, or if you prefer, their “hubbies,” it does all three things simultaneously, with the kind of dogged unselfconsciousness usually reserved for hipsters and trolls.

Not that that’s what I think is happening here, i.e. that the editors at Fox News M are somehow daring their audience to buy into the site’s dumb logic, only to laugh their asses off when those same readers are dumb enough to agree (it would be hilarious if they were, though). It’s just that the site becomes pretty funny pretty quickly—which is fully evident in a number of the comments, particularly in response to “Ten Pranks That Will Spice Up Your Relationship”:

After reading the list, which includes gems like the following, it’s not hard to see why so many people would laugh:

This does not make the site any less annoying. It does however make the site accidentally hilarious, and furthermore/therefore opens the conversation in ways that simple condemnation would likely preclude. So thanks for reminding me why you’re so terrible, Fox News. Keep up the…well, keep doing what you’re doing.