The Vagenda

Grazia Digest

 
 
Oh, Grazia, how I have missed you and your strange mix of current affairs and sandals. Where else would I find the ‘news’ that Karl Lagerfeld proposed to his cat being reported alongside the violent protests in Turkey? Wherein which other hallowed pages could I see both the headlines ‘She’s a Katie-in-waiting!’ (cover story) and ‘The mothers and daughters forced to share a husband’ (hot story number five)? Surely no other magazine so accurately represents the conflicts of modern womanhood (etc. etc.) 
 
Here’s what’s in Grazia this week:
 
- Some of the most disgusting palazzo pants that I have ever seen. They look like the 1970s threw up on them (yours for £260)
 
- Breathless coverage of Kate Middleton’s pregnancy. Such sycophantry has not been seen since the Royal Bloody Wedding.  ’It seems that Kate is more than ready for the next chapter’, squeals Grazia from the depths of her anus, where it set up shop sometime last year. ‘And we can’t either!’
 
Let me get this straight – this is something that we, as women, are genuinely supposed to be excited about? The birth of a child to someone whom we have never met, who is much richer than us, and who has married into a family who believes that they are destined to rule over us BY GOD, and are therefore clearly delusional? I can just about get over the fact that any time one of them does anything we all put hats on and wave flags and bow and scrape like the lowly peasant serfs we are, but it is a truth universally acknowledged that no one is ever going to be more excited about your own pregnancy than you are. Except Grazia, obviously. 
 
- Some nonsense about feminists hating Beyonce’s leather corset. Which feminists? Did I miss this? Apparently feminists on Twitter have been slut-shaming Beyonce, and rather than ignore them, therefore treating them as the fringe idiots that they are, their crap opinions have been used as Grazia column fodder. Seriously, I am one falsely constructed debate away from giving up journalism and going to live in a comune. It’s not just Grazia – it’s pretty much every newspaper except the Times, which is the only one that seems to think that the opinions of morons on the internet don’t immediately need addressing in print form. When I need to escape from constant naval-gazing articles about privilege-checking and feminist in-fighting, that is where I go: the Times. Say what you want about Murdoch, but at least he couldn’t give a flying fuck what anyone on Twitter thinks about anything.
 
- I digress. Continuing along the ‘hideous trouser’ theme that Grazia has going this week are an £108 pair of leopard print jeans in baby blue (yes, baby blue). Just in case you felt like working the nineties hooker pre-princess make over a la Pretty Woman look, which you don’t.
 
- Then we have some irresponsible reporting of Paris Jackson’s suicide attempt, including the means and method by which she attempted to do it (did you not fucking check the Samaritans guidelines, you tossers?) and some rampant speculation about the possible causes of this CHILD’s (because that what she is, a child) mental health issues. Stay classy, yeah?
 
- Jen and Justin attended a wedding together. Rather than it merely constituting two people attending a wedding together, in Grazia land it was of course ‘a dry run’ for their own, the details of which Grazia, as usual, knows nothing. 
 
- The tongue patch diet. This is a patch that a cosmetic surgeon attaches to your tongue which prevents you from eating solid food. The phenomenon is reported in classic ‘no judgment!’ Grazia style, which means that, despite being totally barmy, the magazine has used pictures of hot looking women to illustrate the story and is careful to emphasise the benefits as well as the dangers. Benefits which include losing a stone and helping patient Erica boost her confidence. Way to discourage me, Grazia.
 
- Boiler suits have ‘revved into fashion’, and, being someone who has no interest in looking ‘haute not homebase’, I am leaving the country. For good. 
 
- Grazia has tried to do a Samantha Brick by featuring her spiritual and physical doppelganger, a woman called Fran Straker, under the headline ‘I deserve a better paid job because I’m beautiful’. It’s essentially exactly the same as the Mail article, focusing on how jealous other women are of this women’s beauty. ‘It’s a fact that women judge other women on their appearance’. Do they? Because right now I’m judging you by the shit that’s coming out of your mouth, and  Grazia’s resident expert, occupational psychologist Rachel MacLynn, is backing me up. She says that it’s more likely to be Fran’s arrogance that makes women hate her, and that ‘there are an awful lot of very beautiful women out there who are very well-liked’ (HIYA!) 
 
- Now for Grazia’s weekly bitchfest, ‘You the Fashion Jury’, where a panel of tossers berate women who are much more successful than they are for their sartorial choices through the use of listless witticisms. According to Michael, Jessica Stam’s ‘lumpy yellow dress reminds me of Homer Simpson’s face’ (ZING!) while Adriana Lima’s dress has been munched ‘by a genetically mutated, frock-munching giant moth’. Some of the others said some nice things but I was too busy laughing hysterically at Michael’s superior sense of comic description that I forgot to write them down. 
 
- Polly Vernon’s tackles the big issues affecting women today with a column about Instagram selfies. Unmissable.
 
- But compared to the next article, written by Grazia’s Emily Maddick about her friendship with Made in Chelsea’s Ollie Locke, it reads like the Avignon Quartet. 
 
- Meanwhile Gaby Hinsliff remains the best thing in it.
 
- And finally, quite possibly the most misleading headline about mental illness that I have ever seen: ‘I GAVE UP ANOREXIA TO HAVE A BABY’, a headline so crass in its simplification of a complex psychological condition that I can in no way imagine that Emma Wolf, a recovering anorexic, author and campaigner for body image awareness could have consented to it. The memoir piece is nuanced and moving, and seeing Wolf’s illness being reduced down to a simple matter of choice jars pretty crassly. But then what more can we expect from a magazine who once described the Iron Lady as ‘like King Lear for Girls’? Complex psychology? Leave it to the lads (or ‘modern gents’, as they are dubbed on page 72).
 
Pass the sick bucket. 
 
 
 
 

8 thoughts on “Grazia Digest

  1. don’t really think dissing an item of clothing because it looks like something that a ‘hooker’ might wear is what feminism is all about, Vagenda. Even if it’s intended to be funny, it might be better to try being more sex positive next time.

    • Considering the writer goes on to describe Grazia’s “You the fashion jury” section as “Grazia’s weekly bitchfest”, that hooker comment struck a particularly sour note with me. But whatever, Vagenda. It’s increasingly apparent that it’s okay to say shitty stuff in the articles here, as long as it’s “a joke”.

    • Sorry if the hooker comment upset you – it was a reference to a specific character in a film (Pretty Woman) so we thought it would be OK. It was in no way intended to reflect our opinion of sex workers (or sex work) generally.

      This site is written by so many different people that sometimes they will inevitably use language and make points that you disagree with. However, we listen to our readers and if you don’t think we’re being sex positive enough we’ll take that on board. Though do bear in mind that we have also had quite a few emails saying that we’re TOO sex positive because ‘I don’t actually enjoy sex and your descriptions of your enjoyment of it makes me feel shitty’. It’s bloody hard trying to find a middle ground that pleases everyone all the time, especially when you’re a humour website that aims to push boundaries

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