“The overwhelming response was: Why now, when the brand seemed more in the spotlight than ever?” asks New York Times writer Bonnie Wertheim in a eulogy for Teen Vogue, which publisher Condé Nast recently announced is going out of print.
Really? The overwhelming response I saw was one of jubilation – ding, dong, the witch is dead.
It’s pretty easy to answer the Times article’s titular question, “Who Will Mourn Teen Vogue?”
Not me.
And not any parent with an ounce of gray matter, one hopes.
Combined with a general decline in print media revenue, the timing of the announcement is far too close to the uproar over the publication’s how-to guide on anal sex not to draw obvious conclusions, but nobody would know that from reading Wertheim’s oblivious piece. The entire half-a-sentence summary she devotes to that episode – or any controversy at all – notes that the article “received mixed reviews, mostly from adults.”
As for Teen Vogue’s relentless promotion of abortion, well, that doesn’t even merit a footnote.
On the morning Twitter caught wind of the announcement of the discontinuation of print Teen Vogue, one tweeter, an editor at Business Insider, felt compelled to signal his intellectual superiority to all those derpy conservatives celebrating the print edition’s demise:
Conservatives crowing about the “end” of Teen Vogue know it’s remaining a web brand, right? The stuff that annoys you is what’s staying.
— Josh Barro (@jbarro) November 2, 2017
Breaking news: We’re not idiots. We know there’s a vast internet full of every variety of filth (I said as much to a colleague long before seeing Barro’s sneering tweet). Thanks for attempting to be a huge killjoy, though.
It is worth rejoicing over even the small victories.
I’m reminded of my father. In front of my parents’ home there is a drainage ditch filled with smooth river stones. My father fights a never-ending battle to keep litter out of the ditch and the front yard. Why, when there will always be more trash? What’s the point?
Well, at least he’s doing his part to keep his little patch of the world a decent, clean place to be. Sometimes it’s the best a man can do in a world choked with garbage. Such persistence against enormous odds is an act of heroism in its own way.
That’s how I feel about magazines like Teen Vogue and Seventeen.
It’s incredibly naïve to think, as Barro appears to argue in his sub-thread, that the really objectionable stuff is all online and these printed rags are all about lip gloss and music and crushes. They are not, and haven’t been for a long time, though I doubt they mind if clueless parents think that.
No consumer should ever forget that the purpose of magazines is to sell stuff. In the case of many “women’s” magazines, what they are selling is not just handbags and shirtdresses, but the values of materialism and the Sexual Revolution.
When I worked as a receptionist in the junior division of an arts school years ago as a recent graduate, one day I idly thumbed through an issue of Seventeen and found a primer on the collegiate sexual scene, including a totally upbeat report on the normalcy of one-night stands.
My stomach turned as I thought of the little girls who came in for ballet classes – some as young as four or five – and I quickly took it to the dumpster out back. My only regret is not having burned the thing and put out the ashes with holy water. I guess I take after my dad.
Yes, bad stuff still lives online, where it is very accessible. That’s a real problem. Nevertheless, it is wonderful news that there will be one less entry point into a soul-desiccating pop wasteland.
Teen Vogue will no longer be found on stands, or in waiting rooms frequented by young children – a good thing since some research shows most young people do still read magazines, wrapped up though they may seem in shiny devices.
Jesus says in Matthew 11: “To what shall I compare this generation? It is like children who sit in marketplaces and call to one another, ‘We played the flute for you, but you did not dance, we sang a dirge but you did not mourn.’” This, just before severely chastising towns by name, telling them Sodom will be better off on Judgment Day.
No dirges will be played here. For all you’ve done to corrupt innocent souls, Teen Vogue, good riddance and rest in perdition. God willing, Seventeen will be next.