you can call me boots.

Okay, when I first came across this link, I was skeptical. But let me just say: I have so many feelings about “So Many Feelings.” It’s good. Smart and curious. It also voices concerns that I too had once I realized (in high school) that Cosmo was a.) bullshit and b.) hypocritical. See below:

“By high school it was clear to us that women’s magazines were a dead end. We would not be snapping up Vogue’s must-have statement shoe for spring. We would not be blowing his mind with Glamour’s kinky new move. We would not be the women women’s magazines proposed, and by college, nor did we wish to be.” (Source: n+1; “So Many Feelings” by Molly Fischer)

I mean, WORD. Yes. Thank you.

It traces an underserved group of female readers (as in, a lot) who were looking for something more real. We found Jezebel, then The Hairpin, etc. But what seems to be the larger question — and one that even founders of Jezebel and The Hairpin are struggling with — is the identity factor. What does it mean to be a woman? To be relevant to a woman? What is relevant to a woman? I guess we’ve been told so long to buy this dress and this pair of shoes and wear this type of makeup and wear those earrings that it is the automatic default for, say, a day when we’re “light on content.” Or something like that. It’s really easy to slip into emulating Cosmo and all its less-than-savory (and less-than-intelligent) counterparts:

“The appeal of women’s magazines was that they could tell you how you ought to behave—how you should look and whom you should date and what you should buy. How to be a woman is a notoriously slippery, mysterious business, and the women’s magazines offered to pin it down, to make it manageable. All you had to do was buy a skirt, take a quiz, learn six confidence boosters and seventy-five sex tricks. For the most part, the search function has usurped this role (no contemporary eighth grader thinks Cosmo is the best place to learn about sex). But with regard to the subtler sensibilities of adult life, women’s magazines—or more accurately their successors, the blogs—still have an important purpose: they tell us how to be by showing us how we, as women, should talk.” (Source: n+1; “So Many Feelings” by Molly Fischer)

I am not saying that I am for or against any of these sites. I think there are plenty of articles that crop up on The Hairpin that are great.

Still. There is many a time when I read something from a “lady” site, then distinctly feel that I’d rather be reading Esquire.