SICK OF MEN'S HEALTH

Do you know the value of five bucks? You can take in a second-run movie. You can scarf a big-ass slice of New York-style pizza. You can blow it on five scratch-off lottery tickets. Hell, I could have thrown it out in the street, rattled a prescription bottle, then sat back and watched the neighborhood pill-heads fight each other to the death over it. That would have made me giggle for a bit, at least. Instead, I was seduced by lies and false promises. I bought a copy of Men’s Health. The shame will forever remain with me. “Forever” means “until I finish writing this.”

One night, I went grocery shopping and ran across the offending issue on the magazine rack. Ashton Kutcher was on the cover, touted as a “tech guru.” It struck me as balls-kicking stupid. Anyone who cheats on Demi Moore shouldn’t be considered a guru of anything other than lighting his own farts and posting it on YouTube. I decided to get to the bottom of this foolishness. Upon further inspection, I found I wasn’t seduced in the least by the clever layouts and empty promises of rock-hard abs and becoming a supermodel-seducing sex god.

Then I happened on the article about anxiety-reduction techniques. I have a serious problem with anxiety. Shit, I thought, it couldn’t hurt to give it a further look. It was five bucks. I popped it in my basket, paid for the haul, and headed home.

The anxiety articles turned out to be slick, empty presentations which were based on the advice of self-help hucksters and non-peer-reviewed studies. Most of their “useful” articles usually are. I already knew most of the techniques they described. The rest either didn’t apply to me (I don’t ski or climb mountains), or seemed like passive-aggressive hand-jobbing for office slaves. Ashton Kutcher’s “guru” status was due to his being skilled at using Twitter. Flip the magazine. They present a guide to mostly useless tech gadgets most of their readership can’t afford. Playboy does the same thing, but at least there’s naked chicks in it, even if they do require Photoshop to look fuckable.

I’ll pause my tale of a self-inflicted lack of five-dollars for a minute. Here’s why Men’s Health is as useful as dollar-store toilet paper and less absorbent:

THEY PROMISE THE SAME SHIT IN EVERY ISSUE.

Washboard abs! Get titanic amounts of pussy! Techniques that will turn her into your own personal slobbering fuck-meat! Get rich in a year’s time! BEER CURES EVERYTHING! The only claims I’ve seen more vapid than these are in any given issue of Cosmopolitan or its clones. If you were to take one issue’s worth of advice and make it a stringent routine, you should become some sort of financial, physical, and sexual demigod, right? If this is true, why do they tout the same damn things EVERY FUCKING MONTH? Simple: They know their demographic, and it consists mostly of thirty-something, passive-aggressive divider-dwellers who believe they constantly need improvement and validation in some way or another. Permanent solutions don’t sell magazines. This knifes into the next point:

THEIR SCIENCE IS HORSESHIT.

How many scientific studies come out in a year? Scratch that; How many studies come out in a month? I can’t give an exact number. Browsing news feeds over the years have shown me that it’s a lot. There’s a reason for the glut: Most of the studies aren’t peer-reviewed. They’re pulled out of a grad-student’s ass like dead babies from a coke whore’s uterus. The editorial staff of Men’s Health and other similar rags jump on the ideas. They conjure up half-assed solutions based on said flimsy bullshit and base an article around it. Sometimes, they’ll call in an “expert” and casually mention the self-help book they wrote, as if that’s the final evidence to their expertise. I once read an article that gave a sloppy blow-job to the organic food industry. It was presented as indisputable fact and a scientific epiphany. Trouble was, the article’s writer was the daughter of a guy who ran one of the biggest organic farms on the market. Remember the anxiety article I talked about earlier? It was accompanied by an article about this year’s most frightening diseases. The hypochondriac in us all would appreciate that. Einstein’s dead balls surely get a tingle from these methods. Science!

IT'S CLEVERLY DISGUISED GAY PORN AND SMELLS LIKE DESPERATION.

Sensational bullshit claims litter the dead space on every cover. In the middle, there’s a picture of some muscular guy posed for maximum effect. It’s usually some half-naked mesomorph with no shirt. He’s photographed in black-and-white. He’s ripped to the gills and his muscle tone creates canyon-like definition in his skin. Sweat glistens from pores off his perfectly tanned body. His steely gaze is locked with yours in eternal, yet subtle wanting that stirs memories of locker-rooms past. Did visualizing that description make your pants tight? Run right out and get a subscription. If it didn’t, you’re probably with me in wondering how looking at a buff, half-naked guy sells a magazine meant for presumably straight men. Maxim (frat-boy piece of shit that it is) at least has the good sense to put hot chicks on the cover. I can only guess that the editorial staff looks at their readership as closet fags. It’s not surprising, as every given issue has fragrance inserts and smells like a thirty-five-year-old metrosexual wannabe who thinks expensive cologne will magnetically attract the mouths of attractive broads to his cock. The issue I bought knocked me over with the stench.

Laugh at me. The world laughs with you. The disappointment is mine. I got fooled, and I already knew the score. I won’t be fooled again. I just wish I had that five bucks back. After confessing to someone that I read an issue of Men’s Health, they suggested that it might be healthier to blow five bucks on something completely awful for me, like a bacon-wrapped, deep-fried hot dog or a bottle of Thunderbird. Perhaps I’ll do the generous thing and buy my next-door neighbor the most vile four-dollar whore I can find. That way, I’ll have a dollar left over for a Coke.