Where the heck are your pants?

So I was walking through the grocery store today, and I ran across one of those fitness magazines. It had a picture of a thin, busty, blond-haired woman wearing what I assumed was one of those harnesses that Himalayan explorers wear so that they don’t fall off of mountains. Of course, mountaineers also wear things like parkas and, well, pants, while this woman had nothing else but what the good Lord (and likely a whole platoon of plastic surgeons) gave her. I must confess my eyes lingered a moment (forgive me), but what also caught my attention was written in large type over the magazine’s title: “For Women!”.

It is not a new observation that most modern magazines, targeted for either sex, feature pictures of scantily-clad women, presumably because men like them and women want to be them. While in recent years we men have made significant steps to close the unhealthy-body-image gap (did you know there’s now skin moisturizer for men? Seriously, if I wanted to moisturize I’d go to the friggin’ pool), women still bear the brunt of societal pressure to live up to some impossibly high standard of beauty. It’s a little disturbing that since we all, men and women, are collectively obsessed with these kind of images of female “beauty”, we need extra instructions to determine which magazines are for whom.