The Not-So-Great Magazine Divide

The Girlfriend and I were on our way back on the train. To pass time, I took out my issue of ARENA with Tony Leung on the cover. I got the copy because of the cover, and mr brown's article within. Unfortunately, that's probably all the reasons, plus curiosity, of course. Rest of the time, I would perceive ARENA as a gay magazine, as there are so many men's fashion spreads which I will never buy, nor wear. And yes, the rest of the time, I am very much a FHM, Maxim and occasionally NewMan person, for very obvious reasons. Also yes, call me shallow. People who say "never judge a book by its cover" and "first impression counts" are just as contradicting. With that, I say being shallow would be better than contradicting. Anyway, it piqued the Girlfriend's curiosity and interest in the magazine. So I offered it to her. The Girlfriend in turn offered me her copy of CLEO. So we proceeded to flip through each other's magazines. One grouse the Girlfriend had was the microscopic font-size that was used for the articles. I compared the text of both magazines, and she was right. CLEO has a larger font-size compared to ARENA's. Perhaps they wanted to save paper and consequently, the trees. And perhaps men's magazine can increase the font-size and make itself more reader friendly and consequently, increased sales. One article from CLEO that interested me particularly was this...

So right beside Hady, the title of the article says: 7 SKILLS ALL MEN WISH YOU KNEW. This is of course, in the context of the general readers of CLEO, who are women. I was thinking, what kind of skills do I wish would women know, and maybe thereafter, I know what kind of requirements should I set for my better half. :p So I went to the trusty content page of the magazine and I saw this really helpful directory...

It labels the article titles on the cover with the corresponding pages. And for this particular article, page 98. So, I flipped over to page 98...

And then continuing page...

And that was it. . . . So that's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5... Where are skills number 6 and 7? The cover did say 7 SKILLS ALL MEN WISH YOU KNEW, right? After much thought... Ok, not much at all, since this is supposed to be an attempt to be farny. (read: funny) I now understand why there has been so many women jokes. From stories about shopping addictions, to their less evolved ability to read maps, to being lousier drivers (don't take my word for this one, as I don't drive, yet), to their superior colour spectrum recognition and of course, the thing about them and numbers (but I would like to exclude the bankers and accountants on this). I concluded (for the sake of humour, that is, which means it should not be taken seriously) that these jokes perpetuate because there are so many Singaporean women reading CLEO, and this particular issue included such a blatant error, Singapore's womenfolk's sub-conscious minds now probably see the digit "7" being represented by the value of five, which coincidentally contributes to the jokes repository about numbers and women. I can picture a classic joke in the making now... Guy: "Eh dear, it's $7000 leh, not $500 hor." Gal: "$7000, $500, what's the big deal? CLEO also get the numbers 5 and 7 mixed up what! If CLEO had messed up the math in Singaporean women's head, I wonder what else in their minds had been messed up... But then again, it's not like us menfolk haven't been screwed in our minds by the stuff we read...