Umm, books anyone?

In what I fear is the continuing story of the accomplishments of the self-help industry, now we have more magazines devoted to encouraging shopping. Now, the fabulous girl is a shopping devotee, but somehow, "reading" about shopping seems to take it to a new level. I want to read about crossing the Atlantic on a raft, as an example of something that one is unlikely to do, but that sounds interesting. But we are all capable of shopping, and really, do we need a monthly 400 page magazine to tell us how? And again, how exactly does this qualify as "reading"? And do you REALLY want to compare yourself to Maxim?
"Everything in Lucky has a caption and a context," said Kim France, editor in chief of the magazine. "Lucky located a magazine reader who may not have been a magazine reader. It's a little like Maxim in that regard."

Isn't the idea of fashion magazines to inspire us to add individual pieces to our own fabulous wardrobe? I posit that these magazines want to increase the cookie-cutterification of women everywhere for the benefit of their advertisers. How many times have you seen a woman between 20 and 60 in a terrycloth "skirt" and layered tanktops with flipflops this summer? (Age appropriate dressing is another issue I promise to address at later time). Do we really want to live in Stepford that badly? Now I can't buy stuff I see in these mags, b/c I'm too likely to see it on the street. Thank heavens for places like Anthropologie, where the stuff is at least in limited quantity.

I'm also a little concerned that "shopping therapy" is getting out of hand -"Shopping's therapeutic benefits are in full cry in an article called "Re-tales" - in which a suddenly divorced woman says, "Shopping became a way of creating a future when someone else had just pulled the past and the present from under my feet." " I mean, if you have a bad day, by all means, pick up a new lipstick, but consuming mass quantities isn't really going to get you through a divorce.