The Ugly Truth

I have to say, everything that is wrong with popular, mass-market women's magazines (sorry, Ms., you don't count for the purposes of this rant!) that this beautifully written, emotionally powerful profile of Warren Hern, the last doctor in America who still provides late-term abortions, appeared in Esquire. It's not so much that Esquire got to the story first, that I can't imagine the women's magazine that would devote this much space, and this much genuine, unflinching detail to an investigation of abortion. True, magazines like Marie Claire, theoretically the smart-girl's alternative, and magazines like Cosmopolitan and Glamour, do publish pieces about abortion and reproductive rights more generally. But pieces like this, that truly encapsulate the debates, and do it in extraordinary language and with intense vividness, seem to end up in Esquire orGQ. I'm not sure why. I loved the piece, and I would have loved to read it in a magazine aimed at my demographic. But its appearance in Esquire just made me feel, yet again, how entirely women's magazines seem to have given up on their readers, while at least some men's magazines, for some reason, still seem to hope that their subscribers value something thoughtful, articulate, and finely crafted. When did we become the gender exclusively devoted to junk?