Esquire has made some iffy creative decisions lately, especially when it decided to print what Vice Magazine labeled “The Worst Thing Ever Written” in the form of a profile about Megan Fox by Esquire writer Stephen Marche, one of the authors of the publication’s entertainment section, the Culture Blog. What really baffled me was the Culture Blog’s recaps of episodes of HBO’s “Girls,” a show clearly not written to appeal to the Esquire demographic.
As expected, the Esquire recaps are eye-rollingly predictable because, surprise surprise, the middle-aged men who write the recaps don’t relate to the characters. And trust me, they’re eager to describe their inability to relate and how annoying they find each character.
David Curcurito, design director of Esquire (and owner of a trying-way-too-hard-Twitter bio that reads “Lover of Drinking, Driving, F-----g and Fighting”) wrote the recap of Sunday’s episode, “Bad Friends.”
“Everything men hate about the show ‘Girls’ I mostly hate too,” Curcurito wrote (probably while swigging from a bottle of Jack Daniels as he sped down the highway in a Lamborghini with a topless Kate Upton in the passenger seat — not). “The complexities of young women trying to find their voice, who they are, and their intertwined friendships — blah, blah, ugh, give me a tampon and a pineapple drink in a martini glass.”
Cue a Liz Lemon over-the-top eye roll.
Is this really the best that Esquire has? Resorting to period jokes in the critique of a young female comedian’s TV series, in this age of lady comedy titans Tina Fey, Amy Poehler and Mindy Kaling?
I can only imagine how that thought process went: “What? Girl make joke? Girl??? With boob??? I am man. Only I make joke. Tampons.”
I’m confused as to why Esquire chooses to review “Girls,” a show designed to appeal to young women similar to the main characters. It’s topical and controversial, sure, but how many times can a few men make the same complaints about a show that’s not even written for them?
When was the last time you read a review of the “Die Hard” franchise in Cosmopolitan, or a serious critique of the Comedy Central show “Workaholics” in Glamour? What’s next — “Mad Men” reviews in Nickelodeon magazine? “Breaking Bad” recaps in Teen Vogue? What’s with this odd overlap?
This isn’t the first time Esquire has inserted its unwanted mansplaining on the topic of “Girls.”
In Marche’s profile of Fox, he pulled what is arguably the most stupid statement in the whole history of the world to support his claim that “bombshells” like Fox “used to roam the cultural landscape like buffalo, and like buffalo, they were edging toward extinction.”
“Women no longer need to be beautiful in order to express their talent,” Marche wrote. “Lena Dunham and Adele and Lady Gaga and Amy Adams are all perfectly plain, and they are all at the top of their field.”
Based on this guy’s absurdly bold and misguided claims that all these women are “plain,” I had to find him to see what he looks like.
I know, I know — I should be a bigger person and focus only on his shoddy writing, but I figured Marche had to be some kind of young, godlike Channing Tatum/Ryan Gosling/Donald Glover hybrid — but no. The guy calling Lady Gaga plain is a Canadian man in his late 30s with skin so transparent I can see the misogyny pumping through his veins.
Everyone has the right to an opinion — don’t get me wrong — but what is it about old dudes that cause them to have so many loud, mean opinions about young starlets?
And why do they get to decide what show 20-something-year-old women should enjoy, or how female artists should look?
Esquire has the potential to be a great publication if it stops toeing the line between classy and crude. But this unwanted intrusion on Judd Apatow’s best series since “Freaks and Geeks” is wholly unwanted.
Chloe Finch is a journalism sophomore at UF. Her column runs on Thursdays. You can contact her via opinions@alligator.org.
