The Red and Black

Issue date: 3/26/08 Section: Variety

Media Credit: Courtesy FWBOOKSTORE.com [Click to enlarge]

Women's magazines prey on women's insecurities. Does anyone find that to be a particularly controversial statement? OK, good.

Most smart, young women come to this realization some time during their ascent to maturity, at which point they leave the Cosmopolitan-buying to their little sisters and find something else with which to amuse themselves.

Well, in case you're still trying to employ dating tactics found in magazine articles like "50 Surefire Ways to Please Your Man," author Wendy Molyneux has you covered.

Her book, "Everything Is Wrong With You," is a cloying send-up of the version of reality that beauty mags serve up, complete with mock quizzes and diet plans.

In the spirit of "don't judge a book by its cover," a book's visual appearance is rarely judged or mentioned during a review, but something must be said in this (particularly extreme) case.

All 180 pages of this book are in color, complete with illustrations that surely are intended to be adorable but create one awkward page layout after another.

To call it annoying would be an understatement. At times, it can be downright difficult to look at.

Nevertheless, Molyneux is the kind of author who finds her gimmick and sticks with it, even when that gimmick proves itself not particularly effective.

The entire book is filled with derision and sarcasm, and while funny at times, it becomes tiresome very quickly.

However, the author's commitment to her tone, despite its annoyance, is at least somewhat impressive.

Nearly 200 pages of overt, dripping sarcasm had to have been difficult to achieve, even if the message presented is not particularly useful.

One has to wonder who Molyneux thinks her audience is. Many women, whether or not they have self-esteem or body issues, realize the underlying messages in magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Glamour are not to be taken to heart.

So, the women reading her book will have realized her point long ago, or they'll be women with very real body and self-worth issues that are not going to be fixed easily by reading a single book.

Additionally, she makes fun of this second group of women and its lack of confidence more or less the entire time, meaning she has effectively written her way out of any sort of audience.

Probably the most confusing part of Molyneux's book is she never seems to drop her ruse and make her point.

She just keeps right on going with her jokes and little illustrations and never takes the opportunity to get serious about what are very serious issues to many of her readers. And who's left laughing?

Probably no one.

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