I hired an intern recently – namely, my brother Mr. Stupidhead. It’s working out really well; not only can I send him out into the world to deal with obnoxious errands like going to (read: aging visibly at) the post office and standing in line for twenty minutes at Kinko’s for the privilege of photocopying exactly one IRS document, but I’ve offered a loved one a brief respite from temp agency hell. One day late last week, his marching orders included dropping off a roll of film, dropping off coins at the bank, and chasing down a couple of magazines I needed for research purposes. I imagine it goes without saying that I didn’t need The Economist, or Harper’s, or any glossy that doesn’t concern itself with Lipsmackers and Lance Bass – oh no. I needed a copy of Flaunt with James Van Der Beek on the cover, and I needed a copy of Twist with ‘N Sync on the cover. Mr. S agreed cheerfully to find the magazines, and as the door closed behind him, I muttered, “Sssssucker.” When he returned to the office, though, he held the bag containing the shameful publications away from his body while wearing a face he ordinarily reserves for the cleaning up of cat barf. “I know, I know,” I hurried to explain, “but Twist has an interview with one of the actors from Get Real where he says nice things about Mighty Big TV, even though we harsh on that show big-time, so I sort of had to buy it.” Mr. S made a “yeah right” face and proceeded to torture me by reading certain Twist selections aloud.

Twist has given MBTV several glowing mentions since we launched the site, and I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but even the most cursory leaf through the mag inspires in me a profound pity for any teenage girls who might take the editorial seriously. I want to buy a clandestine copy of the subscriber list and send photocopied articles from the old Sassy to every girl on said list. I don’t fit the Twist demo, of course, but the not-very-subtly sexist content and gushing bestest-girlfriend tone doesn’t differ much from the same Seventeen fare that used to nauseate me a dozen years ago. Twist boils down to the assumption that every girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen is a halter-top-wearing, public-fart-fearing, Rules-memorizing, sparkly-purse-carrying twit with no interests outside of TRL, lip gloss, and turning her sooooo-shiny hair into tentacles with which to trap a boy. Sure, some girls in that age group really don’t have any interests outside of Carson and the Delia’s catalog, and I hardly spent my entire adolescence with my nose in an Ayn Rand paperback, pondering social change.

Still, an entire letters section devoted to tales of “like, ohmigod, I completely farted in front of this complete hunk that I totally have, like, a crush on, like, completely!” woe seems excessive to me. What purpose does it serve to share with the world the fact that a fifteen-year-old in Toledo got her period without noticing and stained the white pants she’d chosen to wear to school that day, and all these way cute boys got grossed out by her and called her “Bloody Mary” for the rest of the year? Do we need further proof that high-school-age kids tend to suffer from empathy deficiency? Should other girls feel relieved that it didn’t happen to them? We all felt these embarrassments more acutely as teenagers, but it’s pretty telling that the vast majority of incidents shared by Twist readers occurred in front of attractive boys (and that very seldom does a Twist reader bust out a snappy comeback to the subsequent teasing).

I’ll let Twist off the hook for the cavity-inducing articles on Ryan Phillippe and ‘N Sync, and for the endless pages of grooming tips that, if a girl tried to incorporate even half of them into her beauty routine, would leave her no time for little things like eating and sleeping. The publishers want to sell magazines, after all, and if Josh Hartnett stickers won’t move the product, preying on a young girl’s insecurities about her split ends, the freshness of her manicure, her summer scent of choice, which red is right for her, whether she has callused feet or the correctly appliquÈd messenger bag or the same citrus-y eyeshadow as Christina Aguilera will do just as well. And Ilana Newman, MD does a good job with the “body hotline” advice column. Dr. Newman must have the patience of a saint – that, or they just keep running the same letters from the same obtuse, health-class-cutting young ladies over and over. I mean, really – how many times do you have to read that not every girl gets her period at the same age before you get the point? And how can they run the same “I’ve heard about orgasms, but what does one feel like” letter month after month after Amish month – don’t teenage girls rifle through their moms’ copies of Erica Jong anymore? Don’t they pass The Clan Of The Cave Bear around homeroom with the naughty bits dog-eared these days? I don’t blame girls for asking, or for wanting to know in the first place, but I think one blanket letter saying “you’ll know it when you feel it, trust us – but in the meantime, go get an armful of Jackie Collins from the library” should do it.

But I have to say, I find Twist‘s perspective on summer flings truly bizarre. Like a lot of other teen mags, Twist seems to advocate acquiring a summertime sweetie exactly one week after school lets out, doing the Grease thing for three months, and then giving the boy a firm but tearful boot no more than forty-eight hours after the conclusion of Labor Day weekend. If I remember correctly, Seventeen encouraged the same “summer romance = white shoes” approach, and I’ve never understood why you couldn’t just keep going out with the guy instead of stowing him in the back of the closet until next year.

And then there’s the “50 Things Guys Would Never Say” article, which puts everything that grosses me out about the genre into a two-page spread. Not to downplay the inanity of the “What Your Dream Car Says About You” feature, or the rampant overuse of the words “fave” and “rad” throughout Twist, or the fact that the “Pump Up Your Party Personality” piece functions as a primer on how to talk to boys, how not to spill anything on yourself in front of boys, blah dee blah, but the “50 Things” exposÈ manages to codify several dozen sexist assumptions about both boys and girls, while implying that girls should not only expect certain stereotypical behavior from boys but should also learn to accept it without complaint – and, from what I can tell, expecting the readership to find the items on the list humorous rather than exhausted and offensive. A few of the lowlights:

“4. Want to hit the outlet mall this weekend?” Oh, I see – shopping is for girls, and watching sports is for boys. Buying clothes is for girls, and knowing about cars is for boys. Taking an interest in one’s appearance is for girls, and barely tolerating a girly activity is for boys. Whatever.

“5. If you want to date other guys too, that’s cool with me.” First of all, guys say this all the time, usually in the service of freeing themselves up to date other girls. Second of all, way to assume that a boy’s default setting is, or should be, “jealous and possessive.” That’s really progressive. Not.

“7. Hey, that shirt looks really good with those jeans.” The message here: “Despite the fact that we’ve recommended you spend hours prettifying yourself for the benefit of boys, don’t expect them to notice how you look, or to compliment you on it, because boys don’t do that.” The subtext: ” unless they’re, y’know, gay or whatever.” Yuck, yuck, a thousand times yuck.

“9. How can anybody watch boxing? It’s totally violent.” Boys like sports, no matter how violent, pointless, or crooked the sport, and even if a boy didn’t like a particular sport, he would never say so? Boys can’t embrace pacifism?

“13. I think we’re lost.” Like, ha ha. Not. I have never, ever gone on a trip with a man who wouldn’t admit that he’d taken a wrong turn or gotten lost. Can we please let the “men won’t ask for directions” thing die? It’s not funny and it’s not even based in fact.

“14. What’s the point of dating if we’re not going to get serious?” Because if a boy does want a commitment – highly unlikely, given his boy-ness – he’d never admit it. Like, stop the time machine, I want to get off.

“18. I feel so bloated.” Boys can get bloated. Boys drink beer and eat burritos, do they not? So what’s the big? Oh, of course – bloating means PMS, and PMS means girly stuff, so a boy would never say that. Oh, PMS humor. Always so clever and timely, especially when pointing up the myriad differences between men and women.

Not, clearly.

“28. I’d love to spend the day flipping through magazines and watching you get a pedicure.” As to opposed to doing what, exactly? Playing Nintendo and ignoring you until his friends go home? The hell? Oh, sorry, my mistake. Snips and snails and puppy-dog tails and whatnot. Carry on.

“35. Why don’t you ever hold my hand in front of your friends?” It doesn’t bother me so much that the author thinks guys would never say this; it’s that she seems to think it’s something girls ordinarily say, and that’s fucked up on a bunch of different levels. If your boy won’t hold your hand in public, he doesn’t want anyone to know he’s with you, because he fancies himself a player or because he thinks he can do better. Ew. But in the author’s world, girls ask this question as a matter of course. Ew again.

“43. So the point of this game is to get that big ball in that little hoop?” Oh, for the love of Christ. Nobody would ever say this, male or female.

“44. I wish we could talk about our relationship more.” Once again, the boy is cast in the role of emotionally constipated Neanderthal; once again, the girl plays the commitment-obsessed nag. And once again, it’s not that the author thinks a boy wouldn’t say this, but that she thinks a girl would. Did Tim Allen ghost-write this piece or something?

Twist isn’t all sexist tripe. An article on squelching bad body-image thoughts actually had a few good insights into thinking more positively about our bodies, and about associating a good self-image more with our personalities and less with our thighs. But the “50 Things” article colored everything else in the mag for me: the investigative report on who knows a girl best, her best girlfriend or her boyfriend; the so-called guide to asking out a boy, which consisted largely of 1) ways to trick him into asking you out and 2) ways to make it seem like you didn’t exactly ask him out so that you won’t get humiliated if he says no, both of which defeat the entire purpose of the piece; the “Deep Thoughts” blurbs on the best parts of being single, most of which mentioned various for-a-boy’s-benefit things that the girls in question would no longer have to put up with (a typical example, “Ordering whatever you want at a restaurant and not worrying if it’s too messy to eat,” just scratches the antediluvian surface here), but which she probably shouldn’t have bothered doing in the first place.

I remember the mortal fear of doing something stupid in front of the cool kids, the belief that I’d better tone down the lip or I’d never get a boyfriend, the effort that went into trying to fit in and make myself all pink and shiny and desirable. I don’t expect today’s fourteen-year-olds to have evolved past me in that regard; high-school society doesn’t really allow for that. And I don’t expect Twist to hew to my ideas of responsible feminism, either; they know what sells, and sadly, it’s compatibility quizzes and how-tos on kissing. But more than a few of the boy-girl stereotypes Twist peddles really turn my stomach – and not just the stereotypes themselves, but the implication that girls should accept these tropes as part of their lives. Girls like boy bands; boys like playing Frisbee. Girls like to talk about their feelings; boys don’t. Guys in their late teens write to The Vine from time to time, bemoaning the fact that girls their age don’t pay attention to “nice guys” like them, and I always reassure them that the girls will grow out of it soon and learn to appreciate it, but I’ve got to say, magazines like Twist don’t help the nice guys’ cause. Magazines like Twist lock in dated, inaccurate, oh-you-know-how-guys-are ideas in girls’ heads and make them expect boys to act like bull-headed, inconsiderate jockstraps, and then when a nice thoughtful boy comes along, the girls don’t know what to do with him.

I’m a DIY feminist, which means that I think girls and women should do their own things and not buy into stereotypes of anyone – of other girls and women, of boys and men, of what the world tells them to do because they got dealt the ovary card. Wanting to wear pink things or frilly things or sparkly things, or to buy a lot of shoes, or to cuddle, or to watch soppy movies and eat ice cream, doesn’t make a girl less of a feminist. Furthermore, wanting to do those things doesn’t make a boy less of a boy. Nothing pisses me off more than hackneyed generalizations about the way we breasted folks “should” behave, and that’s why Twist bugs, in spite of all the shout-outs they give to MBTV.

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