Similar to the phenomenon of "hate watching" television—which I fully plan to do with the first season of Smash one of these days—I enjoy hate reading terrible-yet-high-profile magazine articles.

Like Elizabeth Wurtzel's wonderfully incoherent New York Magazine piece about how tough it is to be an uncompromising free spirit in this world.

Or this week's Esquire profile of Megan Fox, which has led me to consider the possibility that straight men just shouldn't be assigned to write profiles of beautiful women. I'm fairly certain that no female writer would've strung together these sentences:


The symmetry of her face, up close, is genuinely shocking. The lip on the left curves exactly the same way as the lip on the right. The eyes match exactly. The brow is in perfect balance, like a problem of logic, like a visual labyrinth. It's not really even that beautiful. It's closer to the sublime, a force of nature, the patterns of waves crisscrossing a lake, snow avalanching down the side of a mountain, an elaborately camouflaged butterfly. What she is is flawless. There is absolutely nothing wrong with her.

The article struggles to make the case that looking like Megan Fox is a burden to Megan Fox, because in the age of successful uggos like Lena Dunham, Lady Gaga, and Amy Adams (????????????), beauty has become as obsolete as the fountain pen.

The best thing about this piece? This piece that's ostensibly about how Megan Fox is running from her status as a sex symbol? Esquire knows which side its SEO is buttered on:

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