I have posted before about Jezebel's "Write Like a Man" feature, but there's a newish episode up and it's kind of a doozy: an anonymous men's-magazine writer compares celebrity profiles in women's magazines with those in men's magazines, and argues that the mensmag ones are better because they're more meta about the total fraudulence and inadequacy of the celebrity-profile form. From the nutgraf, which comes almost exactly halfway through:
The modern mensmag celeb profile is actually a surprisingly prayerful, if superficial, blend of braggadocio and dogged practice.... The work of writing about celebrity is not real work. It's a break from the real work. It is The Writer's Time To Jizz -- a way to keep that writerly muscle loose and limber and tuned up for the next Big Plunge ... for that 14,000-word hillock of ASME-judge porn that all of us contract heroes have got sitting on our laptops. (Many of which, if we're being truthful, are nowhere near as playful or, in a weird way, honest as our best celeb pieces.) ... Each celeb profile becomes a little underdog story, an uplifting tale of a ragtag writer saddled with a task that Nobody Thought He Could Ever Pull Off: Can he spin a few hours' worth of smalltalk and smiles into a revolution?There's 2,300 words of this stuff, with detailed examples from both sides of the fence. The next time someone claims that the Gawker Empire does nothing but cookie-cutter snark, point them here.
