It's official. The Age is bullshit.

Let's face it, Australians are hardly spoilt for choice when it comes to print media. We've got ONE national newspaper to the UK's ELEVEN*, and it's Murdoch-owned. As for Melbourne papers catering to the country's supposedly most cosmopolitan, progressive, European city - the average punter/commuter has two choices:

1./Pick up a cheap (and nasty) copy of the Herald Sun, and therein discover the boeuf du jour of paranoid halfwits like Andrew Bolt, or the latest phoney/patriotic group hug.

2./Do what every Melbourne citizen with an IQ over 60 is forced to do. Buy The Age. Or visit its dumber online cousin.

(The third "choice", which I'll ignore, is the MX. Naive people always marvel at "how they afford to hand it out for free at the train station!". Maybe they need to learn that this generosity is all about a little thing called the advertising dollar - and the captive market.)

So most of us settle for The Age. I have endured years of its sloppy journalism - half-formed "facts", grammar that sadly reveals itself to be ignorance rather than rush job (the latter being wholely acceptable from time to time), the ominous creep of editorial to the right - with little more than the occasional disgruntled letter. But the recent spate of truly retarded, puerile 'blogs' is doing my head in.

What I detest about these blogs is that, apart from the way the writers all sound like excitable twits ("Like, okay people, herrre's the deal!"), they dabble in the arrogant and very risky practice of playing social barometer - flattering themselves they're in touch with their readers ("everybody's doing it!!"), while gently nudging them towards social enlightenment ("so why aren't YOU?"). It's a very irritating conceit.

The latest one is about whether men should wax.
(I couldn't resist - I posted a comment on this one.)

The writer takes it as a given that women accept ridding their bodies of hair as the norm, and presents male waxing as the Next Great Frontier. Hmm, a topic of earth-shattering importance.
Try this for an irritating opening line:

"Hairy legs. Hairy chests. Hairy bellies. And - worst of all - hairy backs. Guys, ladies just aren't standing for it any longer. Waxing's the way forward (just ask Rove, who had his lip done on telly last night!)."

(Why would I ask Rove anything anyway?)

And this:

"Poor blokes. At least us (sic) women know where we stand when it comes to hair. Men, it seems, are more confused than ever."

I don't need some spray-tanned, semi-literate New Media graduate prescribing cultural norms for me! Do I need to know where I stand when it "comes to hair"? Last time I checked, it didn't matter where I stood on the rather dull topic of hair (especially the hair not visible to the general public) - not to me nor the people I love.

Are people really so tragically vacuous that they think hair removal or a boob job will make them better? Clearly The Age thinks the answer to that is a given, and the question is more "Are we prepared to risk the pain and shell out the bucks?".

Here are some of the more annoying (and scary) bits of the post which sought to answer the really big question (pardon the pun) of Do we all desire double Ds?

"So let's get down to it. Do we all want big breasts? Most men, of course, will say yes."

Will they just? Quantative research? Bullshit generalisation? Or is it viral marketing... The writer of the post ensures she mentions (and links to) an organisation which happens to offer truly frightening sounding plastic surgery 'getaways' to Thailand, where the laws governing medical malpractice are no doubt even flimsier than they are here. I wonder if this is a sponsored link... like the nod to The Plastic Surgery Sourcebook, which also sounds disturbingly like a plug for the knife, from the quote provided:

"Often a patient who has had a breast augmentation finds herself standing up straighter, walking more self-assuredly, and marvelling about how great she looks and feels in her clothes."

Does she feel great about her sense of humour, her intellect, her conscience, I wonder? Does she feel great about her ability not to be conned into giving her (obvious surplus of) cash to cowboys who can't be frogmarched to court if they botch the job? Does she feel great that the type of man who will notice her new assets is likely to be a stupid, sleazy arsehole who will do more to ruin her obviously fragile self-esteem than her throwing money at it could ever improve it?

This, fellow Melbournians, is what we're stuck with. And like, it really sucks.

Post Script: The Age would be less of a rag if it concentrated on exposing what a callous little misogynist prick Tony Abbott is. This time for refusing to put Gardasil, which would immunise girls against cervical cancer, on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, thereby making it available to all and not just the rich. And from time to time, it does. But most of the time it's more concerned with blogs that make those girls (even more) paranoid about their body image.

*Murdoch-owned and, blessedly, otherwise.