That's The Way The Cookie Crumbles

Conde Nast announced they're shutting down four magazines today. The venerable food-porn, Gourmet is axed, but the "parenting" mag, Cookie, is also getting the boot. Good riddance.

Parenting mags are for the most part not what the category name implies. They are usually mothering mags. They are aimed almost entirely at women. There's rarely an article that focuses on fathers, unless it involves an idea for a mother to engage a dad in more active parenting, or something of that ilk. The mags are often fashion rags for mom and adorable offspring. Cookie was the worst of the lot.

At its inception Cookie had instituted a policy that none of the child models used on its covers or in its contents should in any way appear to be fat - not even healthy, baby-type fat. The children were idealized and the "mothers" accompanying them in the photos were never the children's real mothers (unless it was a celeb and their fabulous spawn.) Its conspicuous consumption mentality was annoyingly standard for the genre, but Cookie took it to a Robb Report level.

But the thing that irked me was that it had been launched just as more fathers had begun to take a deliberate place in the the home with more and more of us becoming the primary care-givers. It was an enormous opportunity for Cookie to apply itself equally to both parents. Instead it opted for the easy, and ultimately financially ruinous, tradition.

I rarely bitch about the short shrift stay-at-home dads get in the media. It's the way things are and I don't expect much more than the tired "Mr. Mom" approach. Magazines are no exception and have often shown themselves ridiculously behind the curve when it comes to actual reporting of the substantially changing domestic paradigms. They just don't get it.

Cookie deserves its fate.