Stuff (for Shitheads)

I should have known what I was getting into, but Mila Kunis on the cover suckered me into buying a STUFF magazine at the Westmont Newsstand this morning. I breezed through that pile of crap on the train, and left it there. $5 well spent (I also bought a GQ that was twice the thickness [homoerotic italian fashion ads, no doubt] and it was a dollar less). The content included "hilarious" pictures people took of their friends. Like the ones that people forward you in emails that were taken at 4 AM after the victim was markered up and pissed on or worse. It also included a story by Steve-O (Kato Kaelin of the '00s) and some other Jackasshole about taking pills on a plane. Plus lots of gratuitous nearly-naked shots. Seriously, I don't understand this in a "men's" magazine. A Man, should he want to see naked ladies, will buy a proper nudie magazine. I say this after admitting that Mila Kunis without pants made me buy the magazine... I couldn't help but feel like I was in my 7th grade bedroom. Bedecked as it was in posters from Spencer's gifts featuring two ferraris and a topless woman holding her breasts. The tag line? NICE PAIR! Or, my personal favorite, Miami Nice, featuring a busty blond and a bustier multiracial woman in bikini bottoms and linen jackets in front of a ferrari holding guns...
What disturbs me is the demographic for this magazine; the subscriber.
Go agead and say it. I know you want to... the Frat Boy.

Here we go.
First of all, it's a fraternity. You wouldn't call your country a cunt, would you? ZING!
Second of all, stereotyping all visor-wearing t-shirted shitheads into being Frat guys is just as bad as any other stereotype.
I realize that as a fraternity member (and past president), I am not the picture of the Sig Ep from your Psyche 101 lecture who probably was a date rapist. And though all sig eps are rapists*, not all fraternity guys are shitheads. Some foolishly took the ideals to heart and fought in vain against that perception. It wasn't until my senior year that I realized how futile it was. I stood up at the interfraternity council meeting and said that no matter how much money we made for charities, how much food we collected, how much free labor we were to the community, people's perceptions would never change. They would still see us as the Alpha Betas from Revenge of the Nerds.
Had I to do all over again, it would have been different. More fun and more bits. Less "Apollo Man" (The TKE greek ideal). Do I regret all the charity we did? Not at all. Do I regret the BS Self-policing that the greek system at ISU put on itself, and the fact that we (and I) took ourselves so seriously? You bet.

I digress. Rest assured, there are plenty of shitheads out there who never went greek. As the adage goes, "there are more horses' asses than there are horses."
So, the next time you see someone reading STUFF magazine, call him a horse's ass. Better yet, a shithead.

*Not ALL sig eps are rapists. Some are too concerned with messing up their hair. However, All sigma chis are rapisis. SOURCE: University of Nebraska Sociological Makeup Study Chapters 12-15 "BAD fraternities".