he reports of the death of women’s magazines are highly exaggerated. Or so I hope.

Yes, I know. It’s very odd to read a defense of Cosmo and Glamour on National Review‘s website. But that’s not what this is. These glossies are repulsive, dangerous, unfiltered outlets for NOW and NARAL’s press departments. Their pages typically laud the pleasure principle — literally selling responsibility-free sexual freedom, backed by the endless possibilities provided by life-destroying rewind buttons. They attack religion, promote gender quotas, whine about the travails of the superwoman, and sell super-expensive skimpy clothing.

Yet there is something oddly comforting about them.

I only made this discovery last week when reading a Salon.com piece, an obituary for the gender-specific magazine. The news that one of the smarter women’s magazines, Mirabella, is to fold with its June issue, along with the elimination of smarmy men’s magazines like Details and Bikini from the market is her evidence.

Why is Mirabella folding? Writer Ann Marlowe cites “the rise of women in the workplace” (they no longer use cosmetics because there’s now more to life than catching a husband) and “the increased use of the Internet” as reasons. Both are sound hypotheses. People in general have less leisure time on their hands, and predictions of the death of print magazines and books are nothing new.

But Marlowe’s main explanation is that gender-specific magazines will die because we have moved beyond gender. Since we’re living in a post-gender-role society, there is no need for publications that primitively cater to one sex exclusively. Women buy Tennis magazine if they need a racket and men buy Gourmet if they want to cook dinner, she says.

The death of Mirabella has been long chronicled in the media pages of newspapers. Bad funding, lack of investor interest. Odds are a clone will pop up, maybe on the newsstand, maybe on the Internet. Maybe it’s the bus I take, but on my commute home, women aren’t reading National Review or The New Yorker — the mags they buy for the ride home have models and sex quizzes on their covers.

It’s a shame that Mirabella had to go — I’d applaud the ditching of the pornographic Jane (marketed to not-quite-17-year-old graduates of Seventeen), Cosmopolitan, Glamour, or a host of others first. They missed her points, but at least Mirabella had the good sense to interview conservative author Danielle Crittenden — calling her the most dangerous feminist in America on their cover last month. Dangerous because she’s willing to honestly answer the question of what women want, and the post-gender age is not it. Until Danielle has her glossy, at least there’s Cosmo.