Watch your step! As we descend the cerebellum staircase there is total interstellar darkness except for the phosphorescent flashing of a billion synapses, the paparazzi of the mind photographing their own trajectories. You cross over an intercortical Rubicon not more than a fraction of a micron across—and suddenly everything changes! You’re in another world entirely. The odd thing is that from where I stand the right half of the brain looks identical to the left half, but, believe me, for I have ventured there recently, it is of a different order of reality entirely. You have just entered the Planet of Women’s Magazines.

You’ve seen them on magazine racks, you may even have surreptitiously flipped through one in a doctor’s office or a unisex hair salon—just to see what it was, what manner of thing might lurk within, and, utterly bewildered, set it down again knowing it was not intended for your boorish eyes. Here subtleties of an almost Aristotelian order reign—frills and decoupage, exotic ways of presenting food, and tips on things that you didn’t even know existed.

It’s in English, the articles have titles, the pictures have captions—just like any other magazine—but to the uninitiated it’s as impenetrable as a Masonic manual or Japanese stereo instructions. As if women communicated on a different wavelength entirely. Well, of course we know they do, but nothing makes it clearer than a copy of Woman’s Day or Family Circle.

Take the Easter cover of Woman’s Day. It shows a round cake with rough-cut edges and features marzipan chicks hatching out of marzipan eggs on a bed of marzipan lettuce with marzipan bunny rabbits recklessly carrying marzipan baskets past a tipsy marzipan leprechaun. Looked at from any other perspective it’s pure surrealism. It’s a Jeff Koons sculpture in miniature.

Okay, now take this Right Brian City nuttiness and add Rosie O’Donnell. Rosie has her own magazine, if you didn’t already know. It’s called Rosie—what else would you call it? Rosie, like Oprah, is a type so familiar in some archetypal, media-manipulated way that we think we know her. She’s the loud, bratty, lippy, funny fat girl from high school who became the loud, bratty, lippy, funny fat girl on MTV telling sophomoric bathroom and snot jokes and then got her own TV show which was the more-or-less grown up version of the loud, bratty...

But good-hearted and smart. And so is her magazine. Rosie is actually a replacement for McCall’s, an upscale Family Circle that fell out of touch with the times (if you had a subscription to McCall’s, you would now get Rosie instead). Why do we (the cultural, gender-solidarity we) need another women’s magazine? Aren’t there already enough women’s magazines out there giving out tips on how to butter a cracker without breaking it, how to get wine stains out of a shag carpet, how to perk up your old chest of drawers with decoupage, or your marriage?

There’s a paradoxical situation here. Times have changed and how do you get with it without chucking out all that stuff that women want to know without seeming to be brainless, old-fashioned hausfraus? Martha Stewart’s meteoric rise had a lot to do with her skillful shifting the helpful hint business into an aesthetic mega-industry. Subsequently, however, she became a shill for her own products, which are often badly made and impractical.

Along comes Rosie. In place of the mid-cult taste-police approach of Miss Martha Stewart, you have the self-deprecating, humorous O’Donnell. Women, I’m told have developed the dreaded Martha Stewart Guilt Syndrome from merely reading her monthly calendar. "Either the woman is super human or on drugs," my friend Sue says. "It’s like, ‘April 2nd plant early-American peas, April 3rd built rustic garden arch from hemlock twigs, April 4th convert your bathroom into Brazilian rain forest fantasy.’ It’s exhausting just reading this stuff. Rosie’s calendar, on the other hand, goes like, ‘Saturday, start food journal, Sunday, look for lost food journal, Monday, buy new food journal, Tuesday, suck in gut until mid-September. She’s funny, she’s fallible, she’s human—you relax."

The funny thing is that my friend Sue is a veritable Beat artifact—I plan to donate her to the Smithsonian someday—but through the Hearty-Burgandy poetry readings of the late fifties and the avant-garde art putsches of the sixties, she has religiously read Woman’s Day and Family Circle "If you can just cut through that stuff about if-your-house-isn’t-clean-you’re-gonna-die-a-miserable-death stuff," she says, "and focus on the craft, there’s a lot of good ideas in them."

Actually the amount of advice, helpful hints, and suggestions on how to improve your life is frightening in these magazines. No wonder women are always dispensing advice generally unwanted by men. They know too much! Guys like advice, too, but it generally runs to how to use your router to make an over-the-fireplace Civil War musket mount. Men know that their magazines are about hobbies, however obsessed they are about making trout flies or turbo-charging their V-8 engine.

Men don’t think of their magazines as the world itself. Women’s magazines, on the other hand, aim at a veritable Weltanschauung, a comprehensive worldview from a female perspective. Everything is here from the most trivial to the profound questions of life. In Rosie as in any other woman’s magazine, there’s the standard sections: make-up tips and makeover tips ("our experts take bride-to-be Heidi Sheonfeldt under their wings") there are beauty and fashion tips, recipes, health advice, crafts and decorating stuff, along with more serious articles—gun control for-and-against, foster parenting and disabled children. Then there’s always that tearjerker article about the woman who finds her long-lost mother or the woman who loses her whole family in an accident and is now crippled. The first issue of Rosie features Fran Drescher in an arm lock from Rosie with her "Triumph Over Cancer" story. The marital sex questions in Rosie are handled in an amusing article about a couple who consult four different sex manuals—including the Kama Sutra—and the Dear Abby section is handled by Linda Richman, the original "coffee-talk" lady, in a column called, "What Can I Tell You?" There’s a touching "essay" by Rosie about her adopted daughter, Mia, "a troubled foster kid, one who had been in over a dozen homes, one who spoke no English, one who the experts said was hopeless...sounded perfect to me." Then there’s the celebrities. The magazine is as sprinkled with stars as a kindergarten craft class. You’ve got Jane Seymour and Tracey Ullman answering your parenting questions and an article on Uma Thurman’s mom by Wendy Wasserstein.

I started out intending to trash Rosie—why another dopey woman’s journal when a noble and innovative magazine like Gadfly has had to find refuge in the ether? But, like Pizarro, I soon got lost in the terrain. I began wading through the surf of pre-editorial ads—L’Oreal in 9 breathable shades, the pink fuzziness of Baby Gap, a hair-coloring ad with Andie McDowell cavorting on what could only be Ecstasy, Mabilla Age Minimizing make-up, Waverly, we-bring-the-garden-indoors Sweet Violet sheets, and the Egyptological-sounding Reviving Cleanser—and by the time I got to Rosie’s demurring editorial I felt like I’d taken a mild narcotic. Soon I was in the downy, blurry, fluffy, velvety, nebulous zone where I found myself unable to pick just one adjective, and was worrying about stretch marks. I’d like to finish this article, but, listen, I’m busy right now, I’ve got to get back to my Jack-Kerouac-reading-live-at-the-hungry-i theme sponge cake. E-mail me if you want the recipe.