In an idea stolen from a viral tweet, Elle magazine's Twitter account posted that Kim Kardashian and Kanye West are splitting up. That wasn't true, but the link took readers to a voter registration website.

Elle's gimmick has been rightly dragged by prominent culture writers like Roxane Gay and Ira Madison III. For a magazine that still fashions itself as a news source, not the Onion or even a celebrity blinds blog, to tweet out legitimate fake news to Rick Roll its audience with the assumption that they're too vapid to already be registered to vote is beyond journalistic malpractice or pure idiocy. It's a self-evident microcosm of proof that the mainstays of women's media already have one foot in the grave. They should probably go gently into that good night rather than force us all to watch the slow self destruction of women's media.

Once upon a time, Elle was a fashion magazine, and Teen Vogue published fashion spreads, celebrity interviews, makeup tips, skincare reviews, relationship advice, and the occasional sex column. But a series of inevitable trends, such as a decline of print and the pursuit of clicks intersected with the rise of "intersectionality," Teen Vogue and, to a lesser extent, most digital operations for women's mags, began their slow decline into wokeness, and eventually irrelevance.

Teen Vogue traded thigh high boot reviews for "Thigh High Politics," a humorless grievance column written by the perennially victimized Lauren Duca. Elle, technically the largest fashion magazine in the world, now publishes lovely diatribes like, "My Woke Hot American Summer: 72 Hours at Male Feminism Camp" and "How to Prepare for a Post-Roe World." (Spoiler alert: you go to California because federalism still exists.)

But trading in standard-fare pieces about teen dating and safe sex for aggressively woke screeds like "How To Masturbate If You Have a Penis" — in Teen Vogue, a magazine for teenage girls — comes not without its costs.

According to data from ComScore, TeenVogue.com had 8,341,000 unique visitors in May 2017. One year later, they had barely half that, at 4,476,000. Most damningly, just 1.7 percent of their May 2018 audience was 17 or younger. Only 2.6 percent were 18 to 24 years old. At the absolute most generous estimate, in Teen Vogue's digital audience — the only audience they still have after they shelved their print edition with a final copy featuring Hillary Clinton on the cover — 1 in 20 readers is an actual teenager. As it would turn out, 15 year old girls want to read "7 signs he's into you" rather than guides to using butt plugs and ending capitalism.

And that's not to say that girls and young women have no interest in stories about sexual health and politics. It's simply that anonymous, apolitical Reddit groups and snarky, honest blogs like Betches and babe have supplanted the former, and readers are smart enough to seek out political reporting from professionals.

The woke suicide of women's media, in a way, was a product of their own creation. When everything, from weight loss tips to basic human biology becomes offensive, of course a genre dedicated to women-specific issues would become toxic. Outside of dating, fashion, skincare, and health, not much content really is specific to females. But instead, just as the Women's March did and as leftists are trying — but hopefully failing — to hijack the Me Too movement into, the bulk of women's media became cover for left wing propaganda, more relatable to woke, 30 year old white men from Bushwick than actual young women across the country.