Though I was vaguely aware that Michael Caruso had been fired from Details because of the success of this upstart publication Maxim, I hadn’t seen it before I agreed to be in this conversation, nor had I thought much about men’s magazines, one way or another, in a long time–probably not since the beginning of the ‘80s and the eruption of bitter debate within the feminist movement between sexual libertarians (me and my allies) and the Dworkin/MacKinnon neo-Victorian wing of the movement, which made me realize I had certain common interests with the men’s magazine guys though I still thought they were basically sexist jerks.
The cultural context has changed a lot since then. Certainly the sexual-political plot has thickened, what with Larry Flynt outing right-wing lunatic adulterers. But what first struck me when I picked up Maxim, before I could even turn my mind to heavy considerations of what it might reveal about the contemporary sex and gender gestalt, was that as a journalist and a reader I was on the other side of a massive generation gap. I found myself feeling a bond with Hugh Hefner far more powerful than any alliance of convenience we might forge against Kitty MacKinnon: Despite all the jokes, you could read Playboy for the articles, especially those interviews. Esquire, of course, was a bastion of literary journalism in men’s magazine drag. And Rolling Stone, which in the ‘70s at least was a men’s magazine that didn’t admit it, was notable for its outpouring of words, tens of thousands of them. Maxim, on the other hand, is part of that larger phenomenon, the post-literate magazine. Its words are basically filler, like the lyrics of ‘50s rock ’n’ roll songs.
I have what might be called a reverse attention span problem: It takes me a while to get into an article. To me reading the kind of piece that ends practically before it begins is like having sex with a man who comes too fast. But this is a silly complaint, I suppose, because clearly most of these pieces aren’t really meant to be read. The question then becomes, why are they there at all? In fact, why do people buy these magazines instead of just watching TV? What is the point of a magazine you can’t count on to occupy you for a half-hour wait in the dentist’s office?
OK, enough. It’s unfair, not to say humorless, to burden a cheerfully crass mag like Maxim with the weight of my angst at the decline of the Gutenberg galaxy. Anyway, the first principle of pop-culture criticism is, you can’t understand a popular form by condemning it for not being something else. (How many times have I accused critics who sneer at ‘50s rock ’n’ roll because its lyrics don’t measure up to Cole Porter of missing the point?) So what is Maxim about, on its own terms? Well, to begin with, it projects a sensibility that comes across something like this: Hey, we’re guys, interested in guy things like “sex, sports, beer, gadgets, clothes, fitness.” We’re crude, we’re lewd, get used to it. Whether it’s lying on our résumé to get a job or plotting how best to get laid, we’re for getting over by any means necessary. But we’re very, very ironic about it.
The magazine is a kind of distillation of the men’s-mag genre, boiled down to basics, and at the same time a parody of or comment on it, as in the Playboyesque categories attached to pieces (one on botched penis-enlargement surgery is labeled “Horror,” another called “Pick Up Women With a Sock Puppet!” is billed “Sensitive Relationship Article”). It clearly reflects 30 years of self-consciousness, prompted by feminism, about men, masculinity, and men’s magazines. Which is to say that the editors have a sense of history. But does the typical Maxim reader share or even notice it? I suspect not.
The attitude toward women is much more egalitarian, in the sense that there’s a rough respect for women as worthy antagonists in the battle of the sexes. There’s an assumption, made matter-of-factly and without ressentiment, that guys have to protect their interests, but don’t necessarily rule. Is this post-masculinism?
