Harmonic Convergences
You're right, Maxim's strong point is that it's totally unsentimental
and ungenteel. It's a sendup of the old model, but in a different way than,
say, Hustler was, and the difference (surprise) reflects the sexual
culture of the '90s. With its belligerent grossness and misogyny,
Hustler rebelled against the establishment men's mags' class
condescension, the earnest philosophizing about the sexual revolution, the
"thinking men's sex bomb" syndrome, at the same time that it was deliberately
goading feminists. It came right out with the anger that the regular men's mags
tried to hide. Maxim pokes fun at its progenitors but with considerable
ironic affection. It's not angry. In fact, while its fondness for the most
idiotic, juvenile humor knows no bounds, any strong emotion is taboo (unless
you count horror at having your penis mangled)--that's part of the British
influence, I guess. And feminism isn't an issue, at least not directly--partly
because its basic ideas have been assimilated and are taken for granted, partly
because politics in general and feminism in particular barely exist in the
consciousness of Maxim's age group. (Whereas Gear, which retains
certain elements of the old men's mag ethos, and the old hostility--and not
incidentally runs somewhat longer articles--does worry about and argue with
feminism, as in its recent piece on sexual repression in the military, in which
it is argued, after a fashion, that 1) we can't suppress male soldiers' urge to
rape and harass women without suppressing the urge to kill that's the
military's reason for being, 2) sexual harassment crusades interfere with
women's equality, 3) women soldiers aren't men's equals anyway, and 4) why do
we need women in the military in the first place?)
Another thing I've noticed is that the trajectory of the new men's magazines
and that of contemporary women's magazines seem to be converging, at least
compared with 20 years ago. There used to be an enormous gulf between the sense
of entitlement to the good things of life, including women, that pervaded the
men's mags and women's anxious obsession with self-improvement in order to be
worthy of male attention. In young women's magazines now, Cosmo being
the paradigm, there's a much more bluntly instrumental, "male" attitude toward
getting sex of the quantity and quality desired. Beauty is as central a
preoccupation as ever, if anything more so, but the preoccupation has much more
of a narcissistic, self-pampering quality and less of a desperation to make up
for some irrecoverable, primal imperfection. In the men's magazines, there's
much more of a sense that if you want women to give you the time of day, you
have to make some effort to find out what they want and give it to them. In the
old model, if men needed advice on women or sex, they got it from a male expert
like the "Playboy Advisor." Now Maxim features advice from women on such
matters as how not to give the wrong impression on a first date.
On the other hand, men still don't like to express anxiety directly--I'd
guess that part of the reason men's mags have gotten sillier is that they've
seized on men's time-honored method of covering up insecurity by clowning
around. Regarding your suggestion that these magazines give men a safe place to
be together without their heterosexuality being questioned: That sounds like
more of a hope (on their part) than a reality. Because it's ultimately
self-doubt that really matters, no place can really be safe--hence the
need to escalate the jokes.
