Bad-Boy Nostalgia
Think your analysis is spot-on, Ellen. (How's that for a disincentive to
keep reading?) It's no coincidence that Golin had his apprenticeships at both
Men's Health and Cosmo, two magazines unlikely ever to be accused
of sentimentality or pretension. The crucial lesson taught by those two
publications, and successful mass-market mags in general, is a rigorous
anti-elitism: Esquire and GQ posit, explicitly or by inference,
that only winners will be let into their club. In this week's Advertising
Age, GQ editor Art Cooper asks why condom advertisers bother to take
out pages in Maxim, since the readership is composed entirely of
masturbators. I'm pretty sure Cooper was joking, but the dis was clear.
GQ="classy." Maxim=hopelessly déclassé. But who wants to be
classy anymore? The recent vogues for cigars, cocktails, and the Rat Pack were
not wistful evocations of a more civilized time; they were wistful evocations
of the last great period of big Straight White Guy fun, before the broads and
the fags came in to ruin it all. It was Sinatra's Pack's bad-boy behavior the
late-'90s ersatz swells are celebrating, not the fine tailoring on his
three-button suits.
The tits in these magazines, likewise, are not there for the purpose of
"trouser-rousing" (as Details so delicately put it in its current
issue). The photos are rarely "hot" in the manner of pornography or even in the
manner of the Sports Illustrated tanned-fleshy swimsuit numbers. They
are more like '90s answers to the calender girls and pinups of the mid-century,
suggestive more than titillating, festive more than funky. The men's-mag
T&A is really about providing a kind of boys-only atmosphere in
which the complicated tradeoffs involved in three decades of negotiating with
women's lib can be neatly tuned out.
This is not really anti-feminist, since much of the new laddism seems to be
coming at the behest of a new generation of Cosmo-trained sex-addled
fembots. How terrifying Monica Lewinsky's blithe attitude toward phone sex must
have been to the baby boomers. Hey, talking nasty to the president is just
fun. And how irrelevant is capital-F Feminism now that NOW et al. have
given a tacit thumbs up to the president's sexual harassment of an intern (an
issue that even three years ago would have provoked mau-mauing of the highest
order)? We've come a long way since Clarence Thomas.
Indeed, feminism feels like a
dead letter both in magazines and in the culture at large .
