TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/101590/1015220.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.5 KB | 158 lines

                                                                                PRESS, Page 90

A Muchness of Maleness


With a host of new entries joining a shrinking magazine field,
which of them will be enticing enough to survive?

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III -- With reporting by Leslie Whitaker/New
York


    The dividing line among men's magazines used to be whether
they printed photographs of naked women. Playboy and Penthouse
did; Esquire and GQ didn't. Save for that distinction, they all
tended to paint a consistent portrait of Man Triumphant,
although the skin books gave more attention to autos, sports
and conspicuous consumption, while their rivals emphasized
career climbing, pop culture and dressing for success. Just
below the surface, to be sure, the whole category hinted of
deep male insecurity: along with the assertions of
sophistication and self-confidence came heavy doses of
instruction on how to look right and act cool. But actually
talking about such anxieties, the mainstay of women's
magazines, was all but verboten.

    The American male has evolved, however, and the magazines
that cater to his fantasy life have struggled to adjust to his
expanded interest in health, psychology, relationships and
children. They may not have moved quickly enough. Circulation
has dropped at the longtime leaders: since the early 1970s,
Playboy's has plummeted from almost 7 million to half that, and
Penthouse's has shrunk from 3 million to 1.7 million. That
falloff is mirrored among women's magazines.

    Yet both categories remain eternally attractive to
publishers, if only because they offer the potential for a
targeted, cohesive audience to suit particular kinds of
advertisers. Thus half a dozen well-financed rivals of the
traditional men's magazines have arrived or are poised to enter
the fray, even at a time when all publications are hard pressed
to hold on to advertisers. Warns Charles Elbaum, president of
Publishing Economics, a media consulting firm: "The pie has been
sliced too many times for them all to survive."

    Still, the plethora of choices ought to delight readers for
the moment -- except that, to judge by early issues, most of
the recent entrants are woefully short of ideas. They are also
a bit short on diversity: both story subjects and models (the
magazines are greatly concerned with clothes) are
overwhelmingly white. The very fact of homosexuality is largely
ignored. Three competitors are in their opening month or two:
Details, a bratty, street-talking melange aimed at men in their
20s and early 30s; Men's Life, a smirky yet sentimental blend
of National Lampoon and the Saturday Evening Post directed at
fortyish suburban baby boomers; and M Inc., a merger of two
prestigious but money-losing forerunners, Manhattan, inc. and
M, that is meant, like its predecessors, for the well heeled
and silver templed.

    Also relatively new is Men's Health, which increased
frequency to bimonthly in March 1990 and looks uncannily like
a women's magazine with different pronouns. This Rodale Press
publication mingles diet and exercise features with such
provocative cover-line topics as "Why Men Take Mis(The answer,
a women's magazine classic, is not sex but lack of marital
communication.) Soon to come are an entry from the company that
produces Rolling Stone and a revamped version of Smart, a
sardonic, profile-oriented monthly.

    The shift at Smart results from the decision by Terry
McDonell, its founding editor, to jump ship from a leaky
rowboat to take charge of Esquire, which he likens to "walking
onto the flight deck of the aircraft carrier Eisenhower." The
change prompted Smart owner Owen Lipstein to merge his shaky
start-up with a proposed rival, Men, and pick up its creators,
Peter Kaplan and Chris Kimball, as editor and publishing
director. In their vision, everything old is new again: Kaplan
says his "new" magazine will attempt to recapture the
personality of Esquire circa the 1930s, which he describes as
that magazine's heyday -- not a universal judgment among
Esquire connoisseurs. The Kaplan regime takes effect with the
December-January issue.

    The subtitle of Details is "style matters." Editor James
Truman used to be features editor at Vogue, and it shows. The
opening issues are nothing if not clothes conscious. Even an
informative report about Moscow gangsters begins with a
description of their attire. Truman thinks his focus is
broader: "Style is what you wear to work and also Nelson
Mandela walking out of jail. It's stylish to be interested in
the world." The magazine, published by the Newhouse empire,
which also owns GQ, purports to offer some hard-hitting pieces.
But Doug Vaughan's story about rooting through the confiscated
files of former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega breaks
little news beyond some eye-popping Visa-card bills. Maura
Sheehy's portrait of Fox TV as the "ninja" fourth network is
hyped with adrenal adjectives and metaphors to the point of
incoherence. Details shows glints of awareness of an America
beyond white male plutocrats. But when it is not trendy, it is
often aggressively vulgar.

    Men's Life, a quarterly published by Fox TV's owner, Rupert
Murdoch, is almost sweet by comparison. The inaugural issue
features an article by syndicated humor columnist Dave Barry,
the baby-boomer laureate, and at least a dozen other stories
ape his smirky, adolescent style. The magazine exudes this
attitude most succinctly in a column by Mike Kelly, who
deplores the emergence of a less macho, more candid style of
masculinity: "I don't know any New Men. I don't know any women
who know any New Men. I don't even know any women who want to
know New Men." Story topics are predictable (the allure of
blonds, the pros and cons of buying a house), and the writing
is frequently dreary.

    M Inc. is, at 316 pages, much the fattest of the entries,
but it was able to draw on the articles stored up by both its
parents. In looks the merger retains more of M, but, as the
first issue's cover signals, the sensibility is pure Manhattan,
inc. It proclaims POWER BROKERS in letters 1 1/2 in. high and
names 11 of them (10 men and Madonna). Inside is an almost
nonstop stream of gossip, scuttlebutt and awestruck praise
about the rich and famous, including 65 miniprofiles of such
figures as financier Michael-David Weil and Hollywood superagent
Mike Ovitz. The prose is burnished, but not much of the dish
is fresh, save for two first-rate pieces -- one by Ernest
Volkman and John Cummings about Mob leader John Gotti, the
other by Richard Morgan about advertising mogul Burt Manning
-- that are spun off from books. The juiciest item is about the
marital breakup of billionaire businessman John Kluge. The
weakest, a rambling travelogue of Prague, is by editor in chief
Jane Lane. Overall, if Details is about night life and style,
and Men's Life about home and hearth, M Inc. seems gaga over
money.

    Its reason for being, Lane concedes, has more to do with
demographics than editorial vision: "Our commitment is to a
highly focused target audience of 200,000 men of
accomplishment. We will simply work at finding out exactly who
they are and exactly what they want." Much the same could be
said by the editors of the other magazines. The problem is that
while advertisers may like to get customers bundled in a
statistically neat package, readers have to be enticed to return
for the next issue one by one by one. Not nearly enough is
enticing about any of the new guys.