The Fall Of Men's Magazines

Radar brilliantly plots the fall of the "men's magazine", and it is quite a descent:

For publishers in the halcyon days of the late 1990s—those days before the Internet was blamed for robbing media moguls of their precious ad revenues—there existed a magical recipe that could build you a glossy magazine empire almost overnight. The concoction was simply named The Formula.

The Formula's ingredients were as follows:

3 scantily clad B-list starlets1 two-hundred word sex advice feature

1 personal benefit/service feature

1 "gritty read" (legitimately researched, well written, and at the back of the magazine)

1 humor piece whose punch line might include the term "pierced taco"

These were the ingredients of Maxim, FHM, and Stuff, the so-called "lad-mags." In 1999, the lads came and conquered. They blew off their humorless women's lib oppressors, sneered at the campy "high-brow" men's mags like GQ and Esquire and enjoyed explosive circulation. With their markets threatened, the tanned cheesecake men's magazines had to defend themselves against these young Turks. In no time, the "high-brows" started slashing column space and defiling their articles with words like "dude" and "bro." Even Playboy, the Grand Pooh-Bah of classy girlie mags, began watering down its genuinely rich literary tradition, pumping out pea-sized articles like artillery shells.

By 2002, the most successful of the bawdy bro-rags peaked at an impressive 2.5 million copies in paid circulation. "And let me tell you, I have never found that statistic more dispiriting than I do today," lamented former Maxim editor David Itzkoff, in a 2004 tell-all piece in the New York Press.

Itzkoff bemoaned Maxim's abuse of The Formula, its abysmal content, and eventual decline into a cynical ad revenue machine. Itzkoff indulged in his share of hand-wringing. But, like a true lad, he refused to man up and punted much of the blame to the greedy suits.

Itzkoff pulled out of Maxim right as the porn-lite kingdom started to collapse. While moving 2.5 million copies was no small feat, circulation has been stagnant since. Ad revenues plunged 34 percent in 2007 (in a single year!) and the New York Post estimated that the magazine devoured over $110 million of its publisher's money in its eight years of existence. If Maxim merely went limp, its cruder little brothers, FHM and Stuff, went into a full-on revenue death spiral. In 2005, both shut down print production and settled into the seedy world of online-only content.

Maxim continues to milk The Formula for all its worth while the other more "sophisticated" men's magazines grasp for their identity, stuck somewhere between adolescent towel-snapping and enlightened conversations about manhood. So it is that American men are left with soulless sex advice, perfunctory fashion spreads, toothless journalism, and a couple buxom bodies from reality TV squished in between the ads.

Some ascribe the failure of men's magazines to the Internet. Others blame feminism. Still others blame Girls Gone Wild auteur Joe Francis for polluting the field. But it's really about the purgatory between Lad and Dad, which leaves the males of our generation scratching their heads and asking: are we not MEN?

No need to renew your subscription. Click through this flaccid catalog of misfires...

Playboy

Date: 1953 to present

Peak circulation: 6 million in the 1970s

Circulation Today: 2.8 million in 2007

"We like our apartment," wrote Hugh Hefner in Playboy's first edition. "We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d'oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting in a female for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex." Though it may be laughable now to think of the liver-spotted reality TV star shuffling around his assisted-living mansion, stripping off his pajamas, and having jazzy sex with a philosophy major or two, you can thank Hef for yanking men's magazines out of the trout stream and pushing them into the bedroom.

While many a nebbish intellectual has either critically reviled or nostalgically mythologized Playboy , one simple fact remains: no other girlie mag has been so adoringly respectful of women.

You need look no further than their sex advice column, called simply "Dear Playboy Advisor." Stimulating, breezy, and to the point, the Advisor offers unsentimental but flirty discussion about love and sex that is near impossible to find in any other men's magazine. This month, the Advisor responds to a woman worried about her husband's enthusiasm for spanking:

It isn't necessarily that your husband is into pain; it's more likely he enjoys dominating you while you are in a vulnerable position. The pleasure many women have in being spanked is ceding control. There is a type of freedom and certainly less responsibility in being submissive [this can work both ways. Have you tried spanking your husband? Report back!]

Sadly, the Advisor is the last vestige of the gin-soaked hyper-masculinity-with- a-splash of Hef's original vision. Gone are the glorious essays and articles once penned by the likes of Gore Vidal and Joan Didion. In their place, nugget-sized drivel on gadgets and booze. So, now, when your boyfriend claims he's just reading the "articles," not only is he liar, but a vapid one at that.

FHM (For Him Magazine)

Date: 2000 to 2006

Peak: 1 million in 2002

Girls! Gadgets! Banter about ball sweat! The only thing that really made FHM different than Maxim was the soft, pallid underside of a woman's breasts, otherwise known as the infamous underboob. FHM even caused a scandal when some newsstands banned covers with the notorious nethertitty (sideboob shots: still totally cool). The underboob controversy didn't help the mag. Car makers and high-end fashion brands avoided the title, which began selling pages at steep discounts. It's rumored that ads in FHM's last issue sold at a 90 percent discount.

If you want to know what thumbing through old issues of FHM is like, just Google the term "underboob." Soon your browser will be cluttered with ads for beer and sunglasses. Then you'll come face to face with an airbrushed vision of the underside of Brooke Hogan's orange chest. That's what it's like. Can you believe people actually paid for this? FHM couldn't really believe it either. So now they're an online-only outfit whose ethos is something along the lines of "get laid, get drunk, and get away with it".

Paradoxically, FHM online offers refuge from sex rather than a portal into it. Like a good lad-mag, FHM regards women as worthy (though impossibly complicated) adversaries. But they're certainly not worth the effort unless sex is guaranteed and most of the time it's not, so why bother?

Sad thing is you can't even get mad at them for objectifying women; ultimately, they're scared of them.

Stuff

Date: 2000 to 2007

Peak: 1.2 million copies in circulation in 2003

"Stuff is all about no-limits living, and our readers rely on us to be their filter for cool," wrote Dan Bova two months before Stuff's liquidation. "I apologize in advance to any readers whose heads explode from awesome overload." Yet low budget photo spreads of a bloated Daisy Fuentes and chart-icles on the ultimate air-guitar play list were somehow not awesome enough to sustain readers. To be fair, Stuff was never really expected to turn a profit: the only reason for its still-born inception was to compete with FHM. Stuff peaked at 1.2 million readers in 2003, only to crash-land right next to rival FHM in 2007. Though Stuff fancied itself an arbiter of "cool" for 20-somethings "with cash to blow", relying on it for "cool" was like asking your sex-deprived, pillow-humping little brother for his sage advice on women and nightclubs.

Playboy enthusiast and Atlantic contributor Jon Zobenica described the experience of reading lad-mags like Stuff as being akin to rifling through a teenage boy's desk, piled with "video-game cartridges, action figures, and forgotten junk food ... all of it colored by the boy's glee in knowing it exasperates Mom."

Even though the scruffy hipster in his skinny suit and throwback wayfarers rules the urban landscape, the Stuff boys cling to their backwards caps and plow on with their pubescent '90s aesthetic.

Esquire

Launched: 1933

Circulation: 720,000

Peak: 1.25 million in the mid-70s

"What does it have to do with me?" demanded Esquire's editor in chief David Granger when asked to comment on Maxim's early and staggering success. He went on: It's "the lowest common denominator. I'm sure what they're trying to do is fine. But it's not what I'm trying to do with Esquire."

Maybe beers, boobs, and gadgets wasn't what Granger initially had in mind when he took over at Esquire in 1997. But as the lad-mags began to steal his lunch money, Granger too turned to The Formula. The same month that Granger distanced Esquire from the "lowest common denominator," a bra-less, pants-free Pamela Anderson graced the magazine's cover, which declared "The Triumph of Cleavage Culture."

Although Granger may argue that his magazine is trying to do "something different," Esquire still clings to The Formula, even if its content is more mature: cuff links instead of ball caps, tie knots instead of flip flops, Jessica Simpson instead of, oh, um.... Page after page is filled with trite items that have a smaller word count than your average blog post, annoyingly cutesy charts that force you to twist the magazine every each way—the way you would a centerfold or Highlights for Children magazine—and a hyperactive pace which makes it impossible to linger on a page for more than 45 seconds.

The trouble is, Esquire is stuck in an anxious purgatory between adolescence and manhood, brushing up against sophisticated cultural issues but scampering off before saying anything worth reading.

GQ (Gentleman's Quarterly)

Date Launched: 1957

Circulation: 800,000 in 2007

"Laddy mags, they're for really interesting losers," said former GQ editor Art Cooper, whereas "GQ is an aspirational book, [you] feel like you crashed a very civilized cocktail party and everyone's too civilized to throw you out." The idea intrigued me—might GQ really be like a snazzy cocktail party filled with slick men in Gucci loafers and well-mixed gin cocktails? I opened its crisp cologne-scented pages to find a piece on Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Diaz accompanying a fabulously wry advice column, and I hoped. One man wrote in about being self-conscious in just trunks at the beach. GQ responded:

Pablo Picasso, who could go bare-chested or could put on a sailor shirt and espadrilles with equal élan and have his way with the world, despite being bald and only five three.... You don't have to be brilliant to look good in a bathing suit, but it helps.

Could it be? Could Hef's swan song be cooing from inside of GQ? Was GQ like the well-dressed English major coolly observing the frat party from the couch, coyly making eye contact with me from across the room? As I read on it became agonizingly clear GQ adopted the lad mags' frenetic tone in an attempt to strip out the kitsch and thrust in the hip. Like Esquire, GQ wants to talk to you about manly things. But it doesn't believe you have the balls, brains, or discipline to stick with it. The campy capsules about deodorant and the random Charlie Rose quotes mixed with the uninspired celebrity profiles just solidify the fact that GQ isn't with "it."

No, GQ isn't the inexplicable hipster at the Greek party. GQ is the older professor who shows up to the frat party with a keg in the hopes of winning over all the "interesting losers."