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The Gentleman’s Page

Men’s magazines raise the price of virtue.

Just as men’s magazines are growing old, they’re growing up. Last year, GQ marked its 50th anniversary, and Esquire is currently celebrating its 75th year. These mags are survivors. Esquire managed to promote luxury during the Depression, then cheered on the cultural upheavals of the ’60s that put masculinity itself in doubt. GQ was born as a pure fashion magazine for men and somehow survived its fascination with putrid color and gender-bending in the 1970s. Improbably, its title is now synonymous with being well dressed in a traditional sense.

Over the past decade, men’s magazines successfully resisted an invasion of Brit-based “lad mags,” whose circulation quickly surpassed theirs. The vulgarians at Loaded, FHM, and Maxim threatened to overthrow the dry martini and replace it with a Jäger-bomb. But the lads made their mark quickly and now search for new cultural organs. Meanwhile, the traditional men’s magazines are producing healthy offspring.

Somehow these publications survived their taste for cultural revolution, beat back the rude upstarts, and have become relevant again by championing a vision of masculinity that is civilized and traditional. Formerly bastions of winking infidelity, they now advance a version of manhood that is sober, refined, and, one it tempted to say, devout—though not religious. But like all goods featured in men’s magazines, they’ve made this too into a luxury item, which only a discerning few can appreciate and perhaps fewer still can afford.

When Esquire launched in 1933, Time hailed it as a “publisher’s dream.” Finally, there was “a ‘class’ magazine for men—like Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue for women.” Although it promised racy content, Esquire quickly developed a literary reputation by publishing F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway in the ’30s and ’40s. On its color pages, Laurence Fellows and Leslie Saalburg illustrated the boulevardier styles of the time. Alan Flusser, the current dean of men’s style, collects many of these illustrations in his books like Dressing the Man in order to instruct his students on what he believes are timeless principles of proportion, pattern, and color.

But Esquire was not always a redoubt of good taste. In a decade known for the gray flannel suit and air-raid drills, Esquire let its inner lad run wild. By 1950, the magazine swerved into the lanes Playboy would later drive. The Alberto Vargas pin-ups drove circulation up, and the magazine became stuffed with cartoons that relied on naughty, and witless, puns. In one example, a young stenographer sits in the lap of her nervous boss, his arm around her waist. The caption: “I’m satisfied, but my husband keeps prodding me to ask for a raise.” One can feel the cartoonist nudging at the elbow. “A raise! Get it?”

In that same March 1950 issue, William Laas published “In Defense of Speeding,” which constitutes a kind of proto-lad lit. Laas’s one argument: let men run wild. “Road-hogging, daydreaming slowpokes choke up traffic and are greater terrors on the highway than fast drivers who can handle a car well,” he wrote. “Why not take the snails off the road?” The advertisements also lack sophistication. One, for a Perry-Mason stem-winder, “The Case of the Cautious Coquette,” tells readers, “Beware this luscious blonde—she’s a booby trap!”

Esquire would quickly improve in the 1960s. It was there that Tom Wolfe pioneered “New Journalism,” in which stories were characterized by narrative verve and the centrality of the author as a character. Gay Talese renovated the celebrity profile in 1965, when Frank Sinatra refused to be interviewed by him. The opening sentences are now familiar to every aspiring profiler: “Frank Sinatra, holding a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood in a dark corner of the bar between two attractive but fading blondes who sat waiting for him to say something. But he said nothing…”

By the end of the 1960s, Esquire found the form that would carry it to critical acclaim and commercial success for the next four decades. In fact, the template is so established that the content is often the same. Take the May 1968 issue in which Garry Wills examined Richard’s Nixon’s latest run for high office. Just as in the current issue of Esquire, which features a story on John McCain, a dangerously hawkish Republican makes an improbable political comeback by promoting a volatile mix of militarism and moralism. In 1968, the cover shows Nixon being made up by artists. In 2008, we learn that political operator John Weaver used to comb McCain’s hair. In the June 1968 issue, Robert Sherril explores the radical new dangers posed by southern evangelicals in “Power in their Blood.” The article includes dark but vague mentions of the Klu Klux Klan and hints at a coming theocracy. Some things never change.

Esquire could take its intellectual pretensions pretty far. Thirty years ago, the editors let Alfred Kazin dilate on the subtle differences one finds between Robert Lowell’s poetic vision and John Ashberry’s. In the same issue, Andrew Tobias favorably reviews Irving Kristol’s Two Cheers for Capitalism. Tobias knows his audience: “Read this book fellow liberals. It is, in effect, the other side of the story.”

On the fashion front, men’s magazines took some time to gain their consistency. No one would look at the initial run of GQ with the reverence Flusser and other dandies give to Esquire. In its founding issue, Gentlemen’s Quarterly promoted the “jumpajama,” a combination jumpsuit and pajama. The counterculture excited GQ a little too much. Some of the most notable recommendations include a “wrestling/swimsuit singlet” in a gigantic yellow and white gingham pattern. In other beachwear, they encouraged men to don a two-piece midriff-baring nylon ensemble that featured a half shirt (with a mock turtleneck) and a bikini bottom. Worse, in 1968, GQ even recommended faux facial hair: “[Some men] find their employers frown on hirsute features, and false facial hair provides them with the opportunity to become weekend and evening swingers.”

But the biggest challenge to men’s magazines came from men themselves. Mark Simpson, a UK journalist, declared in 1994 that the “metrosexuals” were perhaps “the most promising consumer market of the decade.” Writing in Salon, Simpson defined the new male archetype: “The typical metrosexual is a young man with money to spend, living in or within easy reach of a metropolis—because that’s where all the best shops, clubs, gyms and hairdressers are. He might be officially gay, straight or bisexual, but this is utterly immaterial because he has clearly taken himself as his own love object and pleasure as his sexual preference.” Suddenly the men’s magazines were stuffed with advice about manicures, even pedicures.

What then for the young man who thought this primping was womanly? Effete males claimed to be his superiors, and the rules of feminism labeled his instincts radioactive. He liked watching the highlights on “SportsCenter” and the girls on trampolines featured on Comedy Central’s “The Man Show.” By 1995, he had a magazine: Maxim. The lads let him indulge his inner man-child.

Lad magazines downsized literary content and super-sized their silicone features. What writing remained would be readable in 15 to 30-second bursts. New Journalism gave way to stunt journalism. How many chalupas can a dog eat? Would Gummy Worms or Drake’s Cakes taste better deep fried? Lists replaced reviews—“20 Most Awesome Kung-Fu Fight Scenes.” Instead of a profiling a $20-million-a-pic actress and photographing her in a designer dress while she held a cigarette, the lads posed television stars like Elisha Cuthbert on a bed in lingerie. Esquire might report war stories, but only Maxim delivered the real bombshells, as it did in its photo spread “Women of the Israel Defense Forces.” The message was clear. Metrosexuals like “Sideways,” soccer, and seduction. Lads like Will Ferrell, football, and flesh.

Soon Maxim outstripped all the men’s magazines combined in total circulation, surging to 2.5 million readers. And the other lad-mags were catching up quickly. But creating a timely product without reference to anything as complicated as current events exhausted their editors. David Carr wrote in the International Herald Tribune, “making lad magazines was tougher than it looked. Every editorial meeting would start with a blank slate, or at best, a few hardy perennials: Nazis? Midgets? Shark attacks? Could we have a Nazi saving a midget being attacked by a shark?”

But the short attention spans and small wallets of the lads’ target audience meant lost ad pages at the turn of the millennium. Carr found Greg Gutfield, former editor of Stuff in the U.S. and Maxim U.K. lamenting the decline in profitability: “The only innovation is price and frequency, and the only price that is working is free and the only frequency that is working is daily.” FHM, the pioneer of the format, closed its U.S. print operations last March. Maxim is chasing the readers who are leaving the print product behind by starting a channel on satellite radio and retooling its web operations to compete with CollegeHumor.com and other online portals for frat laughs and web videos.

The rise of the vulgarians seemed to reinvigorate traditional men’s magazines. Details launched in 2000 and was immediately hailed as “Vogue for men.” Publisher Condé Nast liked the sound of that enough to launch Men’s Vogue in 2005. Both copied the format that Esquire established in the 1960s: narrative journalism mixed with celebrity profiles, short reviews, and advice on clothing and grooming. Having their manhood challenged by the lads, the established mags junked the feminized metro for a more stoic and strong male archetype.

Recognizing that their target demographic is a generation raised by women, men’s magazines have increasingly touted traditional tailoring and timeless style. No longer does GQ announce the arrival of the one-piece leisure suit. Instead, it instructs readers that they must purchase a navy blue suit for job interviews and gray flannel for other days—the sort of advice a father would give. Men’s Vogue has a love affair with well-made suits and traditional overcoats, worn by George Clooney, Denzel Washington, and other “men’s men” on its covers.

Details, widely considered the most gay of the men’s magazines, has made itself an enemy of ostentation and a friend of sobriety in style. The magazine has upbraided men who leave their shirts untucked and has gone on record against splayed collars that peek over a jacket’s lapels, embroidered jeans, “sporty sunglasses,” and cufflinks on men who are young and undistinguished.

Instead of small features on pedicures, Esquire teaches readers how to shine their shoes. Its etiquette pieces instruct on the appropriate times to hold a door open. In sidebars, a sommelier will provide a little knowledge about wines—just enough to impress, not enough to make one overbearing. Over 24 years old? The men’s magazines say it’s time to ditch your MySpace page. Don’t you know that modesty is a virtue and self-promotion a vanity?

The publications that formerly supported the social liberation movements of the ’60s and ’70s are now scandalized by the results. In 1950, Esquire responded to infidelity with a knowing smirk; today it is an unconscionable betrayal. Details summed up a men-deserve-respect ethic against what it called “The New Infidelity”:

You are not some fedora-tipping Man of the House who comes home from the office expecting the rump roast to be on the table. Nor are you an aging frat boy who sits in front of the flat-screen with an Icehouse while wifey irons your Red Wings jersey. You are sensitive. You were raised by a working woman. You wipe down the counters after you make the kids’ lunches. No decent woman would cheat on a man like that, right?

Apparently, yes. In the latest GQ, travel writer Adam Sachs refuses to accept the idea that his marriage can fall apart. As his wife leaves his apartment he decides, “I will save this, I will make passionate declarations and write patient, beautiful letters. … I’ll be forgiving as a saint and deliberate as a killer. … I will outmaneuver this by superior wit and pure intention and be the bighearted superhero of love…” Chivalry isn’t dead.

Not only do these magazines promote fidelity in marriage, they bid their men to “be fruitful and multiply.” Last September, Details praised a father-knows-best attitude and found that the coolest thing to be is a father of many children. A Chappaqua resident who works in the financial industry, told the magazine, “I can’t be in a house that only has three kids. … The silence scares me. Three kids is so weak. It doesn’t feel like you have any.”

But before people declare men’s mags guides for turning boys into men, there is a catch. This revived masculinity does not issue from religious duty, tradition, or even sober reflection. It’s a status symbol. You can see it even in the command to have a big family: “Among the hedge-fund guys, it’s a joke,” says one Park Avenue woman. “They all have the trophy wife and the apartment and the four kids.” In a sidebar, we learn that having kids will improve your social life: “If you learn how to work the PTA meeting like you would a cocktail party, it can get you nice trips to other families’ vacation homes.”

It turns out that the manliness that the men’s magazines advance is not for everyone. Rather than being the product of an upbringing or measured by the expectations of society, maturity is accomplished by correctly divvying up great sums of money. Sending several kids to private school is a rare privilege—like driving a Porsche.

Although the magazines take pains to show men that a good suit can be bought for under a thousand dollars, most of the artifacts an Esquire man possesses are very expensive. While the promotion of bespoke tailors is good for the very few old-world artisans who can provide them, it has little relevance for the American man who cannot fly to England and drop $5,000 on one suit.

If successful marriages, dignified clothing, and masculinity itself are only for the elite, our men are in trouble. In the wake of family breakdown and the uneven influence of religious institutions, men’s magazines may be among the last institutions in America that promote an ideal of masculinity that is constructive and recognizably manly. Inside their world, men are well read, informed, conventionally liberal, well dressed, faithful, and wealthy. Outside this world are the buffoon fathers of sitcoms, the crass consumers, and the lads.

It’s good to see the elites who man our magazines embracing the old American male—outlining his duties, refining his taste, and upgrading his manners. But if American culture cannot find adult male archetypes that speak for the everyman—the man without a loaded 401K—the future looks shabby. Imagine middle-aged boys playing video games that feature shark-riding Nazis and chalupa-eating dogs. One of them shouts, “Honey, can you iron my hockey jersey?” 

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