By James Kerns
It is nice to think intellectual parity will prevail over the trouser-sniping of underdeveloped dot-com tiddly-winkers looking to capitalize on their own arrested pubescence. But to the chagrin of feminists everywhere, Barbie-culture is alive and kicking
What happens when over indulged fratboys put down their joysticks and enter the magazine business? Men’s magazines—glossy tributes to bubble-gum machismo armed with enough cheesecake and gee-wizardry to keep the average sports fan’s eyes disengaged from the play-station during halftime. Provided he is male and marginally longer on disposable income than attention span, of course. There is a whole new genre of self-styled men’s magazines spawned from the nexus of modern male achievement: the pursuit of booze, baubles and babes. Each ad-heavy vehicle is loaded with tabloid-sensationalism, schoolboy antics and nubile T&A. Machismo dogma is resurrected as chic du jour throughout the layered pages, encouraging hypothalamic under-achievers to shift their backwards-hat-wearing, chicken-wing-craving hormones into a perpetual juvenile tailspin. Even some of the names, Maxim, Gear and Stuff, suggest the editors are targeting a sawed-off mentality of twenty-whatevers who still have model airplanes hanging in their rooms and keep their best literature stuffed under the mattress. And while the editors seem to believe they can sell anything as long as a couple of erect nipples are nearby, their comic-book journalism reads like a couple of grammar school boys’ big night with an underwear catalogue. It’s like licking a candybar through the wrapper. The message of the magazines, sex, booze, gizmos and atrocities, is spectacularly unoriginal, but is it dangerous? Can male mischief be lead further astray by promoting fratboy hooliganism out of the bathroom and beyond? Continue Reading