Looking for Mr. Right : The Readership Battle Among Men’s Magazines Is Also an Identity Crisis

The “Museum of Modern Male Art” in the offices of Esquire magazine, features neatly mounted trout and salmon flies, spoked wheel covers, an electric drill, billiard balls and a martini glass.

Back in the simpler era that collection represents, it was easy to define the American man. Everyone knew what kind of man read Playboy. Or Argosy. Or True.

But in the wake of the feminist and sexual revolutions, general and special-interest women’s magazines overran the newsstands and their male counterparts languished.

Now, 25 years later, publishers are trying to corral male consumers and readers with general-interest men’s magazines.

The problem is that no one can agree on what it means to be a man anymore. Is he the aggressive executive who’s studying haiku to expose his feminine nature? Or the gentle painter who gets in touch with his “inner warrior” at male-bonding seminars? Is he embittered by feminists or outraged by the photographs in Penthouse? Does he go bear hunting with Dad or bare his feelings about his conflicted relationship with father figures?

If this were a barroom debate, would it end in soulful blubbering or someone getting his face bashed in?

With those sorts of questions in mind, the small fraternity of men’s magazine editors find themselves tangled in a sort of rugby scrum, with everyone kicking desperately to gain possession of the male reader.

This autumn, despite the worst advertising climate in ages, publishers launched four new general-interest men’s magazines: Men’s Life, M-Inc., Details and Forbes’ FYI.

Within a few weeks, Men’s Life, a quirky new publication produced by a former editor at Playboy, had gone belly up. But at least two more magazines--Smart for Men and Rolling Stone’s as yet unnamed publication--are champing to join the fray.

It was near the end of the ‘80s that publishers suddenly seemed to notice something: There are at least a dozen women’s service, fashion, and general interest-magazines that sell between 1 million and 8 million copies each month and at least half a dozen others that sell more than 500,000, for a total yearly advertising revenues well over $1 billion. Yet only a handful of comparable men’s magazines--Playboy, Penthouse, Esquire, GQ--are nearly as successful.

“Billions of dollars have been made off the feminist and women’s movements,” said Asa Baber, who has written a column about men for Playboy since 1982. Books, movies, television shows, and magazines have all profited from the culture’s focus on women, he said.

But now, Baber believes, the women’s movement is fading and “people are looking around for what’s next. It’s clear to me that for 25 years we’ve had very unbalanced reporting in the area of sexual politics and gender studies,” he says. “Men have gotten either bad press or no press. I think that is about to be rectified . . . . In a marketing sense, a vacuum was created.”

Christopher Kimball estimates that he and Peter Kaplan spent “thousands of hours, drinking beer and going over and over and over” the question of man’s current place in humanity.

The product of all this pondering, Smart for Men, will hit the newsstands in mid-December, fusing the old Smart magazine with a yet another men’s publication that Kimball and Kaplan, a former Esquire editor, had been planning to launch.

Its arrival is geared to correspond with what Kimball calls “the return of the new man.”

“In the past 25 years, America has been feminized.” Kimball says. “It was a good thing, generally speaking. But men have been on the back burner for a long time.”

Smart for Men, he says, will give men what they want.

“Basically, men are adolescent and over-sexed. We always have been and always will be,” says Kimball, a tall, thin man wearing spectacles and a bow tie. Moreover, he adds, most of the women he knows are increasingly willing to accept that. “They’re sick of the wimpy ‘80s image.”

As a result, the days when women’s magazines might feature the question, “Why Can’t a Man be More Like a Woman?” may be over, Kimball thinks.

“Men’s Life” went so far as to turn those stereotypical headlines around. In a brief humor item, it suggested that if men’s magazines were to handle gender-sensitive issues the way so many women’s magazines do, they would run stories such as “Raising Consciousness: Why Can’t She Raise the Toilet Seat?” or “Hey, How About My G-Spot?”

Or, as the magazine’s editor and creator, Barry Golson, a 17-year veteran of Playboy, said in his editorial: “Many of us have this suspicion we’re not the jerks some women say we are . . . . Welcome back, guys.”

This defensive self-definition ran through the premiere issue of the magazine, which sold 250,000 copies on the newsstands. That the magazine went belly-up on Oct. 26, just six weeks after its official launch, was the result of a lousy advertising climate and the financial woes of owner Rupert Murdoch, rather than a failure to connect with readers, who did indeed identify with the magazine’s tone.

Critics of the magazine, including Arthur Cooper, the editor of GQ magazine, think that readers were attracted to Men’s Life out of a sense of “a nostalgia for the type of man that existed before the ‘60s.”

But “those were simpler times,” he says. “A man was what he did. His wife was at home. He had his buddies, his poker playing. It was very easy then to define what a man was.”

Now, Cooper has found, many men and women alike are baffled by the male role in this culture.

In the late ‘80s, GQ held panel discussions with members of each gender. They revealed that “women are angry and hostile because they thought men would change more,” and because their sprint onto “the super-woman treadmill,” had caused them to lose balance and teeter between a successful career, home life and personal life.

Men, on the other hand, were simply confused, and wondered aloud why women had urged them to be more sensitive, then turned around and “bashed them” for their vulnerability, Cooper said.

Magazines like Men’s Life, he continued, are ignoring the complexities of today’s life.

Besides, Cooper, like others, is skeptical about their basic motives.

“The women’s magazine market,” he said, “seems to be glutted, every niche occupied. So people are looking around and saying, ‘We’ve discovered or rediscovered men.’ But these magazines are market-driven, not reader-driven.”

To grab a piece of the perceived male readership pie, publishers have torn the gender into fragments defined by generation, economics, values, sensibilities and interests.

Men’s Life, for instance, was targeted to “a generation of men grown up,” the 41 million middle-income men ages 30 to 49. The newly launched Forbes FYI, shared “a sense of humor and sensibility” with Men’s Life, said its editor Christopher Buckley, but it is more narrowly directed at corporate executives in their 40s and 50s.

Men’s Life featured articles on necktie selection and the allure of blondes. The premiere FYI, a quarterly, features former President Richard M. Nixon on wine, a pictorial spread on President George Bush’s $20,000 double-barreled shotgun, and a fashion spread titled “Slammer Glamour,” in which financial wizards and junk bondsmen are featured in chic clothing and handcuffs.

“This is our man of the ‘90s,” Buckley said with a laugh, as he sat with his loafers up on the desk of his well-appointed office in the Forbes building. “He’s going to jail!”

Kimball and Kaplan at Smart for Men will attempt to attract those Baby Boomers who now feel comfortable, but trapped.

“Every man wants to be James Bond,” Kimball said, and as he describes it, Smart for Men will provide vicarious thrills for a generation of men who don’t get many of the real kind any more.

That take on manhood is at least a decade removed from the world view of the young men James Truman is hoping will be drawn into the newly redesigned Details magazine.

Truman sees an old-fashioned generation gap rather than a gender gap as the heart of the difference between Details and the competition.

“We’re very frightened of the term men’s magazine. It sounds like a magazine of locker-room chat, men standing around, slapping each other on the back, and talking about babes,” said Truman, 32, as he sat in a starkly black and white office in the bustling new black and white suite of offices in a totally hip section of New York’s SoHo District.

“I think any magazine that creates a ghetto like that is cutting itself off from a lot of potentially interesting stories . . . and interesting reaction from its audience.”

Whether Truman likes it or not, though, Details bills itself as a men’s magazine. And it is the one that causes most older editors to make odd faces and admit that they just don’t get the Details mix of gruesome photographs, high fashion, weird comic strips, Obsession ads and columns on such decidedly male topics as the penis.

M-Inc.’s typical reader--upscale executives in their 40s--for instance, may read that magazine’s November cover story about why the United States is in Saudi Arabia and worry about the effect on oil prices from the comfort of his armchair. The average Details reader is of the age to actually be there digging foxholes in the sand.

“I don’t think our audience is nearly as big on self-definition,” Truman said. “I think they’re young and living a life rather than sitting around agonizing about the state of the collective soul of their generation.”

Or gender.

“I guess our readers have reaped the benefits of the (feminist and sexual) conflicts of the ‘60s and ‘70s without having to absorb the bitterness and anger that came with those changes.

“To me, the thing about Playboy and Penthouse was the discomfort men felt about women. These magazines brought a non-human woman into their homes in a pictorial way. I tend to think men feel more comfortable about women than they did 20 years ago.”

But Baber, at Playboy, said he thinks the declared gender truce is premature: “Younger men have often been raised in a feminist environment, and are simply much more wary of voicing some of the discomfort they feel when masculinity is trashed and feminism is handed out as the religion of the day.”

But, he added, “gender identity is crucial to all identity--always will be and always has been. Androgyny as a model of behavior has probably had its day.”

Other men’s magazines, old and new, have paid too much attention to the feminist movement, which was, Baber said, “a very conservative and puritanical movement.”

Only Playboy, he contends, “has always had the courage to confront those forces. When we were being told over and over on Donahue and Oprah and in Ms. magazine that we men were terrible people, Playboy said, ‘No!’ ”

Most men’s magazines--the veterans and the upstarts--are too feminine, Baber said: “Esquire for example, tried very hard for a long time to please the feminist population, and I don’t think that really answered the demands of the readership.”

Owen Lipstein, publisher of Smart magazine shares that view, and said he thinks that’s why the Hearst Corp. hired away Terry McDonell, the creator and founding editor of Smart magazine, to run Esquire--one of the oldest and most prestigious American magazines period, let alone in the men’s magazine niche.

“Terry has a Western sensibility, a macho-ness” that Esquire has been sorely lacking for some time, Lipstein said, leaning back on a couch in Smart magazine’s offices, which feature a window full of New York skyline and a cactus, guitar, and pair of cowboy boots on the floor.

McDonell, newly planted in the more elegant offices at Esquire, bristles upon hearing this observation.

“First of all, I think of myself as a feminist,” he snapped. “I really do. No (expletive). I’m not kidding.

“So macho ,” he continued, leaning forward with the sort of body language that might precipitate a barroom brawl, “is like a word from the Pleistocene.”

The real men’s magazines, he said, are those read by both men and women--Time, Newsweek, Businessweek, for example, and if Esquire competes with any magazines, it is the New Yorker and Vanity Fair. The men--and women--who read Esquire aren’t “out there thinking ‘Which of the men’s magazines am I going to buy?’ They’re saying, ‘Should I pick up the Wall Street Journal? Should I watch Entertainment Tonight or watch McNeil/Lehrer?’ ”

The last thing the male readers want to do is waste their increasingly precious time pondering the meaning of their own masculinity, he said.

This paradox--the real men don’t talk about what it means to be a man syndrome--exemplifies the problem faced by aspiring men’s magazine editors.

As the odd woman out in the predominantly male field, Jane Lane, editor in chief of M-Inc., doesn’t plan to make her magazine a forum for complex debates about gender politics or touchy-feely discussions of sexual identity.

“We’re not offering psychotherapy, we’re offering entertainment and good writing,” she says. The “real concerns” about such issues as the economy are of more interest than “whether a guy is likely to change diapers or do the dishes,” she says. “Certainly there are a lot of platitudes around about the new man and old man. But the minute you say them, they’re out of date.”

“If men are confused, they’re not particularly interested in reading about their own confusion,” says John Rasmus, a former editor of Outside magazine, who is now working with Rolling Stone’s Jann Wenner on a men’s magazine scheduled for release next fall.

Push Christopher Buckley on the “sensibility,” of his magazine, and he becomes the stereotypically nonverbal male. The “new manism,” he says with a grin, “bores me to death!”

Even the hyper-analyzed Smart for Men will be “a magazine that’s for men, not about them,” Kimball said. “I think many women’s magazines are about working women, are about working mothers, are about savvy women. Women confess. Women want editors to tell them, for example, how to dress for success,” he said. “Men convey information through storytelling . . . . This magazine isn’t going to fret a lot about being a man . . . .”

McDonell’s said his full impact on Esquire will be felt in the February issue, not with any treatise on “the man of the 1990s,” but with a renewed commitment to investigative journalism and hard-edged reportage.

On the wall outside McDonell’s office is a long line of Esquire’s covers framed in glass: October, 1972, Burt Reynolds. May, 1976, Truman Capote. On the March, 1965, cover Marilyn Monroe is shaving. The caption is “the masculization of the American woman.”

But the one McDonell stops in front of is the October, 1968 cover, showing images of John and Robert Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in a cemetery. Rapping it with his knuckle he said, “See that!”

That is sort of magazine fare that shapes men’s--and women’s--views of themselves and how they should live.

It may even be the sort of thing that shaped McDonell as a young reader, and, in turn, will shape his magazine. But McDonell doesn’t want to talk about it.

“People ask, ‘Will your magazine be more about guys who like Alan Alda or guys who like John Wayne?’ ” he said. “That’s a preposterous equation to set up. Nobody in their right mind thinks like that.”