MAGAZINES, MEN'S

MAGAZINES, MEN'S. The definition of a men's magazine is capacious and variable. In the nineteenth century, it was sometimes assumed that anything that was not specifically a women's or "family" periodical, but rather encompassed serious reflection on the world, was primarily a men's magazine with women as only incidental readers. Particular subject matter, such as sports, hunting, adventure, and, for many years, sex, business, and automobiles, have been classified as of specifically male interest. Magazines such as Scientific American or Popular Mechanics have similarly often been classified in this way. The category arguably includes the labor press of male-only or largely male occupations, the military and clergy, and the magazines of men's social and fraternal organizations like the Masons, Woodmen, and Knights of Pythias.

Since many subscription magazines were likely to arrive in the name of the man of the house, and men were more likely to be newsstand customers, other magazines also may have appeared to be primarily for a male audience, though actually reaching a more evenly distributed readership. The publisher Cyrus Curtis, for example, conceived of the Ladies' Home Journal and the SATURDAY EVENING POST as a gendered pair, with the Post addressed to the businessman who anticipated success, and full of such features as the serial begun in 1901, "Letters of a Self-Made Merchant to His Son." Similarly, Vanity Fair (1913–1936, revived in 1983) had, according to one magazine historian, a masculine focus, pitched to a male elite, although it certainly had women readers, and the African American magazine Ebony (1945–) promoted a specifically African American version of success to men.

Sports and Men's Bodies

The National Police Gazette (1845–1932) exemplified the cultivation of a specifically male magazine audience. At its start it was filled with sensational crime stories and exposés of the police. After the Civil War, the focus shifted to sex scandals and sex crimes, all heavily illustrated, with advertising to match. It later focused on the theater, with numerous pictures of actresses. It also covered sports, including prizefighting and baseball. More specialized magazines published news of sports, minus the scandals and pictures of actresses. Baseball magazines got their start in 1867 with The Ballplayers' Chronicle. A magazine with broader interests, Sporting Life, began sixteen years later and lasted until 1926.

In the mid-twentieth century, as a generation of American men returned from military service, the postwar era brought great growth in hunting, fishing, mechanical, and handyman magazines. Field and Stream began in 1896 but was revitalized in this period; Sports Illustrated, part of Henry Luce's magazine empire with Time, Life, and Fortune, began in 1954.

Magazines on sports and athletics divided between covering the reader's favorite teams and addressing the development of the reader's own body. Physical Culture: Weakness a Crime (1899–1947), advocated bodybuilding and avoidance of tobacco, alcohol, and meat. Unlike men's physique magazines, it anxiously insisted that the male bodies on display were not meant to appeal sexually to other men. A late-twentieth century variation on magazines focused on the development of the reader's own body were magazines like Men's Health (begun in 1988). These mirrored women's magazines in campaigns to cultivate insecurity about the reader's body, though the solutions offered were most likely to be abdominal exercises rather than the wider variety of cosmetics and diets found in the women's magazines.

General Interest Magazines

General interest men's magazines developed alongside the sense that men would spend money on leisure and appearance. Esquire began in 1933 and became an immediate hit despite its high price, even in the depths of the Great Depression. It published well-known authors like Ernest Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, Thomas Mann, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and Ezra Pound, some of them picked up at bargain rates from other magazines' piles of materials they found too daring to publish.

Pulp magazines for men, specializing in action, adventure, and he-man heroes, were popular among working-class men from the 1920s through the 1940s. Absorbing and continuing such titles as Railroad Man's Magazine, Frank Munsey's Argosy was the first, developing in various incarnations from 1896 on, and rapidly followed by The Shadow, Dime Detective, Western Story, and Detective Fiction Weekly. Black Mask was published by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, better known for their work on The Smart Set. Pulp magazines had little reliance on advertising, but instead depended on cheap production to keep prices down. They published writers like Erle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler, Hammett, and scores of others now forgotten. Rising post–World War II production costs and competition from paperback books, comic books, and later television brought the pulp magazine era to a close.

Some magazines descended from the pulps found new popularity, however. True: The Man's Magazine (1937– 1976) was based on the assumption that men preferred ostensibly factual material to fiction; it became the first men's magazine with over one million in circulation. Argosy took a different tack in its development from a pulp to a magazine with a circulation over one million: it became an all-story magazine in 1943, and later encompassed true adventure, hunting, fishing, crime, and science.

Picking up from Esquire's emphasis on fashion and good (bachelor) living, men's fashion magazines like GQ, originally Gentleman's Quarterly, infused the clothing concerns of women's fashion magazines with an air of after-shave, and thus tapped new advertising markets. Other slick magazines with an advertising base eager to reach men's spending on leisure emerged: Details (1982–) and Maxim (1997–) were written in a wiseguy style infused with casual misogyny. Some, like Cigar Aficionado (begun 1992), pushed masculine consumption even more directly.

Skin Magazines

Late-nineteenth-century magazines like Broadway Magazine (1898–1912, with some title changes) featured bathing beauties and burlesque stars, modestly clad by today's standards, and then, under the editorship of Theodore Dreiser and others, developed a muckraking side. A variety of girlie magazines included those that specialized in cartoons and sexual innuendo, like the 1920s Hot Dog: A Monthly for the Regular Fellows.

Playboy launched in 1953 with a centerfold of Marilyn Monroe. Its founder, Hugh Hefner, sought to create a sophisticated magazine like Esquire, and although its explicit nude display of women's bodies remained a main draw, it published well-known authors like Norman Mailer, Evelyn Waugh, and Jack Kerouac. The somewhat raunchier Penthouse (1969–), by contrast, sold mainly on newsstands, as did Oui (1972–), the Playboy-owned magazine which attempted to recapture the Penthouse readership. Hustler began in 1974, addressed to a blue-collar readership, and took sexual explicitness and sometimes demeaning treatment of women further, inspiring protests and imitators. Players began in 1973 addressing a largely African American readership.

Gay Men's Magazines

"Physique" magazines from the late 1940s to the 1970s featured male models completely nude from the back or covered with a posing strap. They included Physique Pictorial, Tomorrow's Man, Grecian Guild Pictorial, and Adonis, with the first two routinely reaching circulations of forty thousand each. This was a far higher circulation than the nascent gay rights movement publications ONE (begun 1953) and the Mattachine Review (1955–1966), though the publisher of Physique Pictorial and other titles urged readers to join homophile organizations and demand their rights.

Physique magazine publishers had been imprisoned for obscenity, and in one case indicted for "excessive genital delineation." But by 1969, the legal obscenity standards were loosened; full-frontal male nudes could be shown, and openly gay magazines like Drum published male nude photos.

Conclusion