Joel Stein in this week’s Time essay: For Lad Mags, the Jig Is Up: Yet men read Maxim on planes, buy it without an accompanying pack of Trident and use their real name on their subscription. The brilliant marketing of the magazine — closing the gap between the MTV-ized sexuality to which we’ve become inured and soft-core porn — makes men feel this is acceptable behavior. But the objective of Maxim is the same as that of any porn magazine or J. Lo video — to make me dance, where dance is loosely defined as moving the way I feel like moving.
Maureen Dowd in the NY Times weighed in on the issue this week: Look Good, Act Cool and mixed in the flap over the lingerie Barbies as well as women fawning over Dubya in a flight suit. Lisa Schiffren, a Quayle speechwriter who wrote the “Murphy Brown” rant, gushed in a Wall Street Journal piece entitled “Hey, Flyboy” that President Bush in a flight suit was “really hot . . . as in virile, sexy and powerful.” Huh?
And the Boston Globe reports: Playboy still your father’s mag but stay tuned. They’ve hired a couple of Maxim editors to give Playboy a makeover.
Want a soft porn women’s magazine this month? A feature piece in this month’s W is Oh, Pamela! Bruce Weber shoots Pamela Anderson for W. The photo gallery is a Maxim clone. (I checked it out for you — journalistic integrity.) Wal-Mart carries W.
Kudos to Dads and Daughters for pressuring Macy’s to drop the Bongo jeans ads that appeared recently in Seventeen and Teen People magazines.