> what were you expecting from escapist literature?

Escapist needn’t mean terrible. Car magazine is escapist, and it’s beautifully photographed and very well written. Edge magazine talks about videogames without assuming its readers are idiots. There are lots of examples. But at the time – and we are talking about a publishing phenomenon that was already running out of steam five years ago – the term “men’s magazine” was starting to mean “soft porn, football and pictures of horrible wounds”.

I think the argument I made at the time – that there wasn’t a general interest men’s magazine that was any good – was true.

> women’s mags about celebs are really awful

They are. And two of the magazines I named in the piece – Marie Claire and R – have changed since I wrote it. MC is a shadow of its former self, and R stopped publication a few years ago.

The issue I fear is profitability. The UK cannot sustain a niche men’s magazine product; ultimately it will (as Maxim, GQ, For Him ((FHM)) and Arena will testify) move from its original differentiation position to one of the ‘Vanilla Middle’ articulated successfully by Loaded.

Having isolated the real profit potential in the UK male and should we be so surprised, I give you The Sun as exhibit A, they must imitate or die.

The result is what you now see. Sadly a brave attempt by Zero magazine failed.

Regards

Reading (by reading I mean skimming through and realising it wasn’t worth it) Maxim this evening I thought it was even worse. Example – stars obviously have hard lives so lets juxtapose a quote from that one-legged woman married to famous bloke about being harrassed by the media with a quote from a woman who had been gang-raped by soldiers somewhere in the middle-east. I’m not sure that really made the point.

Some of these womens magazines put the men’s ones to shame though. More is obscene – I think that most of the FHM/Loaded writers would be embarrassed reading it front of their girlfriends. I think a nymphomaniac reading it might feel a little inadequate. Ruth bought one the other day – can’t remember which one but I think it was one of the ones you mentioned. It had a couple of excerpts from “diaries” from four so-called “typical” men in their twenties who basically shagged anything that moved for a week. The bias of the article seemed to be that all men are like this and women would be shocked to find this out.

All we need is a quality newspaper to merge with the star or something. Then you’d get stuff to read inbetween ogling.

PS on the subject of the star – no, I didn’t buy it – but it is another example of newspapers stealing images from the web and not crediting them. (Charles with Camilla as a horse from B3ta midweek.)