Breaking News: Shallowness and Lack of Purpose Rampant at America's Girlie Mags

I once read the New York Press with some frequency. Sure, it was always a sloppily edited, strangely cantankerous weekly, oddly mixing shrill punk-scene dedication with the self-indulgent conservative bloviations favored by Russ Smith; a friend of mine once said that reading Smith's weekly inventory of restaurant visits and political pronouncements afforded the same category of pleasure that one gets from picking at a scab. But there was some good crankishness in there as well -- William Bryk on strange NYC history, Armond White's iconoclastic film reviews, and "Dirty Sanchez", a hilarious weekly free-association riff on the lower depths of the rock-critic world.

More importantly, it was free lunchtime reading material, as easy to swallow and about as nutritious as a street vendor hot dog. If the week's Voice (at a time when one might find, say Mim Udovich riffing brilliantly on American Psycho) was already read through, one could turn to the Press's collection of first-person rants and crankly restaurant dissections with a certain amount of temporary satisfaction, especially if one turned right past the literary toy-train wreck of Amy Sohn's column.

This was pre-Web, of course; now it's almost impossible not to find better things to read at lunch -- and most of the readable writers the Press had have departed for better gigs. But, following a link a mention in Romenesko, I found myself returning to pages I hadn't glanced at in years, reading David Itzkoff's apologia for his lad-days at Maxim; nothing piques interest like a behind-the-scenes story, so I was sufficiently moved to read the news from "inside the sausage factory," as the writer put it. Upton Sinclair meets Stuff? Men behaving, one had to figure, very, very badly.

Sadly, Itzkoff provides no details of scandalously awful things said or done in the editorial meetings or on photo shoots. But hold onto your hats, though, fellow lads, because what Itzkoff (now on staff at Spin) does reveal is so breathtaking that you may not be able to fully grasp it. The horrible thing about Maxim is...that they have no ideology. That's right, Itzkoff was shocked -- shocked! -- to discover in the course of his tenure there that there was no editorial strategy or philosophy other than the commitment to feature a scantily clad celebrity body on every cover (he hints at the very small universe of recognizable starlets willing to grace a Maxim cover, which might have been the kickoff to an interesting discussion of the economy of fame as it intersects with the sub-softcore world...but, unfortunately, that didn't occur to Itzkoff). Can you imagine? He reports that the magazine is only produced according to a cynical "formula" -- it turns out they've never intended to do path-breaking journalism at all! That isn't, of course, to say there isn't quality in the magazine -- Itzkoff insists that, despite editorial negligence some "actually thoroughly researched and reported, and often well-written" true crime pieces are published. Too bad he can't provide an example of a single one.

The worst crime Itzkoff was witness to, however, was the fact that "It’s all one big tease, except underneath those frilly undergarments there ain’t nothing to show." We'll pass over the fact that in the case of a "big tease" there's no "except" -- the very definition of the tease, be it sexual or commercial, is that the anticipation all that you get. What's mind boggling is that the editor, after years in the "sausage factory" finally figured out what any college freshman could tell you after a flip through the pages of Maxim or any of its clones -- the clever headlines and splashy girlie pix don't announce satisfyingly libidinous content or libertarian prose, they replace it. The notion that it took editorial experience at Maxim to discover this elementary fact is a headslapper -- as is, of course, the idea that any sane person thinks of Maxim as more than a the modern version of pinup photos. Who, exactly does Itzkoff think he's clueing in?

OK, forget that question. A better one: can't even the Press do better than this for a cover story?

Posted by BT at June 06, 2002 04:41 PM