Are We Not Men?

Down the ladder from Playboy to Maxim, with some hits including:

In the February 1976 Advisor, a woman writes in that her boyfriend, who’s miffed that he can’t bring her to orgasm (though he claims he’s successfully done so with every other lover), has tried to pressure her into a threesome with another woman as a remedy. The response reads in total:

Your partner has come up with a rather novel excuse for experimenting with a third party (necessity is the pimp of invention or the mother of deviation), but we doubt that a ménage à trois would be the answer to your problem. While a triangle might show him by direct comparison that all women are different, it might also double his failure rather than his fun. Since you are more familiar with your response than he is, do what you can to increase your pleasure. Patience is not something that can be measured or corrected with a stop watch: By making orgasm the goal of your lovemaking, you may have changed the event into an endurance contest with no winners. Love for the moment, not the finish. Sex is a mystery, but when it works, it reminds us of what Raymond Chandler said: The ideal mystery is one you would read if the end was missing.

Several new men’s magazines—led by the laddie triumvirate of Maxim, Stuff, and FHM—have been eating into Playboy’s readership for a decade now, and what they primarily encourage is a lot of boyish grab-assing. (A recent headline from FHM: “Stooge Luge! Now people can ride something dumber than your sis.” And one from Maxim: “Man Punks Nature: Yes, Mother Earth, we are the boss of you.” Stuff, for its part, has offered such puntastic fare as the Yo, Bitchuary! and the Bro-file.) Incidentally, all three magazines are also great advocates of the sort of lite lesbianism that the aforementioned Playboy Advisor discouraged. Even still, they do bear a faint resemblance to Playboy. There’s hardly a trace of the old journalism, and no fiction, but there are the numerous girlie pictorials, in this case teasingly non-nude; the gadgetry and the spiffy autos; the obligatory fashion spreads. However, where the sexes are concerned in lad land, it’s almost completely separate but equal, which is to say equally puerile. These mags are full of bravado (not limited to the guys) about hooking up, but otherwise, basically, the twain never meet: you might score with the opposite sex, but you hang out with your own—which perfectly captures a sensibility people my age (fortyish) tended to ditch before they left their teens, and which indicates that the average lad finds girlfriend scary.

Who would ever have thought that where rude male self-indulgence is concerned, Hefner could be outdone by a bunch of patricians? Apparently so as not to suffer the same emasculating fate in their day, the laddies at Maxim, Stuff, and FHM take every opportunity to nudge readers, with eyebrows dancing, and ask (actually shout), “Aren’t we just so naughty?!” Which can only be answered, “Not really.” To open these magazines is to walk into a teenage boy’s room: the air scented with dirty socks and the contents of wadded-up Kleenex; the walls decorated with pictures of swimsuit models and he-man athletes and sports cars; the desk barely visible under piles of video-game cartridges, action figures, and forgotten junk food; and all of it colored by the boy’s glee in knowing it exasperates Mom. In fact, that phantom mom (or equivalent mother figure) is just about the only palpable female presence in these magazines.

And the culmination:

Of course, marriage these days is as soluble as cotton candy, and family loyalty has less opportunity to prove itself (or not) when so many people shy from starting families in the first place. But the lads aren’t really flouting that old convention. That was more Playboy’s beat, decades back. The laddie burlesque of male chauvinism is almost purely a reaction to feminism’s ascendancy, which people of both sexes have long taken for granted. And feminists are quite right to feel unthreatened by the lads’ rebellion. Because in fact, it isn’t a rebellion at all but, rather, a capitulation. It’s as if American masculinity has finally surrendered to decades of feminist criticism, criticism the lads have assimilated fully, because—unlike the Playboy men of yore—they’ve known no other world. One can wish that the lad shtick were subversive minstrelsy of a sort, an absurdist attack on unflattering male stereotypes, but more likely, and all pretend insensitivity aside, the laddies are sadly sincere in their embrace of buffoonery. They’re adopting—before the fact, and with the cold comfort of intent—the very characteristics that would most ensure further criticism, further rejection, which is essentially to take control of defeat by forfeiting the game rather than risk another losing effort. It is, in short, to take control by running away.

In this—paradoxically—the lads’ be­hav­ior is much more closely connected to that of the sensitive, New Age, pantywaist male than to that of the devil-may-care rogue of old. Along with most of their critics, the lads have preferred to think that they represent a male backlash, a testosterone-soaked atavism, a rude if somewhat ironic return to the pre–James Taylor days. But their fear of women is nothing but a rueful extension of Mr. New Age’s obsequiousness, their pantomime of sexism nothing but utter compliance with the harshest feminist critique—nothing but a dancing-bear routine in the feminist tent show. It’s enough to put a real man off his popcorn. The Playboy guy of old didn’t fear women; he surrounded himself with them. And where the battle of the sexes was concerned, he gave as good as he got, not by running from or validating the criticism directed at him but by refusing to let it define him, one way or the other. To borrow some New Age jargon, he knew who he was—he was comfortable in his skin—and if certain people found him abrasive at times, so be it. He made sure to have other qualities that recommended him, qualities that included a social seriousness that was reflected as well as cultivated in the pages of Playboy magazine.

This current state of affairs is a sorry one for all involved. Women understandably wanted to fend off, or reform, that lecherous Playboy man. And no matter how pointed their criticism may have been, implied in it all was a belief that men could, well, take it like men. The typical guy might have chosen to see it as a compliment, an endorsement of the competitive spirit, an invitation to some social and intellectual roughhousing, as it were. Yet if the man-children captured in the lad mags are any indication, the typical guy has chosen instead to fly off to a laddie Neverland where he amuses himself with boys (and maybe the occasional Tinkerbell) and refuses to grow up. Wendy Darling, Peter Pan’s girlfriend manqué and Neverland’s own ultimately exasperated make-believe mother, knew well this boy-on-boy dynamic, more than once exclaiming (albeit with a mother’s good humor), “I’m sure I sometimes think that spinsters are to be envied.”