| |
|
That is interesting. I think there's a danger that all that will happen is a reinforcement of the duality that exists in many people’s minds wherein “pornography” = all that bad stuff they would never actually look at, whereas the stuff they do like to look at (pictures of Rachel Stevens in her pants) is something else, just a bit of fun, etc. Ideally I’d like society’s relationship with porn to be more sophisticated than that. But I’m probably putting the cart before the horse. Getting people to acknowledge some of the potential problems with viewing pornography, specifically the kind of extreme pornography that one can almost blunder into on the internet without trying, is a good point - done right, it isn’t just scaremongering, because I think there are real risks that come from porn that at the least inspires an urge to do some BDSM without educating people about basic precautions like safewords, and at worst contains a worrying amount of unmistakably genuine vicious woman-hating.
Going back to the original question – I think the basic problem is that even before you get on to the other undesirable attributes of most men’s magazines as listed in the thread title, the whole idea of a men’s magazine depends on binary gender essentialism. So you’d have to start by acknowledging that masculinity is performative. But I think you’d have to acknowledge that this wasn’t even a magazine just for men even if “men” was defined in its broadest sense – ‘cos even if it’s for the trannybois as well, I think the idea of a magazine that says “here is some STUFF that MEN like and that defines us as MEN” is kind of… annoyingly reductive. You’d have to make it clear that this was just a magazine about STUFF that has traditionally been seen as associated with masculinity, but doesn’t have to be. That sounds awfully high-faultin’ crazy academic gender theory gone mad, but it doesn’t have to be – you can express it in totally different terms, and make it insanely cool. Cars, hair gel, cigars, black shirts, Johnny Cash – oh bollocks, this is a rockabilly zine, isn’t it? Well, I guess it would be timely. |
|
|
