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Well, it's a really a question of how the magazines in question define male identity - Petey posted upthread about its content, stuff that positively defines male identity, but I think the content of these magazines is as much about defining identity through negation. Those two methods of self-definition can cause some interesting conflicts - like an article on skincare that carefully manoeuvres between excessive care as a bit suspect and regular toning & moisturising as incresingly important as a strategy for sexual success. I wish I still had FHM's article on Antony Hegarty actually, it was particularly fascinating in this respect.
If one were aiming to produce a magazine that doesn't rely on this frequently prejudicial negation of the Other, I think you'd have trouble marketing it, given that the source of a lot of the appeal of the genre is humour that plays on such a prejudicial view. It's not limited to heterosexual magazines, as Tryphena points out. Gay lifestyle magazines often encode even more limited and fractured prejudices - there was a particularly nasty period in about 2000-2003 where a lot of their content was based on scene division. Attitude marketing itself to the younger part of the scene, AXM launching as the alternative to airhead, twinky culture, both magazines not infrequently caricaturing lesbian culture, which is historically disadvantaged in terms of having its own publications anyway. |
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