Men's magazines tend to fall into two categories. They're either about squirrel hunting or CB radio; or (and there's no polite way to say this) they're about pussy. My newsstand carries hundreds of both kinds. No fewer than forty publications displayed cater to automotive aficionados, almost as many to weaponry fanatics. If the handful of mainstream periodicals, like the 3.6 million-circulation Sports Illustrated, do not speak to a man's particular passion, there are hobby rags ranging from the plain-vanilla Popular Mechanics to the more fetishistic KitPlanes. Saltwater fishermen, stereo connoisseurs, and Nintendists all have a publications just for them. And, speaking of fetishes, I lost count at fifty skin magazines -- past Playboy to Juggs and beyond.

In number and variety, these special-interest periodicals dominate the men's field. But worth watching for its influence on mainstream popular culture is a third category: "general-interest" men's magazines, which address the whole man and not just his enthusiasms for howitzers or golf. The sector is puny, at this writing comprising only Esquire, GQ, Details, and Men's Journal. The first three are widely considered to be economically sturdy (Men's Journal is too young for prognosis), but compared with their counterparts in the women's field, their readerships are small. Whereas five women's publications boast circulations over 4 million, even the strongest men's books have a hard time breaking 850,000.

There's tough competition doing so. Esquire at sixty is suffering a protracted identity crisis, and this fall its editor-in-chief, Terry McDonell, was kicked downstairs to Sports Afield and replaced by New York Magazine's Edward Kosner. GQ, having led Esquire in ad pages, in 1993 pulled ahead in circulation for the first time. New entries founder. The last few years saw Smart, Men's Life, Men, and M dash past. Among newcomers only Details is healthy, and this downtown tabloid transformed to a glossy men's book by Conde Nast three years ago competes less against its older men's colleagues than against Rolling Stone and Vibe for its plugged-in readers.

Sparring in this tiny ring continues, accompanied by the minute-to-minute commentary of industry scorekeepers. (In June, Mediaweek found "Market Flat for Men's Magazines;" in October, "Men's Books Optimistic About 1994"; in November, "'94 Starts Slow for Men's Books.") But the male reader is not jut a consumer of Absolut vodka or Ray-Ban sunglasses, and these magazines tell more than a marketing story.

Coded into the text and images of Esquire, GQ, Details, and Men's Journal are messages about social transformation. As the editors labor to arouse the desires and assuage the worries of men -- or at least high-earning, largely white, urban, male Baby Boomers and Busters -- they are responding to, and doing their part to reshape, masculinity.

Within the past two years, the publishers of Rolling Stone have spawned two publications: Men's Journal and, Barbie to its Ken, Family Life. With anything domestic or emotional thus segregated, Men's Journal was free to rejuvenate masculinity -- early publicity called the tone "Hemingwayesque" -- replacing the old wolf's sheepskin with Gore-Tex.

"Men have always been oriented toward action and accomplishment, a perspcctive that life is, or should be, an adventure," wrote editor-in-chief Jann Wenner and editor John Rasmus in the premier edition. The cover was a sepiatinged black-and-white photo of a kayak on a high-cliffed beach, a lone man wading the surf.

"Men . . . want to understand and master their lives," they wrote, nodding to the New Introspector while wooing the just-do-it readers of Tennis and Yachting. "Traditionally, special-interest magazines have served these needs. But men today . . . don't have the time or the floor space to subscribe to lots of single-topic magazines." Men's Journal would offer this modern cross-trainer the word or basketball camp or skiing the Matterhorn -- accoutred with the latest watches, helmets, and shoes.

To take any homosocial sheen off this manly life, most issues include one sinewy female athlete; to scuff its frivolity, one grim feature on the Mafia or famine. But these hardly register: Men's Journal calls to high-earning muscle-heads, 96 percent of whom are men.

Can it be that the Men's Journal reader really kayaks, climbs, cycles, and also golfs? With apartments too small for magazines, where will they keep the gear? Barely used Rollerblades now outnumber barely used waffleirons at yard sales, testament to a new genre of good intentions. In America, where only 8 percent of men in one major study undertake regular "vigorous and intense activity," is Men's Journal pitching not to Hemingway but to Walter Mitty?

No matter Dreams are what consumer magazines live on. To conjure the proper dreams, women's magazines brew a sweet-and-sour potion of self-doubt and eternally springing hope -- they invent cellulite and spend the next decade curing it. But men grow up believing masculinity equals mastery -- "action and accomplishment" -- so their magazines must appeal to self-confidence, not self-hatred. Regarding a photo of an iron-thighed skier flying over a Mazda-sized mogul in Men's Journal, a male friend tells me men respond to it just as they would to a do-it-yourself whatsit in Popular Mechanics. "The guy might ski once a year," explains my informant, "but he thinks, I can do that! Next winter . . ."

That's the fantasy, anyway. Luckily for publishers, masculinity is an idea, not a thing or an act, so "buying" even Men's Journal's death-defying brand of manliness requires no actual mogul-jumping. Its success (the bi-monthly went to ten issues in September) may not prove Wenner's contention that male Boomers are more apt to "climb a mountain" that "sit on a beach . . . and drink pina coladas." Rather, it may prove that an adventure magazine can draw what every publisher -- and advertiser -- wants: someone happy to sit in a chair, wearing Medalist underwear, Eddie Bauer cologne, and Seiko sports watch, and read. Masculine mastery -- or, who cares? its semblance -- may be ordered by phone with any major credit card and accomplished by proxy through the pages of a magazine.

Take the Men's Journal man, outfit him in Calvin Klein, add a fancy for literature and a propensity to pronounce judgment on women, drop him off between Montana and Manhattan, and dare him to collect a coherent identity -- you've got Terry McDonell's Esquire reader, whom editors at GQ called "Irving Cowboy." (Kosner will doubtless retire Irving. In an interview for this article, he indicated that Esquire will speak to men and women who live "the third way," with neither "macho swagger" nor "feminist lunacy.")

McDonell's Esquire published fine journalism -- Robert Sam Anson on Max Frankel, Guy Martin on a young German Nazi -- and was laced with urbane wit, as in Stanley Bing's workplace humor column, "Executive Summary." Yet the rough and ready tumbles onto even the style, food, and arts pages: furniture from Cody, Wyoming; cowboy cuisine; and, on the occasion of the monumental Joan Miro exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, a piece on the artist's relationship with Hemingway.

Esquire's always high-quality fiction became increasingly redolent of deer and antelope, too, as more and mor estories unfolded in Texas or Montana trailer parks and bus stations, featured alcoholic men and mistreated, leggy women, and were written by guys who live west of the Mississippi. When the magazine debuted Elizabeth Gilbert, a twenty-four-year old Lower East Side waitress and writer, what was her subject? A cowgirl!

"Girls" in these pages were mostly ogled, ridiculed, or patronized. In march '93, McDonell charmingly pitched the Ms. Foundation's "Take Our Daughters To Work" Day -- in an issue without a single female byline. Typical coverage of women included Philip Weiss's long feature on models and Michael Angeli's "Last Pinup" of Demi Moore (wanna bet?), a breath-bating account in which the star undresses, the writer offers he r$ 500 to kiss him, and she declines. Except for Lynn Darling's occasional perspicacious survey of the sexual-political landscape, the magazine's most in-depth look at women has been "The Women We Love," which sometime seemed to be written by a media-savvy jury of construction workers on lunch break.

While GQ and Details accommodate their reader's marriages, fatherhoods, and sex lives into their pages without breaking a sweat, Esquire has struck a man's-man stance and maintained it arduously, a guy hardening hisabs and challenging everyone to punch him. Then, the magazine awarded a Dubious Achievement Award two years running to Fabio, spokesmodel of hyper-heterosexuality. Do the gentlemen protest too much?

So disintegrated was Esquire that last year if fugued into multiple personalities. One of these, Esquire Sportman, an Orvis-clad Field & Stream, died fast. But Esquire Gentlemen, a fashion book aiming to "blend the fabness of fashion with a kind of regular-guy attitude," as designer Roger Black put it, succeeded so smartly at what rival GQ had been doing all along that Esquire pulled it aboard as in a regular section in December, perhaps to act as a sort of advertising flotation device. It will also be published separately, twice this year.

There are other signs that Kosner is bringing the hunter home from the hill and Esquire's editorial direction home from the sea. In the process, he has already civilized its dialogue with women. February's issue zooms in on "The 21st Century Fox," the next generation of feminists. Tad Friend makes an intelligent stab at the sexual-freedom/sexual-equality conundrum, and E. Jean Carroll (a woman) gives us an awesome profile of womanhood's future, embodies in the "rockingest girl" at Madison, Wisconsin's West High. There are irritating signs that these guys don't quite get it yet, which Ellen Goodman pins with her javelin-like summary of the magazine's poll of 1,000 eighteen-to-0twenty-five-year-old women on money, power, sex, and men. "Note to the men who wrote the questions," she writes, in a sidebar to the poll. "Give us a break with these choices." Don't offer "strong but silent" or "in touch with his inner child," she instructs. How about strong but not silent? "These women are sure what they want om sex," she concludes, but "given the ridiculous choice between sex, we'll take hugs. Because -- surprise! -- an encounter without hugs may be Esquire's idea of sex, but it isn't ours."

The good news is, Goodman's on the page. The conversation has begun again.

GQ started life as a fashion magazine, and fashion has remained its keel. A decade ago, before editor-in-chief Art Cooper took over, the book was a curious cross between Ladies' Home Journal and Mandate, the front of the book gray with columns type, the middle juicy with Bruce Weber photos of hunks under glaring Los Angeles light. GQ was perceived as a gay magazine, and one of Cooper's first tasks was to het it up. When he did so aggressively -- adding, for instance, a starlet of the month -- The Advocate denounced him for betraying the gay community. Now the magazine is firmly in the mainstream, appealing to "guys who expect to succeed within the establishment," Cooper says.

Is the mainstream straight? GQ tilts that way: relationship pieces are heterosexual oriented and sex adviser "Dr. Sooth" deals with vaginal warts and the Coital Alignment Technique, a recalibrated missionary position. Pieces on feminism come from the perspective of men intimate with women. But a report on RU-486, the "abortion pill," shares the July 1993 issue with "The Straight Queer," David Kamp's indictment of straights who borrow "AIDS chic" and skip the muss of being homosexual.

And then there is GQ's devotion to fashion, which still retains a whiff of femininity. Cooper made intelligent decisions: adding babes without deleting cufflinks, running athletic profiles, ware that many readers buy their football jackets at Barney's. Fashion sense is the magazine's calling card, after all. Without it, why not read Esquire, with its tradition of good journalism?

Not to say that GQ's journalism isn't good. It is. Along with the requisite flavor-of-the-month celebrities -- Shaquille O'Neal, Liam Neeson -- it profiles Al Sharpton and Christopher Drogoul, the Atlanta bank manager whom some see as the Bush administration's scapegoat in Iraqgate. And Cooper regularly runs features of 5,000 to 7,000 words on untrendy subjects -- Daniel D'Ambrosio's coverage of a violent feud over gambling at the Mohawk Akwesasne reservation, for example, or Mary A. Fischer's investigation of a 1980s Justice Department "witch hunt" against black politicians. The GQ reader, one infers, is hip but not fidgety; he is a man who sits still to consider serious issues -- culture, money, power.

GQ has achieved Roger Black's ideal balance of "fabness" and "regular-guy attitude" -- code for gay and straight -- by assuming that whatever their sexual preference, men want to look good, feel good, read good writing, and have good relationships. So a reader is not discomfited to find, pages away from a fetching Sarah Jessica Parker, a spread headlined "Animal Magnetism," featuring a smoldering Stephen Rea, the actor who plays the straight man in love with a drag queen in The Crying Game. Whether he identifies with Rrea or lusts after him, the GQ man is the thoroughly masculine 1990s urbanite: chic, fit, informed, sexually sure of himself.

LIke GQ, Details aims to be sexually "nondenominational," according to editor-in-chief James Truman, and, to some extent, it succeeds. (On April 1 Truman becomes Conde Nast's editorial director; John Leland takes his place at Details.) Fashionwise, the Details reader is as butch or swish as he wishes,in lemon-yellow suit, torn jeans, battered leather overcoat, or plaid high-tops. "My dad was a football player and my mom was homecoming queen, and I've always tried to be a little of both," says a commercial artist modeling a Smurf-colored polyester suit. As to fitness, the get-up-early challenges found in Men's Journal would elicit a firm "Not" from most Details readers, who burn calories by staying up late: 90 percent go to nightclubs, compared with 20 percent of adult Americans. Health tips are relevant -- "Hangover Helpers: Morning-After Cures of the Stars."

But this reader of nonchalant gender receives a subliminal message from Details -- or from its major subject, pop music celebrities, most of whom are male and a significant number of whom appear to be intoxicant-pickled, mildly talented overage teenagers who think they ejaculate manna. "I'd get hammered and meet these chicks and I couldn't remember what they looked like," says Sean-E of the Ex-Idols, a Guns N' Roses look-alike. "I'd come home shit-faced and scribble in my bok 'Pretty nice. Kinda sweet-looking, but it was dark. Tattoo on left tittie. Bought me a beer. Threw up in her car.'"

Not everybody in the pop-music world is dopey and sexist and, to be fair, Detail's editorial pitch in reporting on jerks like Sean-E is often a major third above the mayhem. The magazine assigns gay British pop star Holly Johnson to write on being HIV-positive; it covers the women of pop; and Anka Radakovich prowls the between-the-sheets beat with gleeful lubricity and feminist good sense.

Truman says hiring a woman to cover six mitigates the "locker room" tendencies of men's magazines, but such sexually progressive intentions may be lost on his readers: one sent Anka his used jockstrap. Meanwhile, throughout the pages, women are "girls," and penis references, by sheer number, transmit their tiresome message in spite of the irony that often sheathes them.

A close read of Details reveals a catholic sensibility. International reporting is astute and textured, like a piece on Siberia's shamans and another on the Kaiapo chief, a leader in the fight to save the Brazilian rain forest, who activists say is being framed for a brutal rape. The magazine hits and runs a lot, with quick takes on cocaine smuggling, dead eagles, circumcision -- the result, maybe, of attempting the oxymoronic: to produce a print product for the MTV generation. That goal may also explain the book's only priority: those indistinguishable band-on-tour stories.

When a magazine gives itself to celebrating pop music, it is a tricky business not to celebrate the wanking masculinity of pop's denizens. When it devotes itself to a frenetic pursuit of the just-about-to-be-new, it shrinks its ability to take stock of much more than the just-got-old, and assumes the perspective of an adolescent: world-weariness on top of naivete.

In the end, Details is a little like the twenty-something men who read it: smart, hip, and handsome, but it tries to act more grown up than it really is.

Gendered assumptions shape the men's books at my newsstand. Men like sports, war, and tits: women are interested in love and beauty. Women read for fun and self-improvement; men read in order to do something. That's why so many men's publications resemble user's manuals more than journals. But as women run companies and marathons, that old gender dichotomy, active/masculine vs. passive/feminine, is wobbling, and the general-interest men's magazines are wobbling with it. Esquire is the Marlboro Man on one page, Jerry Seinfeld on the next.

As to sexual politics, these magazines are equally in flux -- or in trouble. Although both Esquire and GQ count as many as a third of their readers female, a men's magazine by definition excludes women, which can exacerbate alienation and antipathy. Like the women's magazines, which often subtly represent men as both white knight and useless brute, the men's publications rhapsodize over their featured gals as they hunker in male defense during an era of sexual power struggles. Even GQ, with a gender-balanced stable of writers and subjects, can't bring itself wholeheartedly to endorse feminism. Nicholas Lemann's encomium to liberated women is followed some months later by Harry Stein's conversion to anti-feminism.

The magazines may have an easier time making room for homosexuals than making peace with women. Where they are fashionable or vain, they can't escape

Columbia Journalism Review, March 1994

feminine associations; GQ doesn't even try. When they're club-hopping, in Details, gender-bending is the rage. (Depeche Mode's Martin Gore wears a skirt occasionally; RuPaul, always). Even when they're jocks, as in Men's Journal, their world is homosocial.

When it comes to tinkering with the rules of gender, publishers consider extreme caution good sense. No one really knows if such rigidity keeps circulations as high, or as low, as they are. Still, the culture works on magazines as they work on it, and today's more androgynous man has begun to see himself in the men's magazines. Like a juggler who keeps a chainsaw, a laptop computer, and a silk scarf in the air, h esometimes looks ridiculous doing it, but he is skillfully performing an ancient art while transforming it into something new.

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