Rhyme And Unreason

[BaronOfHair]

Looking for Mr. Right : The Readership Battle Among Men's Magazines Is Also an Identity Crisis

The "Museum of Modern Male Art" in the offices of Esquire magazine, features neatly mounted trout and salmon flies, spoked wheel covers, an electric drill, billiard balls and a martini glass.

www.latimes.com

Excerpt: "NEW YORK — The “Museum of Modern Male Art” in the offices of Esquire magazine, features neatly mounted trout and salmon flies, spoked wheel covers, an electric drill, billiard balls and a martini glass.

Back in the simpler era that collection represents, it was easy to define the American man. Everyone knew what kind of man read Playboy. Or Argosy. Or True.

But in the wake of the feminist and sexual revolutions, general and special-interest women’s magazines overran the newsstands and their male counterparts languished.

Now, 25 years later, publishers are trying to corral male consumers and readers with general-interest men’s magazines....

“Billions of dollars have been made off the feminist and women’s movements,” said Asa Baber, who has written a column about men for Playboy since 1982. Books, movies, television shows, and magazines have all profited from the culture’s focus on women, he said"


But now, Baber believes, the women’s movement is fading and “people are looking around for what’s next. It’s clear to me that for 25 years we’ve had very unbalanced reporting in the area of sexual politics and gender studies,” he says. “Men have gotten either bad press or no press. I think that is about to be rectified . . . . In a marketing sense, a vacuum was created.”





We can only hope and pray that Wokeness is receding just enough for something similar to happen today. The Manosphere being our only "press" from '16-forward hasn't been remotely beneficial

 

[Scaramouche]

Hi Barren,
Baber is right,2025 will see massive changes,what I see and feel I know is a trickle compared to the coming tzunami .....For the first time in quite a few years I feel optimistic....Good to be alive!

 

[BaronOfHair]

Hi Barren,
Baber is right,2025 will see massive changes,what I see and feel I know is a trickle compared to the coming tzunami .....For the first time in quite a few years I feel optimistic....Good to be alive!

Part of the article I didn't quote:

"This autumn, despite the worst advertising climate in ages, publishers launched four new general-interest men’s magazines: Men’s Life, M-Inc., Details and Forbes’ FYI

Within a few weeks, Men’s Life, a quirky new publication produced by a former editor at Playboy, had gone belly up. But at least two more magazines--Smart for Men and Rolling Stone’s as yet unnamed publication--are champing to join the fray

Smart for Men, he says, will give men what they want.

“Basically, men are adolescent and over-sexed. We always have been and always will be,” says Kimball, a tall, thin man wearing spectacles and a bow tie. Moreover, he adds, most of the women he knows are increasingly willing to accept that. “They’re sick of the wimpy ‘80s image.”

As a result, the days when women’s magazines might feature the question, “Why Can’t a Man be More Like a Woman?” may be over, Kimball thinks

Men’s Life” went so far as to turn those stereotypical headlines around. In a brief humor item, it suggested that if men’s magazines were to handle gender-sensitive issues the way so many women’s magazines do, they would run stories such as “Raising Consciousness: Why Can’t She Raise the Toilet Seat?” or “Hey, How About My G-Spot?”

Or, as the magazine’s editor and creator, Barry Golson, a 17-year veteran of Playboy, said in his editorial: “Many of us have this suspicion we’re not the jerks some women say we are . . . . Welcome back, guys...

Men, on the other hand, were simply confused, and wondered aloud why women had urged them to be more sensitive, then turned around and “bashed them” for their vulnerability, Cooper said.

Magazines like Men’s Life, he continued, are ignoring the complexities of today’s life"

Now as back then, the path forward will be messy... A fair few of whichever websites and forums attempt to succeed The Manosphere will likely be short-lived, just as Men's Life and some of those other publications were. I do look forward to a day though where we're not confined to the most obscure corners of social media(as has been the case from late '15-today), and the culture at large is once again Post-PC, to the degree that it was between the late 90s-the mid 10s

Days where pre-Woke Askmen was writing from an unapologetically pro-male viewpoint https://www.askmen.com/editor/51_100/72b_editor_letters.html

 

[AmsterdamAssassin]

Men, on the other hand, were simply confused, and wondered aloud why women had urged them to be more sensitive, then turned around and “bashed them” for their vulnerability, Cooper said.

Women can be bad at explaining what they want. Women wanted men to be sensitive to their feelings. Except 'their feelings' didn't mean men's feelings, but women's feelings.
Men used to be callous and insensitive about women's feelings: "Is it that time of the month again, woman?" and women just wanted men to show a bit more empathy for the female plight. Instead, the media told men they had to show more sensitivity by showing their (men's) emotions.
So men started to behave like women and cry at the drop of a hat. And now the tone changed, "I know you're on your period, but I'm hurting too." Instead of empathy, women got competition in who could cry the hardest. That was not the intention, so women wanted the stoic barbarians again.

And I'm sorry to say, but men don't read that many magazines anyway. If these publishers want to reach men, they might have to do something different than a 'magazine'.

 

[BaronOfHair]

Women can be bad at explaining what they want. Women wanted men to be sensitive to their feelings. Except 'their feelings' didn't mean men's feelings, but women's feelings.
Men used to be callous and insensitive about women's feelings: "Is it that time of the month again, woman?" and women just wanted men to show a bit more empathy for the female plight. Instead, the media told men they had to show more sensitivity by showing their (men's) emotions.
So men started to behave like women and cry at the drop of a hat. And now the tone changed, "I know you're on your period, but I'm hurting too." Instead of empathy, women got competition in who could cry the hardest. That was not the intention, so women wanted the stoic barbarians again.

And I'm sorry to say, but men don't read that many magazines anyway. If these publishers want to reach men, they might have to do something different than a 'magazine'.

To your first point: https://www.wpr.org/shows/central-t...ory-through-clothing-argument-against-empathy Listen the fourth story

To your second: Yeah: This article was written in 1990, so no one today will be starting a print magazine