A Muchness of Maleness

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

The dividing line among men's magazines used to be whether they printed photographs of naked women. Playboy and Penthouse did; Esquire and GQ didn't. Save for that distinction, they all tended to paint a consistent portrait of Man Triumphant, although the skin books gave more attention to autos, sports and conspicuous consumption, while their rivals emphasized career climbing, pop culture and dressing for success. Just below the surface, to be sure, the whole category hinted of deep male insecurity: along with the assertions of sophistication and self-confidence came heavy doses of instruction on how to look right and act cool. But actually talking about such anxieties, the mainstay of women's magazines, was all but verboten.

The American male has evolved, however, and the magazines that cater to his fantasy life have struggled to adjust to his expanded interest in health, psychology, relationships and children. They may not have moved quickly enough. Circulation has dropped at the longtime leaders: since the early 1970s, Playboy's has plummeted from almost 7 million to half that, and Penthouse's has shrunk from 3 million to 1.7 million. That falloff is mirrored among women's magazines.

Yet both categories remain eternally attractive to publishers, if only because they offer the potential for a targeted, cohesive audience to suit particular kinds of advertisers. Thus half a dozen well-financed rivals of the traditional men's magazines have arrived or are poised to enter the fray, even at a time when all publications are hard pressed to hold on to advertisers. Warns Charles Elbaum, president of Publishing Economics, a media consulting firm: "The pie has been sliced too many times for them all to survive."

Still, the plethora of choices ought to delight readers for the moment -- except that, to judge by early issues, most of the recent entrants are woefully short of ideas. They are also a bit short on diversity: both story subjects and models (the magazines are greatly concerned with clothes) are overwhelmingly white. The very fact of homosexuality is largely ignored. Three competitors are in their opening month or two: Details, a bratty, street- talking melange aimed at men in their 20s and early 30s; Men's Life, a smirky yet sentimental blend of National Lampoon and the Saturday Evening Post directed at fortyish suburban baby boomers; and M Inc., a merger of two prestigious but money-losing forerunners, Manhattan, inc. and M, that is meant, like its predecessors, for the well heeled and silver templed.

Also relatively new is Men's Health, which increased frequency to bimonthly in March 1990 and looks uncannily like a women's magazine with different pronouns. This Rodale Press publication mingles diet and exercise features with such provocative cover-line topics as "Why Men Take Mistresses." (The answer, a women's magazine classic, is not sex but lack of marital communication.) Soon to come are an entry from the company that produces Rolling Stone and a revamped version of Smart, a sardonic, profile-oriented monthly.

The shift at Smart results from the decision by Terry McDonell, its founding editor, to jump ship from a leaky rowboat to take charge of Esquire, which he likens to "walking onto the flight deck of the aircraft carrier Eisenhower." The change prompted Smart owner Owen Lipstein to merge his shaky start-up with a proposed rival, Men, and pick up its creators, Peter Kaplan and Chris Kimball, as editor and publishing director. In their vision, everything old is new again: Kaplan says his "new" magazine will attempt to recapture the personality of Esquire circa the 1930s, which he describes as that magazine's heyday -- not a universal judgment among Esquire connoisseurs. The Kaplan regime takes effect with the December-January issue.

The subtitle of Details is "style matters." Editor James Truman used to be features editor at Vogue, and it shows. The opening issues are nothing if not clothes conscious. Even an informative report about Moscow gangsters begins with a description of their attire. Truman thinks his focus is broader: "Style is what you wear to work and also Nelson Mandela walking out of jail. It's stylish to be interested in the world." The magazine, published by the Newhouse empire, which also owns GQ, purports to offer some hard-hitting pieces. But Doug Vaughan's story about rooting through the confiscated files of former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega breaks little news beyond some eye-popping Visa-card bills. Maura Sheehy's portrait of Fox TV as the "ninja" fourth network is hyped with adrenal adjectives and metaphors to the point of incoherence. Details shows glints of awareness of an America beyond white male plutocrats. But when it is not trendy, it is often aggressively vulgar.

Men's Life, a quarterly published by Fox TV's owner, Rupert Murdoch, is almost sweet by comparison. The inaugural issue features an article by syndicated humor columnist Dave Barry, the baby-boomer laureate, and at least a dozen other stories ape his smirky, adolescent style. The magazine exudes this attitude most succinctly in a column by Mike Kelly, who deplores the emergence of a less macho, more candid style of masculinity: "I don't know any New Men. I don't know any women who know any New Men. I don't even know any women who want to know New Men." Story topics are predictable (the allure of blonds, the pros and cons of buying a house), and the writing is frequently dreary.

M Inc. is, at 316 pages, much the fattest of the entries, but it was able to draw on the articles stored up by both its parents. In looks the merger retains more of M, but, as the first issue's cover signals, the sensibility is pure Manhattan, inc. It proclaims POWER BROKERS in letters 1 1/2 in. high and names 11 of them (10 men and Madonna). Inside is an almost nonstop stream of gossip, scuttlebutt and awestruck praise about the rich and famous, including 65 miniprofiles of such figures as financier Michael-David Weil and Hollywood superagent Mike Ovitz. The prose is burnished, but not much of the dish is fresh, save for two first-rate pieces -- one by Ernest Volkman and John Cummings about Mob leader John Gotti, the other by Richard Morgan about advertising mogul Burt Manning -- that are spun off from books. The juiciest item is about the marital breakup of billionaire businessman John Kluge. The weakest, a rambling travelogue of Prague, is by editor in chief Jane Lane. Overall, if Details is about night life and style, and Men's Life about home and hearth, M Inc. seems gaga over money.

Its reason for being, Lane concedes, has more to do with demographics than editorial vision: "Our commitment is to a highly focused target audience of 200,000 men of accomplishment. We will simply work at finding out exactly who they are and exactly what they want." Much the same could be said by the editors of the other magazines. The problem is that while advertisers may like to get customers bundled in a statistically neat package, readers have to be enticed to return for the next issue one by one by one. Not nearly enough is enticing about any of the new guys.

With reporting by Leslie Whitaker/New York