Personal essay: GQ and Esquire Redesigns

Sadly I fear two veteran magazines who have launched so many writers and have influenced American culture--have both been redesigned into the homogenous world of current magazines--and dare I say it: "dumbed down" for their male audiences.  Upon reflection, it was a female, teenage friend of mine who first introduced me to regularly reading Gentlemen's Quarterly or GQ.  She often purchased it and loved it for the pretty pictures.  Hormones and possibly a little reverse objectification aside--this started a keen appreciation for me (another teenage girl), toward general interest male magazines.  Around that same time,  my dad brought Esquire home from the airport, and it rapidly became another favorite.  Some day as a writer, I hoped to make their "women we love" awards.

As teen girls and media consumers, we were breaking away from our worship of Seventeen then (the joke among us was you stopped reading it when you turned 17), and that was in mid 1980's, during the MTV invasion before the Sassy revolution of publishing targeting young women as a more diverse, individual market with flaws and not homogenous, cookie cutter statistics.  

My favorite titles have always been Esquire and GQ, although I subscribed to both Details and Men's Health for awhile.  Personally I thought they peaked--taking a women's magazine format, but completely readjusting it to men and then really kicking butt with it.  Then the life style focus went to extremes, and I just couldn't take the aggressive brand extension marketing from Men's Health, so I didn't renew my subscriptions.  

Personally while I have subscribed to a variety of women's magazines, and still have a few I read regularly, I felt the men's titles were on the whole much more informative and entertaining.  The pieces were longer, better written, and the variety of topics from the serious to quirky blended together in a nice assortment.  Not to mention the odd bits of practical advice.  The web site where I learned to send all those freaking chain letter emails from Men's Health was infinitely more valuable than anything I ever read in Cosmo's "Why Don't You Just Once?" section.  

By trial and error, many of the women's publications I felt were either too full of product placement, bad pop psychology, and continuing to add uneven, quickie blurbs about beauty, health and celebrities.  Sometimes I felt you could read these issues, literally with your brain turned off--which I'm not entirely knocking--for on occasion it can be just what the doctor ordered.  Quality though, however, separated the male products vastly in my eyes.  In many a doctor's office waiting room I would gladly reach out and grab a GQ or an Esquire over many female magazines or the usual issues of People and US.  

The well worn cliche of course, is that heterosexual men despite urgent claims, generally do not read a certain segment of their magazines for the articles, or perhaps don't read them at all--especially those specializing in pictorials of women in their birthday suits.  These days the old guard of GQ and Esquire, face stiff competition not just from the skin trade of Playboy (who has also launched and landed many a lauded writer), Penthouse, Hustler, and all their off spring, but in the form of a new hybrid, commonly called the lad mags (being British imports) which include: Maxim, FHM and Stuff.  These new formats include profiles with accompanying pictorials of scantily clad starlets plus run the gamut of general interest: sports, cars, fashion, travel, alcohol and sex.  

Just as tabloid televison changed standard  broadcast journalism into infotainment, I'm seeing the trickle down effect to my two beloved publications.  Often perusing through GQ, I knew I'd skip by the car and gadget reviews for example, the serious article profiling the tragic life of the man the character of "Crocodile Dundee" was possibly based upon, or the quirky essay about driving through Italy on the Autostrada, and stopping at their roadside cafes and grills.  

New issues of GQ and Esquire have both disappointed me.  There's still a layer of peanut butter, but it's much thinner, compared amount to the marshmallow fluff in their composition.  Recent issues of GQ and Esquire (May 2006)  have disappointed me, and Esquire now reminds me of Details when I was starting to think it was slipping.  

My only consolation is the end to my bottomless frustration that certain men's publications will always be on a level so much higher in scope and quality than women's general interest titles.   To me it seems GQ and Esquire have been retooled, and not to better address the guys in my age group of Post Baby Boom or the Baby Boomers themselves, but to allure, capture and lock in the subscriptions to the younger boys of the ever powerful 18 to 35 marketing demographic, and in doing so, they have been pared down and blurbed to the low level of consistency of the average, contemporary, general interest, women's magazines in fashion, health and life style.  Quite upsetting to me is the marked similarity, if not out right cloning to their girly counterparts, except for a smattering of racy pictures from the art department to keep up with the lad magazine competition.  

Overall as a reader I am very sad, but as a feminist I'm happy, for male readers are finally being written down to by the powers that want more sales.  Welcome to the club gentlemen, and after awhile--well you won't even know, what you've been missing.