As publications designed to appeal to the young, the affluent, and the upwardly mobile, men’s lifestyle magazines have always had a liberal, cosmopolitan sensibility. People who join CrossFit gyms, buy designer pea coats, and winter on the Amalfi Coast (or imagine themselves wintering on the Amalfi Coast) aren’t in the market for lectures on traditional values. But in addition to covering cars, girls, and other typically masculine interests, earlier iterations of Esquire, GQ, and Playboy took an ecumenical approach to feature writing.
Despite their reputation as mindless purveyors of luxury advertisements and celebrity puff pieces, men’s magazines have long produced some of the best writing in American journalism. You may not have read “The Crack-Up,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic essay on his midlife crisis, but you’re probably familiar with its best-known line, “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time.” That was originally published in the February-April 1936 issue of Esquire.
Fitzgerald is just one of many celebrated authors who wrote for men’s magazines in their prime. Esquire’s roster of past contributors includes everyone from Wesley Yang to Tom Wolfe to Joan Didion to Normal Mailer. Mailer was also a contributor to Playboy, along with Jack Kerouac, Ray Bradbury, and Gore Vidal. Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea started as an Esquire assignment. Nora Ephron, of When Harry Met Sally fame, wrote a regular column for the magazine. Even William F. Buckley, Vidal’s conservative sparring partner, had a Playboy column. For decades, subscribers could credibly claim to have read the magazine that invented soft-core titillation for its articles.
GQ’s track record is also impressive. Recent iterations of the magazine published in-depth investigative pieces on oil spills, Russian serial killers, and Dylann Roof, the white supremacist responsible for the infamous 2015 Charleston church shooting. Even Maxim, a younger publication that falls somewhere between Playboy and GQ on the exhibitionist spectrum (the magazine’s current creative director is Nicki Minaj), once published lengthy essays on dirty cops, Evel Knievel, and cocaine trafficking mini-subs.
Compare Fitzgerald’s piece, or any of the greats that once appeared in the pages of men’s mags, to a recent Esquire essay on navigating your 40s from celebrated novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen, in which he graciously explains that “there’s more to life than being a famous writer.” Nguyen goes on to contemplate a word, “mid,” that has rarely been used by anyone over the age of 25, while blaming America’s declining life expectancy on, you guessed it, economic inequality, guns, and the absence of universal healthcare. (For the record, U.K. life expectancy is also in decline, and the data show the NHS and the U.S. system produce broadly similar patient outcomes, which is probably an argument for cherishing neither and reforming both.)
Nguyen’s predictably left-wing take on aging is emblematic of a strange divergence between men’s magazines and their target audience. Across the developed world, in countries as diverse as Germany, South Korea, and the United States, men and women have increasingly different ideas about everything from feminism to foreign policy. Various personalities and media outlets, many on the fringes of respectability, have exploited this opening. Podcaster Joe Rogan’s $250 million deal with Spotify is a testament to the economic logic of catering to male sensibilities.
Men’s magazines might be expected to follow suit. From writing about the counterculture in the 1960s and ’70s, to celebrating yuppie excess in the ’80s, to more recent trends like the ascent of the male fashion industry, these publications have usually been editorially nimble. Despite mounting evidence that men are typically less left-wing than women, however, they have lately decided to embrace the cause of social justice. The results are often confusing and sometimes quite funny.
Here is a smattering of recent headlines as examples. For confused but sexually adventurous readers, GQ helpfully lists “12 rules for cis men interested in dating trans women.” For metrosexuals who care about the state of public school libraries, Esquire covers LeVar Burton’s brave stand against banning books, which would perhaps be more compelling if the books Burton is worked up about weren’t readily available on Amazon.com. Some of these entries have the unmistakable whiff of desperation. Another Esquire listicle recommends watching The Last Dance, a sports documentary best known for showcasing Michael Jordan’s borderline-psychotic competitive instincts, to understand racism. For gym bros who want to confront systemic racism, Men’s Health named anti-racist celebrity scholar Ibram X. Kendi as one of its “60 influencers to follow.”
Lest the reader accuse me of cherry-picking, here is the “essential question” explained by Will Welch, GQ’s editor-in-chief, in 2019: “How do you make a so-called men’s magazine in the thick of what has justifiably become the Shut Up and Listen moment?” The circuitous answer involves reaching a “smart, diverse, engaged, and gender non-specific audience” by preaching the gospel of mental health, “debunking the idea that testosterone determines male behavior,” and various other fashionably progressive ideas. Welch describes this process as “an awesome, exciting, long-overdue challenge.”
Adventurous feature writing could comfortably coexist with luxury watch advertisements, photographs of scantily clad women, and softball celebrity interviews. But it’s become harder to reconcile their vibe with modern progressivism (or any doctrinaire ideology, for that matter). Clothes, celebrities, and sex still drive men’s magazine coverage, often supplemented by sponsored content and affiliate links, but the tone of these publications is now what you might call “woke adjacent.” This is not the strident, full-spectrum progressivism of the Nation or even Teen Vogue — mercifully, no one at GQ has written an explainer on decolonization — but it does mark a noticeable change in emphasis. The upscale lifestyle promoted by men’s magazines is now filtered through certain unmistakably progressive assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, and mental health. Terms such as “cisgender,” “cultural appropriation,” “heteronormativity,” or “toxic masculinity” now appear in their pages with startling regularity.
Recent attempts by these magazines to marry typically male interests and social justice politics are awkward and didactic. Like sports? Surely you’ll want to read Men’s Health on Colin Kaepernick, the quarterback turned progressive activist who hasn’t played an NFL snap in seven years. Interested in sexual health? Perhaps you’d be interested in an advice column that refers to women as “vulva-owners.” The difficulty in appealing to male readers while parroting progressive talking points is particularly evident on issues related to sexuality and gender. In 2019, the Playboy relaunch featured pieces on BDSM and Pete Buttigieg, which sounds like a rejected SNL sketch about clueless elders trying to reach the kids these days. The magazine’s editor unironically described an underwater photoshoot as “meant to represent gender and sexual fluidity.” In 2021, Playboy followed up this coup with its first gay male cover star.
If the economic rationale behind this lurch to the identity left is hard to understand, internal magazine politics may be to blame. Over the past several years, magazines and newspapers have been rocked by staff revolts over ideological deviations from the progressive consensus. Men’s magazines are likely facing the same pressures in meetings and on Slack channels.
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To be fair to the current crop of editors, the old guard never had to contend with social media mobs, digital advertising, and the uncertain future of print. Even in the current environment, Esquire still manages to publish lengthy dispatches from the front lines in Ukraine while GQ profiles Martin Scorsese. Critics may snicker at sex advice columns and sweater recommendations, but these were a reasonable price to pay for great essays.
Modern progressivism, however, is a more exacting taskmaster than Rolex or Ralph Lauren. The trouble with letting staffers shape coverage is that their political views are not a reliable guide to good writing, much less writing that might appeal to a mostly male audience. Earlier generations of men’s magazine editors may well have skewed left, but they had the good sense to put their ideological sympathies aside when commissioning pieces from writers like Didion, Wolfe, and Mailer. Revisiting this approach is no guarantee of profitability, but it’s a better idea than publishing more paeans to Ibram X. Kendi. Some adventurous editor should do the unthinkable: keep the models, watch recommendations, and weekend getaway features, but jettison the tiresome lectures on social justice, or at least run them alongside smart, sharply written essays about the sort of thing Rogan’s success proves men actually want to read about. After all, “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time.”
Will Collins is a lecturer at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary.