The Bottom Line: If you value intellect and process a modicum of self-respect, you will not subscribe. Morbid curiosity is one thing, falling into the black hole this is Maxim, another.
Is it me, or has there been a literal explosion of men’s magazines in the last three years, all catering to the same subset of men; namely 20 something’s whose taste in literature clothes, toys, and women seem the weigh towards the extreme? First there was Maxim (the subject of this review), then FHM, Gear, Stuff (from the publishers of Maxim), and the newest, Blender (also from the publishers of Maxim), which touts itself as “The Ultimate Music Magazine,” as if Rolling Stone didn’t have that label sown deep into the blood-red letting of its flowing script!
All of these magazines have one thing in common (well okay several), they all feature pictures of the latest “girl thing” on their glossy covers in some skimpy attire and offer the reader a soft, soft porn photo spread of her and others inside the cover, along with several meaningless (stupid, moronic, insulting, tasteless, vapid) articles, and a truck load of advertisements!
I leafed through my first edition of Maxim magazine about a year ago, at my ex-brother-in-laws apartment. It was in and among the other garbage that carpeted his music studio floor, and it caught my eye because it had the sexy half clothed picture of someone or other on the cover, and being a “red-blooded American male,” that I am, I could resist a peak. What I found was less than impressive and after about ten minutes of hype and little substance I discarded the magazine.
Then about five months ago, some dot.com or another in a vain attempt to attract views to their site, was offering free six-month subscriptions to Maxim, and two other magazines, so I bit (especially since they didn’t ask for a credit card in return for my name, address, and email address). And about three months ago I received my first issue of the thickly papered magazine. I leafed through it again, decided the magazine was still not worthy, and quickly consigned it to the recycling pile.
Now normally that would be the end of the story, but I felt an obligation to my Epinions brethren to pen an opinion of this magazine and so decided that September’s issue would receive ~The Bard’s~ full analytical attention. So I started with page one, only on page one where the table of contents was supposed to be, was an advertisement. And so it went for the next 21 pages! Finally after much ado about nothing I would ever want to buy, and can’t figure out for the life of me why anyone would, I chanced upon Part One of the table of contents. I say Part One because the next two pages after it were more advertisements! All n all roughly 90% of this magazine is advertisements! Do men shop this much? Even on the pages with articles there were advertisement squeezed into every available nook and cranny; there was scarce little white space in this magazine at all on which to scribble a number, or write a short note, or drop taco sauce!
This month’s (September) cover features the cutesy, sexy pose of Jamie-Lynn Sigler, who portrays Meadow Soprano on HBO’s The Soprano’s. And somewhere buried within the cavernous (did I mention this magazine is thick), pages of the magazine lies her seven page (interrupted by ads of course), spread. The pictorial itself is nothing much to look at; little chest flesh is shown, and no locks south of the navel is unmasked to show the true hair color of the damsel in distress you are supposed to fall in lust with. So I wonder what the fuss is all about? Perhaps it’s the suggestive poses or the come-hither looks, or the slightly wet skin that together are supposed to induce young men to play Omar the Tent Maker, but for me the poses just fall flat.
What about the articles you make ask? Don’t, you’d be better off. In between ads, and the standard sections of your typical magazine, are pictures of people doing gross and or stupid, off the wall things like pulling a bloody tissue out of one’s nose (huh?). The following is a sample of the articles in this months issue:
*Cirrus Maximus: Coats of Harm, The Russian Army plays dress-up for another cheery Commie Halloween.
*How To Survive Torture: Can’t stub you toe without bursting into hot angry tear? Time to toughen up soldier.
*Hard Times: An herbal supplement with Viagra-like effects, a prostrate medicine, and an erection that wouldn’t die. (now this one was interesting and useful).
*Blood Brothers: Torture, rape, and mass murder are the family business. Saddam Hussein taught his sons well. Now the boys are eager to prove to the world that dad was a lightweight.
Anyway, you get the picture; totally useless banter and bad prose accompanied by even more totally useless pictures in bad taste. Now I have a question for my younger gender-mates: is this really what you guys want in a magazine? Has our society become so shallow, and turned-off to intellectual stimulation and respectful, tasteful entertainment that Maxim is now the yardstick by which the depth of our young men is to be measured? One more question and then I’ll stop: is this what passes for sexuality and allure in the 21st century? Women constantly complain that men (especially younger men) treat them as little more than sexual objects and yet there is no shortage of young starlets lined up to grace the pages of Maxim, Gear, FHM, Stuff, and others. Do they have a responsibility to do their part to stop the exploitation?
In the final analysis, I was right to toss the first edition of Maxim I ever read back onto the floor with the rest of the trash where I found it, and feel confident enough that I will be missing no great insights into the human condition when I toss this issue into the recycling pile. The magazine amounts to little more than a shopping catalog with a few journalistically questionable articles, and a plethora of young women posing in soft-soft porn spreads thrown in an attempt to add interest, and legitimacy to a magazine the clearly fosters neither to non-Neanderthal thinking men like myself.
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