Maxim is a Bully: Making Women the Victim for Male Pleasure

This study analyzes domestic violence discourse in 72 issues of Maxim magazine, an influential and widely circulated publication for young men that is rarely studied because it is not digitally archived or searchable. This discourse reveals culturally entrenched patriarchal attitudes and hegemonic and retrograde references that degrade and marginalize women in an important cultural artefact and a meaningful site of popular culture representations of gender. Maxim's commodification of the bullying of women may undergird persistent patriarchal attitudes toward intimate partner violence and reveal an anxious masculine response to feminism. Maxim's discourse positioned verbal, if not physical, violence against women as a socially acceptable signal of a desirable masculinity.