Maxim Magazine and the Management of Contempt

T HIS ARTICLE DISCUSSES MANIFESTATIONS OF CONTEMPT IN MAXIM magazine. Not the obvious contempt—for women—though that is unavoidable in this magazine. Not the contempt for gay men, or even for what we have recently begun calling the ‘‘metrosexual’’ man, what the British call the ‘‘new man’’—the fashion-conscious, sensitive aesthete who falsely sets off gaydar and who Maxim readers do not believe even exists. Rather, this article explores the magazine’s contempt for its own readers, who are encouraged by the magazine to indulge in dangerous forms of self-loathing. But en route to this claim, we need to review the British genesis of the magazine and the cultural ecology that is presumed in Britain to neuter its more insidious contributions to constructions of gender in times of change. The American version of Maxim magazine is unquestionably the most commercially successful of the men’s lifestyle magazines arriving from England during the British invasion of the mid-90s. At a time when the so-called new lad school of British publications was declining in sales and influence in England, Maxim became, in the three years since its arrival in America, what Brandweek called ‘‘the biggest and fastest-growing men’s magazine in the U.S.’’ (Gray). Like its competitor FHM, whose arrival in the States was likened to a ‘‘testosteronecharged British sperm . . . swimming across the Atlantic’’ (Goodwin and Rushe, qtd. in Benwell 25), the American Maxim occasioned triumphant boasting that the British succeeded in creating a young male readership of magazines where American publishers had failed.