What happens when over indulged fratboys put down their joysticks and enter the magazine business? Men's magazines-- glossy tributes to bubble-gum machismo armed with enough cheesecake and gee-wizardry to keep the average sports fan's eyes disengaged from the play-station during halftime. Provided he is male and marginally longer on disposable income than attention span of course. There is a whole new genre of self-styled men's magazines spawned from the nexus of modern male achievement: the pursuit of booze, baubles and babes. Each ad-heavy vehicle is loaded with tabloid-sensationalism, schoolboy antics and nubile T&A. Machismo dogma is resurrected as chic du jour throughout the layered pages, encouraging hypothalamic under-achievers to shift their backwards-hat-wearing, chicken-wing-craving hormones into a perpetual juvenile tailspin. Even some of the names, Maxim, Gear and Stuff, suggest the editors are targeting a sawed-off mentality of twenty-whatevers who still have model airplanes hanging in their rooms and keep their best literature stuffed under the mattress. And while the editors seem to believe they can sell anything as long as a couple of erect nipples are nearby, their comic-book journalism reads like a couple of grammar school boys' big night with an underwear catalogue. It's like licking a candybar through the wrapper. The message of the magazines, sex, booze, gizmos and atrocities, is spectacularly unoriginal, but is it dangerous? Can male mischief be lead further astray by promoting fratboy hooliganism out of the bathroom and beyond?

The producers of Maxim (Dennis Publications) also publish Stuff and have hugely popular websites plus spin-off publications like Maxims' Put-downs, Pranks & Pick-up Lines and Maxim's Book of Big Pictures-- Hot Babes, Strange Freaks and Bad, Bad Accidents. The June, 2000 issue of Maxim offers tidbits on how to make your bedroom girl-friendly (buy a plant to show "maturity"), how to "Suck more pleasure out of life by screwing with other people's heads for no reason," and where to find great golfing, featuring drinking, putting, chasing girls and drinking. The poor bastards can't even get their stunted priorities straight. The rest of the magazine is devoted to profiling post-teen TV Glam Chicks ("Grovel Before The WB Girls"), introducing expensive toys ("get down and dirty with medieval weapons"), sharing various animal anecdotes and Junior High toilet humor, and offering reassuring explanations for penile inadequacies. The resulting confluence of virtual pouts and smokescreen misogyny weaves a trail of navels and vapid advice from cover to cover without challenging the intelligence of the reader or defending the integrity of their chief commodity: women. The only stabs at journalism came via a truncated Conrad Anker account of finding Mallory's body on Everest (three pages of text and photos), and a sensational report on a sadistic homicide ring operating out of a trailer park in Elephant Butte, New Mexico (nine pages of text and photos). The filler pages are redolent with the kind of boxer-short boyism that insures America will produce another generation of TV-troglodytes who are more comfortable naming superheroes than world capitals. Do we really need to funnel more chauvinism into the mouths of late developing Gen-Yers?

In the real world no one is counting the potential lost to the vacuous literary grazing of the CK-generation, and the men's magazines are only capitalizing where their women's counterparts (Cosmopolitan, Vogue, Seventeen, and Elle) have been mining the till for ages past. By diverting readership from such sweat-stained stalwarts as Car and Track and Guns and Ammo, the editors are offering men the chance to get in touch with their mass-marketed sides and, along the way, opening huge doors for fashion advertisers hitherto denied large male markets. So what is at stake? Dignity for one thing, and not just that of the grovelers hoisting-up their trousers in the executive washroom either. Our cultural and intellectual dignity specifically. For one thing, I do not wish to be associated with the same gender that thinks making smelly sock jokes and knowing more about women's underwear than women is haute couture. But more importantly, even as it is hard to imagine taking a further step backwards in the area of equal rights in this country these magazines represent classic endorsements of the kind of testosterone culture so ardently eschewed by the sensitive drum-thumpers of the eighties and nineties. Of course, this is part of the appeal, the new macho guy is all about self satisfaction. The cost is the wholesale intellectual integrity and fledgling sexual awareness of the gender, unfortunately, and from the discussions I have had with too many sexually frustrated women, these boys need real help. They will not find it in the likes of Maxim. Besides the obvious girlie-on-a-stick sales techniques and bovine social advice, the magazines go a long ways towards maintaining the image of idiotic girldom waiting to be tricked into the beds of the socially infirm.

It is nice to think intellectual parity will prevail over the trouser-sniping of underdeveloped dot-com tiddly-winkers looking to capitalize on their own arrested pubescence. But to the chagrin of feminists everywhere, Barbie-culture is alive and kicking, so to speak, and for any woman who does not measure-up to wonder-bra fullness, the world can be a cold and lonely place. The same pimple-faced fools who coin-up at the newsstands and imagine four bucks a month includes them in the primetime world of waxed breasts and pudgy lips ain't welcome either. The good news is that none of these so-called men's magazines can be taken seriously outside of the bathroom or locker-room. And as long as the editors are feeding their horn-puppy public a steady diet of Nipples and Bits maybe they will stay in their tree-forts practicing-up on wedgies and spitball rolling. That will leave those of us who did not learn the finer points of denouement from the ESPN Zone free to address the rest of the population: the ones who are able to talk back.