I was at a closing a few years ago in a glass-walled conference room off the reception area of another law firm. In the middle of the proceedings, the Poland Spring water guy showed up to deliver those five gallon jugs of water for the coolers.
The entire office stopped. All of the women – secretaries, lawyers, receptionists, and everyone in between – spent five minutes watching this hunky guy in shorts manhandle large bottles of water around. The other guy in the closing and I looked at each other, amused, while the women from the firm explained that they got water deliveries every month and it always was an event.
No, I wouldn’t buy the magazine you describe, but the romance novel commentors are onto something.
I would buy magazines that were essentially photo illustrations of hardcore romance novels. Production values would have to be high. Men in those blousy pirate shirts, tight breeches and lace up boots. Women in fabulous dresses. castles, ships, horses, jewels, clothes coming off or partway off, then hardcore sex in the romance novel context.
Me too. I kept thinking about Tiger Beat. I don’t know if that name was supposed to be ironic but it made me laugh then and it makes me laugh now.
My angle on the “female Maxim” is that you can never ever say, “let’s look at what women traditionally like” and try to market something to them. You always have to look at what they will like next. What they will like next in not necessarily what’s best for them or what was best for their moms, and they won’t wait for something to come out that’s tailored to them as females. We always go out and make do with what’s already there. It’s like hardware stores. The reason couples porn and Playgirl never took off is that women were not waiting til someone made porn for them to get into porn, just like women didn’t wait for Home Depot before they started to want hardware. Women needed hardware first and would go wherever they had to go to get it. Home Depot didn’t say, “women are going to be buying more and more hardware so let’s make a chain with nothing in it that will intimidate women and add things women like.” If they had tried to do that, they would have been screwed because women would prefer to go to an actual real hardware store, not some special femmy hardware boutique.
Same thing goes for wacking materials. Do a poll of what the under-25s masturbate to and most of them come out and say the internet. And do female internet pervs want to go to websites geared to women? No. They look around for what’s there in the real porn and when they feel compelled to jerk off that’s the deciding factor. Whenever I read about what type of porn women are drawn to, it’s not stuff that was set up for them. It’s not going to be stuff that was contrived to appeal to women. You figure out what women want after you see what they choose for themselves.
If you think about what women have traditionally gotten off on, you have to think about a lot of factors that aren’t true any more. I’m only 34, but when I was a kid, a guy could go into the bathroom with a magazine, park himself and jerk off while pretending to be doing the other thing you do on the toilet for 20 minutes. A girl’s tactic was to save up her fantasies til she was in bed or in the bathtub. She needs two hands really and it’s better to be lying down. What was the biggest thing to change masturbation habits in the next generation? Computer chairs. Anyone can masturbate in a computer chair. Computer chairs are the democratization of masturbation. The fact that women need to open their legs to jerk off properly means that it’s always more of a production. The pants have to come all the way off. Legs need somewhere to rest. You really need two hands. Yeah, you can prop up a magazine but it’s not that easy. Trust me, because I spent a lot of years kickin it old school with a stolen Hustler and it took a lot of practice and coordination. It was always easier to just look at the porn or read the book first, and then remember it while masturbating in the shower or bed later when you had built in privacy. That does a lot to condition you to use your imagination instead of a visual aid. It didn’t take evolution to condition me to be visual once I had an easy way to look at something and masturbate at the same time and in 30 years I bet nobody will say women aren’t innately visual.
As for the context thing, I don’t think it’s weird that women like context, I think it was weird that men spent so much time jerking off without context. I think guys are less quick and perfunctory than they used to be too. I tend to think that men just didn’t used to like women as much as they do now. They didn’t used to have female friends or role models and so jerking off to a bimbo was as far as it needed to go. Now that you see guys raised with a different view of women, you see many many guys, if they are stuck with a bikini photo, would rather jerk off to Tina Fey or Kate Winslet than some bimbo they never heard of. There’s more opportunity to for a man to eroticize someone because he thinks she would be smart or capable and fantasize about sexual tension and buidup. Maxim sells because it puts sex into context. It features celebrities a lot, doesn’t it? It is a lot of complicated reasons Maxim appeals to men right now. It makes no sense to try to flip it backwards for women. Women and men are on completely different trajectories when it comes to what they want to see for a lot more reasons than genetics.
I might read one. Not if the content was like Cosmo though. I hate that dreck. Although Maxim content is pretty brain dead, I prefer it to constant reviews of clothes and make-up I can’t and don’t want to afford and speculation about sandals. At least with Maxim, you occasionally learn something,
I enjoy seeing men in sexualized contexts. I found myself enjoying my office’s copy of GQ quite a bit- not as materbation material, but as some nice eye candy to look at as I read the articles. I’d probably enjoy celebrity photo shoots and the like. If it was marketed as a magazine with interetsting articles, a smart and pop-saavy alternative to the average women’s magazine (you ever actually read those things? there is nothing to read! Just a bunch of barely disguised ads and a few untestable platitudes about relationships) with some sexy guys to spice things up, I’d get it.
Umm… I’m not a woman, but trust me that women don’t need to be pants less, spread eagled with scented candles to row the little man the boat. Women are much more efficient stealth masturbators than men.
I didn’t say anything about being spread eagle with scented candles or imply in any way that it’s a necessity. I sure didn’t say that. Yeah you can do it without taking a leg out of your jeans, you can do it one handed. Maybe me and every female I ever talked to about it are weird, but it’s better if you can open your thighs. I’m not talking about getting in the stirrups or anything, but you don’t want to do it like a guy does. It doesn’t make much difference anyway because there are a lot of other reasons magazines never hit it big for women.
I really don’t mean to act like an expert on how most women masturbate. If they mostly do it with their legs closed, I’ll take your word for it. Either way, it would not mean the reason they don’t get magazines is because they are hard wired against them.
I buy Maxim, FHM, Ralph etc from time to time because they amuse me. Sometimes it is fun to read dirty jokes etc. Often there is more actual content then there is in anything calling itself a ‘women’s mag’.
I wouldn’t buy a beefcake mag. Men just can’t do “sexy” pics. They tend to end up looking like egotistical pricks
When I want male-type smut and humour I buy their mags
While I agree men are the more visual type, I would like to see more beautiful not so clothed men in women’s magazines and less beautiful not so clothed women…I think Cosmo has good things but it always seems to have articles teaching us how to please our man… I’m not saying its not good to point things out but I’m tired of everything we as women read etc…focusing on “our man’s” needs, wants etc…ironically these were the the mags of liberation for women and most ads are half naked women projecting what society thinks a “perfect” woman should look like and act like ugh!!! I want some man flesh(not all of it) in these magazines! Just nicely done photos of some of the hottest guys they can find just like Maxim!
Thanks for letting me vent and for asking this question.
This. If the magazine were centered around textless comics - pictures of attractive men being attractive in a way that also told a story (even a banal story, such as ‘He goes to the grocery store, accidentally breaks an glass item, feels bad and brings the cashier who had to clean up the mess some flowers.’) I would be about a hundred times more likely to purchase it. Maybe this mean’s I’m not in your target demographic (women who don’t need sentiment in their porn) but pictures of men alone doesn’t do it for me. Pictures of men acting semi-realistically allows me to more effectively fantasize about them.
No, I wouldn’t. I find that too many pieces in print that try to appeal to women just don’t.
For example, when I was writing erotica more frequently, I worked with a guy who was creating an erotica site for women. I would write stories to the pornographic/sometimes erotic (i.e., pornographic but more artistic) photographs he provided me. Most of the photos of women were just lovely and fairly arousing; the ones of the men were horrible turnoffs.
After I wrote the first story to go with one of the pictures of men, I had to have “the talk” with him, or the discussion that went, “Hey, these pictures are great (yes, I was being nice), but women often don’t get turned on by a guy wearing little shorts with his dick hanging out one of the legs. And the hard hat is kind of a cliche. You might try X instead.” It was really awkward, but he genuinely had no idea. He managed to improve the male photographs to some extent, but still didn’t quite get my point. I wrote for him for a couple of years, but was happy when I got my first erotic novel published and didn’t need to anymore.
