Men's Magazines

Over the last several years, more and more men's lifestyle magazines, offering self-help and bodily discipline articles, have become available. According to some observers, this generation of “new magazines” reflects a trend toward men's changing gender relations and bodily and self-identities; according to others, these magazines stabilize the traditional relationship between hegemonic and subordinated masculinities. Either way, the male body seems to be at the core of a concern (and a gaze) centered on a consumerist use and representation. The male body is a desirable and desiring one, concerned with health, fitness, and beauty, which define an “embodied masculine lifestyle.”

Not only are masculinities and male bodies socially constructed and imagined (the media—including men's lifestyle magazines—being one of the primary factors in that construction, with daily representations of masculinity and male bodies), but the very concept of lifestyle is also “no more than a construct of theory or research” (McQuail 1997, 94), which addresses the tensions between the private sphere (domesticity, the “feminine realm”) and the public scene (dominated by men's working lives), within a consumerist framework.

Several scholars argue that the contemporary era is witnessing a “crisis of masculinity.” Masculinity and the male body are changing, reflecting men's changing gender relations and self-identities. This change encompasses all the traditional spheres, which have defined and regulated masculinities and male bodies. In addition, men pay more attention to their physical and emotional health, and today, the male body [Page 952]is subject to continuous scrutiny—it is objectified, exploited, and monitored.

Men's lifestyle magazines open up such an ambiguous and contradictory space where men's bodies are represented as objects for other men's gazes and as a suitable subject for the increasing care and concern—and marketing attention—of bodily practices, bodily health, fitness, beauty, and sexuality. Tim Edwards emphasizes the role of consumer culture in the shaping of the male body as it is accomplished by the men's lifestyle magazines. It is doubtless that the rise of men's lifestyle magazines has much to do with the consumer culture; furthermore, these magazines ask individuals to assume self-responsibility for the way they feel, they behave, and they look, with their display of the male body as a vehicle of care and pleasure.

The commodification of the male body is one of the main features of men's magazines. The commodified male body displayed by men's magazines can be found not only in sections devoted to style and fashion but also in advertisements. Advertisements in the magazines tell the readers how men should present themselves, how men should take care of themselves, how they should live, what they should smell like, and how their physiques should look. What is interesting here is that the majority of the advertisements represent almost exclusively male subjects, with very few images of women. Men are encouraged to use a whole set of beauty and body care products that were traditionally associated with women; for this reason, advertisers must legitimate these products for manly use, one strategy being that of using stereotypical images of the male body.

Another major feature of the men's magazines is the medicalization of the male body. If the “new man” and the “metrosexual,” whether they are imagined types of masculinity produced by the media and the public discourse or not, are obsessed with bodily fitness and health, then men's magazines are the place where this obsession is encouraged and connected with arenas as diverse as illness, diet, cosmetic surgery, beauty care, and so forth. The uncertain body framed by these magazines is a risky body, which has to be prevented from illness, disease, and, ultimately, death. Much of the stylistic and narrative construction of this kind of article is based on irony, which seems to be one way for the magazine staff to face such serious issues as death prevention.

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