Cultural commentator – from a generally conservative vantage point – David Brooks has some interesting things to note about the popularity of men’s magazines like Maxim, and about what this says about our culture. In a nutshell, he suggests that this shows that the advance of feminism and even political correctness (however you want to define that) may not have produced the results some commentators may have wanted.
He also makes the point, which to my mind rang true, that ‘reactionary’ attitudes are often not the preserve of the upper classes, but often most deeply held elsewhere, such as among America’s rap music artists. Here’s a nice quote:
We have a dynamic urban culture that treats women like whores and that regards owning a Mercedes as the highest possible human aspiration, and the leading articulators of progressive opinion have nothing to say about it. They can’t seem to bring themselves to admit out loud that their most effective ideological enemies have turned out to be the same underprivileged people they wanted to rescue from oblivion.
This observation is hardly new. Yet even someone like yours truly, who likes to watch action movies, dreams of fast cars and feels no shame in enjoying pictures of lovely women, can feel a bit troubled about where things can be headed. I don’t know if the kind of things Brooks frets about are problems that have to be ‘fixed’ in some way.
There definitely has been something of a backlash in parts of our culture against the dictates of political correctness. It doesn’t surprise me all that much that the kind of mindless dreck published by the Maxim mags of this world is so popular. Maybe we are just observing the cultural equivalent of Newton’s law at work – every action has an equal and opposite reaction. It applies to space rockets and it applies to culture as well, maybe.
Nah, it hasn’t been a backlash; it was there the whole time. It was just temporarily kept under wraps by the sensibilities of the elites of the homogenized cartel of Big Media. People said these things back in, say, 1980; it’s just that nobody on the Big Three networks would broadcast it, and none of the big magazine chains would run a magazine on it, and none of the big advertisers would run ads in anything that said it.
And the upper classes, frankly, have always been more liberal than the lower ones when it comes to things like the position of women, or race, or homosexuality, or any of the other big social issues. The radicals have always deluded themselves about this, though I’m not sure why. Maybe because it’s easier in a democracy to believe you’re fighting the Man, instead of admitting the real reactionaries are the construction and factory workers.
I have to concur that it wasn’t a backlash. But its prevalence in society is due to Feminism.
The Feminist movement stood up and said that women were tired of their role as Socializers of Men, of being the moral and social compass that made men into gentlemen. Bully for them? Ha. Instead of saying women had a right to demand better treatment by men, more consideration, more respect (in and outside of the home, in and outside of the workplace), they decided that women would become free if they behaved as badly as men did.
So they encouraged women to become “whores” and feel pride it in; they encouraged more sexual promiscuity and accepted no backlash for it; they encouraged the idea that women could “play like men play”–in sports, in the workplace, in the bar–and demanded no consequences for it.
Well, the consequences of it are Maxim. Because men can now view women the way they view men–as objects, as interested only in material goods, as shallow, maybe even as pigs. Men, seeing now that women don’t demand women to respect them, but do expect them to desire them, have simply lived up to what they wanted as adolescents, but then had been off-limits. This is what Feminism wanted. Careful what you wish for.
Hi Jonathan,
As I continue a personal quest to finish Karl Popper’s magnificent The Open Society and Its Enemies, in the otherwise empty hours provided to me each day by Thames Trains, and the Central Line (I’m the fat bloke at the far end of Lancaster Gate station), I’m rapidly coming to agree with Sir Karl, that the worst thing we can ever do is to try to “fix” the future, and that the future itself is not “headed” anywhere in particular.
It is entirely unpredictable, except for the broadest sweeps, such as “Man will one day live on the Moon”. The “historical destiny” of €uroland’s formation is thus a Marxoid fantasy, similar to Hitler’s fantasy of a thousand year Reich, and we must free ourselves of the idea that we can either predict a detailed future, or change it to suit our wishes, via conspiracy, or even (dare I say it) increased social controls (boo, hiss).
We can, if I’ve got this right, try to “fix” things piece-meal, that are currently wrong (eg: Britain’s appalling education system), and then see what happens to our experiments, and we can discover philosophical frameworks (such as the rule, which seems to hold, that legally-upheld free speech will tend to be associated with scientific progress), but the evolutionary growth pattern of men’s magazines is beyond our ken, so we shouldn’t concern ourselves with it, except to keep the government out of it to enable them to evolve properly.
That they will evolve is certain. But will they go more pornographic, and head even further up towards the top shelf, or will they go more towards the Spectator/Private Eye serious/humourous end of the shelf? This is something only the market will decide.
And beyond the short-term decisions of editors, which may or may not be mistaken, it’s the daily decisions of millions of buyers which will push them one way or another, not the wishes of sexist feminists. And the more the socialists try to make magzines do what they want, the more unpredictable will be the results of their efforts.
And this failure of historicism, which cannot make the future do our bidding, is why we must always fight for freedom. For it is conceivable that the socialists may get their wish eventually, and create a One World government administered by a UN-Soviet, with an aristocracy of UN-crats ruling over the rest of us starving serfs.
Conversely, a free world of libertarianism is not inevitable. And even if we were to create a truly free world, it’s only 10,000 years since the Stone Age, and socialism, and its tribal appeal, may keep re-appearing over and over again, as it does with us every “New Generation”, despite the Gulags, the gas chambers, and all the other paraphenalia of socialism, and national socialism.
We must never let down our guard, and we must continue to fight them over every inch of ground, forever.
By God, it’s a great book. My apologies if I’ve got the thrust of it wrong, to any Popper afficianados. I’m only on chapter 13, and I possess the unoriginal mind of a marshmallow, so I’m unable to predict how the book will end! 🙂
Rgds,
AndyD
Andy, maybe you slightly misinterpreted me – I think observing a trend – such as noting that magazines are getting baudier, crasser, etc, is not the same as trying to guess where a particular thing is “headed”. But all the same I totally agree with you on the main thrust of your comment. We cannot try to steer the future, though we like to exert whatever benign influence we can. Hence why we scribble away on this blog.
As for Popper, I recall reading TOSAE about 13 years ago. It is a magnificent book, though the final installment on Marx is too kind to the old monster about his economic views, such as his claim that the working classes would be increasingly crushed in poverty. His dissection of Plato is absolutely devastating.
regards,
JP
Hi JP,
Yes, my apologies for jumping straight in at a deep end, when you were dipping your toe in a puddle! 🙂
It’s such a great book, which is colouring many of my thoughts at the moment, I got a bit carried away. You might be right about his treatment of Marx. Over this lunchtime I had to stop, for a moment, when I found this jaw-dropping sentence in Part III of Chapter 15:
Que?! I hope he qualifies that sentence, by the end of the chapter or I may have to remain a quasi-Randite, rather than a pseudo-Popperite, after all! 😉
Rgds,
AndyD
Interesting theories about the relations between the sexes.
Now consider that it may have nothing to do with culture or beliefs.
http://www.nap.edu/issues/13.2/courtw.htm
Consider it may all be because of the male to female ratio.
Feminism is to blame for men treating women like objects? I guess that explains the traditional dowry system. C’mon now, I’m no fan of the ‘blame a man for everything’ school of feminism but there was plenty of vulgarity and rudeness in the world before Maxim and before feminism. If a man wants to read Maxim, why not? I couldn’t care less. As a woman, I got better things to do with my time – like watching Vin Diesel movies. Oh wait…….you’re right! Feminism has taught me to treat men as objects. The horror. I guess no one will open doors for me now. 🙂
Imho you’re all overblowing the issue. Guys read Maxim b/c it’s damn funny. You come home from a long, grueling day at work, have a beer and laugh your ass off at Maxim for a few minutes. The eye candy ain’t bad either.
yes