by Mark Dapin
I was very good at making men’s lifestyle magazines because I knew all that.
I could make magazines for young men because I was brought up differently to most people my age. My stepdad was only ten years older than me. My parents played the same rock records, read the same hippy books, had the same leisure interests as Ralph readers’ parents. I felt as close to their generation as my own. I grew up differently too. When my school-friends were getting married, I was at university with a gang of mates. When my schoolfriends were having children, I was travelling with a gang of mates. When my university friends got married and had children, I was in Australia with a gang of mates. Now that my divorced friends were fighting over the children, I was going out with a woman twelve years younger than me.
I was very good at making men’s lifestyle magazines, but was there any point?
The press sneered when the category emerged but, in the last few years, the print media has become more like men’s lifestyle magazines. Lists and trivia are scattered through the tabloids; there are jokes where there used to be none. Interviews were once solemn and respectful; now irrelevant surprise questions are a feature of almost any Q&A. Our influence has altered the broadsheets too. Youth-oriented supplements such as The Sydney Morning Herald’s ‘Radar’ and ‘48 Hours’ lift the entire men’s lifestyle format, from the irreverent attitude to the news-value-free ‘how-to’/’ how-it-works’/’how-it-feels’ stories to the reliance on first-person narratives. Jokey captions (or, as one of our readers called them, ‘those little stories you put in the corner of pictures’) have become so common, it is difficult to know what is going on in photographs anymore.
Men’s lifestyle magazines internationally have changed, lost readership, got worse. Loaded has become that which it set out to parody, a matt-paper, perfect-bound News of the World. Men’s lifestyle journalists, like the rest of us, have lost their politics. Loaded’s James Brown briefly took over UK GQ, included the Nazis on his list of the twentieth century’s best dressed men, and immediately parted company with his publisher, Conde Naste. In the US, the unchallengable market leader is Maxim, a brilliant, superbly designed product that even its publisher, Felix Denis, admits has no soul. Ralph had a soul, though. I never stopped chuckling at Captain Stupid, or giggling at the picture of the Doner, or sniggering at Ivan’s face with (or without) drawn-on glasses, or the unusual excuses my staff invented to explain why they had not done what I had asked.
The first words I heard about sex came from a pair of older boys who joined me on the swings in our estate. ‘When a woman really likes a man,’ one told me, ‘she puts his balls in her mouth.’ I did not believe this at the time, and nothing that has happened to me subsequently has changed my opinion – but I remember that confounding curiosity about what people did in bed. I wondered if I could do it too, and if I could do it well, and I sweated through vivid, virginal nightmares, in which women turned out not to be made the way I thought they were.
Through Yvonne’s column, through Babes Behaving Badly, through our dating tips from girls to boys, Ralph tried to help all the clueless, fumbling virgins forced to strut around like studs. We tried to fill in the gaps. Women learn about men, sex and relationships through a process that begins with Dolly magazine when they are ten years old and progresses through Cleo and Cosmo to She. All of them repeatedly address the same questions: What is normal? What is permissible? What can I do on a date/at a party/in bed?
Men learn about women, sex and relationships through the lies of their friends or from naked centrefolds found blowing across public parks. There are many reasons boys use pornography, but one of them is: they think it shows them what women are. Boys do not have the support that is available for girls from an imaginary peer group of publications that grows up as they do. From their teens through to their twenties, they secretly turn to their girlfriends’ magazines as if they were older sisters, to try to find the truth. Through my last year at Ralph, I did my best to help them, to be a good mate.
I got a lot out of men’s magazines. ACP was immensely generous to me. If I ever felt my magazine was being treated shabbily, I rarely believed I was. However, the lesson of the pay office is the lesson of corporate life. They do not pay us, we pay them. The journalists, the photographers, the designers, the editors and the subs make the product the rest of the company sells. It is the profit we earn, with our stories and pictures, that buys the company cars for the brand managers, the expense account lunches for the advertising salespeople, the gambling chips for Kerry Packer.
We should be their bosses.
APPENDIX
The Ten Immutable Rules
of Magazine Publishing
Rule Number One: Beautiful Women Sell Magazines
Rule Number Two: Crashing Aeroplanes Do Not Sell Magazines
Rule Number Three: Celebrity Nudes Sell Out Magazines
Rule Number Four: Successful Publications Supply a Service
Rule Number Five: Never Call Your Magazine after a Bodily Function
Rule Number Six: When Somebody Says Their Industry Is ‘Based on Relationships’, It Means They Do Nothing Useful
Rule Number Seven: When in Doubt, Consider Brad’s Rhetorical Question, ‘Should We Give the Readers More of What They Like? Or Less?’
Rule Number Eight : In Publishing as in Life, When People Say ‘I Love You’, It Means They Want to Fuck You
Rule Number Nine: Writers Who Adopt Alter Egos Eventually Grow into Them
Rule Number Ten: The Best Magazine Will Sell the Most Copies
