There's an old story about the man whose wife catches him in bed with another woman. The guy leaps out of bed in shock and screams, "it isn't me!" And the thing of it is, you sort of know what he means. Which is more than you can say of Bill Clinton's touching belief that oral sex does not constitute adultery, ("eatin' isn't cheatin'," as some wag put it). The president's swingin' behaviour seems to have come straight from the pages of Playboy magazine, so it seems like an opportune time to leaf through a few men's style glossies and see what kind of spell they'll cast over any embryo Clintons out there.
Liam Gallagher is on the cover of this month's GQ. Inside, there's a heard-it-all-before story on a washed-up 1970s footballer (Malcolm Macdonald), an inconsequential article on stock car racing, an I-threw-up-so-they-threw-me-out-of-the-brothel piece on Bombay and a pictorial entitled "The Ad Birds of 1998", featuring a lot of girls off the telly with not a lot on. Elsewhere, GQ explains how to have phone sex, tells you what not to say to your "mates" and has a style feature on anoraks. GQ stands for Gentleman's Quarterly.
Esquire features a cover girl, Denise Van Outen, who presents Channel 4's Big Breakfast programme. Her boyfriend, Andy Miller, who plays guitar in a band called Dodgy, assures us that Essex girl Denise (23), farts more than anyone he's ever known, information I could quite contentedly have lived without. There's a centrefold pullout of the flatulent blonde in a leopard-skin dress. Esquire carries better features: good pieces on Burt Reynolds, Lennox Lewis and IRA informer Martin McGartland; but the tone throughout is relentlessly tabloid: February's is a special Hard Issue, so there are 30 ways to tell if you're hard, the 50 hardest things in the world and, inevitably, a piece on what to buy when what should get hard stays soft (a vacuum penis pump, apparently).
Esquire's not actually as dumb as it tries to pretend, but why is it pretending in the first place?
After all, when Arnold Gingrich helped to found it in 1933, he set his sights a little higher. Hemingway, Ring Lardner and John Dos Passos were early contributors; Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote followed, and the magazine's commitment to the growth and serious appreciation of jazz as an art form was exemplary. A special All Jazz issue in 1958 featured one of the most extraordinary photographs of the century, when many of the greatest musicians of the day - Charles Mingus, Thelonius Monk, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Dizzy Gillespie and Count Basie among them - gathered in Harlem for a group portrait at Esquire's behest. From celebrating great musicians to ogling half-dressed birds off the telly is a pretty sorry decline by any standards.
But perhaps this is to take it all a bit too seriously. I mean, let's not be prim here. Boys will be boys and all that. They're just glossy magazines, aren't they, there to advertise luxury products and serve as fantasy material for spotty young clerks in cheap suits? Well, no, actually. Not at their best. Granted, boys will be boys, and I've no objection to half-dressed women, but when you look at GQ's picture of Stephanie Seymour in thigh boots and a pout, all you think is: If I'd wanted porn, I'd have bought some. And since I didn't, could you get her out of my face, please? What is a men's style magazine at its best? I'd suggest that Arena magazine during the late 1980s and early 1990s came pretty close. But to understand why, you have to go back to the glory days of the New Musical Express.
In the late 1970s, the NME told you what to think and how to behave. And it was a relief, quite frankly, when you were 16 and clueless, your parents were prehistoric and your peer group was prehensile, to have impossibly cool magazine friends such as Tony Parsons, Nick Kent, Charles Shaar Murray and Julie Burchill, friends who introduced you to sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll, who sneered at your errors of taste and your half-baked opinions, and who urged you constantly to better yourself: listen to better music, wear better clothes, read better books.
They weren't very nice, these new friends of yours, but that was OK: at 16, you didn't set much store by "nice". Most importantly, perhaps, they took feminism for granted: any man who thought otherwise was a macho idiot. Nick Logan edited that golden-age NME, then moved to unisex style bible The Face, and then, flush with that success, founded Arena. Arena was like classic Esquire crossed with the NME - a magazine for younger men who had hitherto only defined themselves in negatives: they weren't sexist, they weren't racist, they weren't power-crazed, testosterone-soaked rugby club blockheads. But they certainly weren't New Men either. (The problem with the all-caring, all-sharing, all washing-up New Man was that it had been an image created entirely by women. Sadly, the New Man had turned out to be a bit of an Old Lady, deeply unattractive to the opposite sex and ridiculous to his own.)
Arena's project, if that's not putting it too grandiloquently, (and it probably is), was to create an image men could recognise, identify with and emulate. The house style was hip, retro-American, jazz based: immaculate suits, cocktails, classic cars, hard-boiled writers. Cover stars included Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, James Woods and Sean Penn. There was superior arts coverage, often championing unknown or neglected authors, and superb travel writing. Above all, there was ongoing, serious inquiry into the war between men and women. Nowhere else at that time were relationships discussed in a way that made sense to men. Yes it was just a magazine, and yes they did once put Robert Palmer on the cover, but still, for a few years, Arena wasn't just unfeasibly cool; it was almost important. And then they go and spoil it all by saying something stupid like: The New Lad.
Sean O'Hagan's original 1992 blueprint for the New Lad was essentially an encapsulation of all that Arena had been about: too masculine to be a New Man, too feminised to be an Old Fart, too confused by that insoluble conundrum, Woman; what the hell, let's have a drink and try again. But New Lad stuck around, drinking a bit too much until, in 1994, he re-emerged in Loaded (The Magazine For Men Who Should Know Better), transformed into Tabloid Man. Tabloid Man said: who cares about a bunch of dead jazz geezers? Who cares what women want? Let's go down the football, drink 12 pints, eat curry and watch porn. Cheers, mate! Everyone bought Loaded. Then everyone tried to copy it. Tabloid Man was all over TV, Behaving Badly and Thinking It's All Over. The launch editor of Loaded now edits GQ. That's why it's puerile, sub-adolescent garbage. The fact that British Esquire carries occasional articles from its American counterpart is the only reason it's not as bad. My love affair with Arena ended abruptly when a readers' poll accorded most favoured babe status to Pamela Anderson, thus implying that its entire readership, apart from me, was 12 years old.
Men's magazines are, I suppose, fundamentally ridiculous. Perhaps, deep down, biologically, so are men: nature's jokes, programmed to impregnate and then piss off. It's a bleak enough destiny, but on the bright side, one which can only be enhanced by a well-cut suit, a properly mixed cocktail and a Clifford Brown solo. And is there a girl in this picture? Of course. There's always a girl in the picture - haven't you ever been to the movies?
This Just In: Arena has introduced a new player in the sex wars. He's called Soft Lad, I think because he's in touch with his feelings. If not . . . well, I suppose he'd better buy a vacuum penis pump. After all, it'd be an awful waste to make it all the way to the White House, only to have nothing to do once he got there.
Declan Hughes's new play, Twenty Grand, opens at the Peacock on February 25th