I Just Wasn't Meant For These Times

This is a long article, about the guy who founded Maxim and how he's now decided he's a poet.



Here's the article.



Some questions popped into my mind as I read this.



1. When, exactly, did our society come to the point where we celebrate bad behavior, chauvinism, drunkenness, and horniness?

2. Why? Why are these things to celebrate?

3. Why is "intelligent" becoming a pejorative--like "liberal"?

4. Why is "stupid" becoming a GOOD thing?

5. Does anyone else understand the difference between "poetry" and "locker-room limerick"? Does this man also consider " There once was a man from Nantucket..." to be "poetry"?



If I had a choice--if someone handed me a copy of Maxim and a three-foot stack of hardcore porno magazines and videotapes, and they said to me "You have a choice. You HAVE TO give your man one of these two items--this one copy of Maxim, or this stack of pornos. Which are you going to give him?"



Given that choice, I wouldn't even think twice--the stack of hardcore would win every time.



Porno doesn't pretend to be anything but what it is--there's no agenda here. There are those who say it degrades women, and in many cases I agree with them--but it never pretends NOT to be degrading them. The ones that degrade women are open about that fact, and they play on it as a way for men to deal with fantasy without having to ACTUALLY degrade real women.



Maxim, on the other hand, says it's "humor". And that's where the trouble comes in....because much of this "humor" has an undertone that exposes the attitudes that lie beneath it. The ads, the pictures of scantily-clad females--there's an agenda underneath all this stuff, and it's very decidedly NOT pro-woman. Or even pro-understanding between the sexes. Like a lot of women's magazines, there's a quiet repetition of the themes that the opposite sex is out to get you, is out to burn you, screw you over, take your money, whatever. And I just don't believe in shit like that.



And even putting the best possible face on it: Okay, suppose all this talk of anti-woman agendas is just my own little paranoid fantasy world. Suppose Maxim IS intended as humor.



Fine. BUT--like Mancow, the biggest anus on the radio, who piously claims "I'm not like this in real life--this is a CHARACTER, a PERSONA,"--no matter what might be the INTENT....



...there are inevitably people who are going to AGREE with your most-outrageous proclamations. There are inevitably people who won't see that the intent IS "humor". What the people who create this stuff don't realize, or choose to ignore, is this:



No matter what THEY, personally, might think, the fact remains: they tailor their messages to the lowest common denominator. And when members of their target demographic, hearing this Maxim guy talk about how great it was to have 14 mistresses at once, or Mancow holding forth about how women are only good for one thing, stand there pumping their fists and yelling "YEAH!!! WOOHOO!!! SLAP DEM BITCHES!!" --then these same guys get all innocent-eyed and claim "But we were only JOKING..."



I'm not saying that life should be a humorless wasteland, or that all humor should be safe and inoffensive. Nor am I saying we should worship intellectuals...many of them, I've found, are too busy glorying in their own superiority to actually interact with the other 95% of the human race. And then, too, some of them are boring. But I would rather spend time in the company of someone who looks at the world and wonders what makes it go; someone who looks at people and wonders about what makes them who they are. Not somebody who thinks they already KNOW--but definitely not someone who looks at people as either "something to fuck" or "something to fight"; not someone who looks at the world and thinks: Man, my ass-crack itches.



When you celebrate the Cult of the Dumbass, you FEED the Dumbass. And eventually, you BECOME the Dumbass.