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Brand X
The Mr. Peanut chronicles
Burned by past disasters, icon managers have learned the hard way that the suave mascot must never wear a wetsuit and that Ronald McDonald cannot hang out in bars.
By Ruth Shalit
[03/24/00]

Brand X
The inner Doughboy
How an army of admen battle to define and protect the true nature of the Jolly Green Giant, the Pillsbury Doughboy and other advertising spokescharacters.
By Ruth Shalit
[03/23/00]

Media
The San Francisco Examiner, 1887-2000
Underfunded and outmanned, the scrappy afternoon paper could sometimes prevail over the competition -- but couldn't survive its own mismanagement.
By Scott Rosenberg
[03/21/00]

Media
Prime-time propagandist
Is ABC's John Stossel a reporter or a right-wing apparatchik?
By David Mastio
[02/25/00]

Media
When bad shows become truly abominable
Who was the real victim of the "Multi-millionaire" hoax?
By Frank Houston
[02/23/00]

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No, this isn't another diatribe about anorexia. The women's magazines' worst sin isn't their promotion of an "unrealistic body image" or excessive thinness. (Frankly, given the ballooning of the average American, male and female, the problem is in the opposite direction.) Their sin isn't even the promotion of consumerism as a substitute for real experience, or the insipid hedonism they purvey (we'll get to that later).

The problem is that women's magazines depend on the notion that the major signifier of identity is gender, and this is less and less true. Gender roles just aren't as important in daily life anymore, and the work world is readier to ignore sex than most of us are. Mirabella's demise may be a leading indicator of this new, de-girlified reality of women's lives.

The magazine had its own internal problems -- it was bought and sold and went through several editors in its decade-and-a-half lifespan -- but the fact that its educated and affluent women readers were abandoned may herald further changes down the demographic ladder.

Then there is the psychological impact of the recent changes in our increasingly sex-neutral material world. The predominance of media that produce less tangible artifacts -- from CDs to digital cameras to VCRs to the Web -- also reduces the attention we pay to our necessarily gendered bodies. As more of our lives are conducted using digital rather than analog technologies, the role of touch diminishes, and the sensuality of life with it. This would seem to be both a good thing and a bad thing, and the consequences are still difficult to see.

Gender as the primary identifier was true for only a pretty brief period in human history, maybe 1860 to 1960. Before that, class and religion were equally basic to the way people thought about themselves; in developing countries they still are. In our Bible Belt, obviously, religion never went away as a principal component of identity. I'll bet you that Christian, Muslim or Jew have a greater resonance for many people in this country than male or female do. And while the paraphernalia of upper-class life are available to anyone with the money to buy it, those born into old money still see their class status as a fundamental aspect of their identity.

After the 1960s, age became another major way of identifying yourself, though oddly that's fading now that everyone wants to be, and to some extent thinks of herself as, young. As my 73-year-old mother says, "80, that's old."

What we're left with now is, well, interests. Narrow-casting. You're a 26-year-old female gay Chinese-American webmistress in San Francisco and you mountain-bike to work and collect vintage handbags and rock-climb on weekends. You're a 47-year-old white male lawyer in Manhattan, divorced with twin boys, and you play club tennis and serve on the board of a small theater company and collect Italian mid-century furniture.

Maybe both of these people would enjoy reading some of the same articles and you could probably sell them some of the same products, but is their gender really the key to reaching them?

The recent fate of several men's magazines -- Details, Bikini, Icon Thoughtstyle, POV have all folded -- suggests that it isn't. Young men, it seems, would rather be addressed through their particular interests -- music or extreme sports or business or pictures of naked women or literature -- than as "young men."

In fact, the American men's magazines that have targeted the "laddie" sensibility most strenuously have gone out of business the fastest, while those like GQ and Esquire that address a broader range of interests and pride themselves on the quality of their writing have flourished.

My hunch is that Mirabella's demise foreshadows the end of service-oriented women's magazines. Part of this has to do with big social trends like the rise of women in the workplace, and part of it has to do with the increased use of the Internet.

What Web browsing suggests is that narrow-casting is the best way to reach most people. Tap into the niches out of which they forge a self. Advertisers are starting to get it. But as a quick glance at the current crop of women's mags shows, they don't yet see that gender isn't the best basis for narrow-casting. For one thing, it ain't that narrow. For another, it's not related to enough economic activity. Only a small percentage of purchase decisions are directly gender-linked, mainly clothing and personal-care products. And how many of these can you buy?

I have always felt vaguely insulted by how little women's magazines deemed to sell me. Women's mags assume I never buy furniture or wine or tennis rackets or cars or in fact anything other than clothes and makeup. I guess the premise is that I will page through Tennis magazine if I am in the market for a racket and Gourmet if I want cooking equipment and Wallpaper for lamps. But the Web should have taught them, and us, that reality doesn't line up that way.

One of the corollaries of the fact that we now have everything available to us all of the time is that we are ourselves available to everyone all of the time. You can reach me reading a trade publication online and convince me to look at some sporting equipment that's on sale, or catch me on eBay trolling for art pottery and suggest a new book.

What you are less and less able to do is convince me or, especially, people under 30, to sit still for 400 pages of one thing, whether it's fashion or politics.

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