BOOZE, BABES, AND BALLS Making Sense of Men's Magazines. By Peter Jackson, Nick Stevenson, and Kate Brooks. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001. Reviewed by Joanna L. Di Mattia British style magazines in the 1980s, caught up in that decade's consumer ethos, gave birth to the 'new man' – that softer, more caring, more style-conscious and self-conscious man, who smiled seductively to male and female readers alike from the covers of such style bibles as Esquire and GQ. Aimed at single men-about-town with the disposable incomes necessary for intensive consumption (the 'new man' dressed for success), these magazines catered to and created a new consumer market that has continued to grow – the men's lifestyle magazine – and to rival its female counterparts. In the 1990s, as part of a backlash toward these images and the wider cultural idealisation of the 'soft' man and the feminising of male culture, a new generation of men's lifestyle magazines emerged, commodifying the lifestyle of the 'new lad' – that infantile, unpretentious and loutish bad boy of British masculinity, epitomised by pop band Oasis, by football hooligans, and by men tired of feeling guilt for their more primal urges. Magazines like Loaded, FHM and Maxim, considered no better than 'soft-porn' by their detractors, and an honest and 'natural' manly pleasure by their regular customers, indicate both the re-visioning of male gender roles typical of many popular culture products of recent years, and a disturbing return to comfort in traditionally 'macho' pursuits, best explained here as drinking to excess, sexually objectifying women, and competitive sports. Making Sense of Men's Magazines provides a substantial, although problematic analysis of the impact of the rise in popularity of men's lifestyle magazines in the 1990s. The study is contextualised within a growing anxiety about the shifts in the meaning of contemporary models of masculinity, and asks what the recent dramatic growth of the men's magazine market signifies in terms of men's changing identities and gender relations. The text combines a sociological perspective – drawing material and conclusions from a number of interviews conducted with male focus group participants of various ethnicities, generations, and sexualities, and also one all-female group – with a cultural analysis of the tools that men employ to 'make sense' of the images and narratives of masculinity offered by these magazines. These magazines need to be described to those unaware of their content and concerns. The men's lifestyle magazines of the 1990s address a heterosexual readership and reinvent white male heterosexuality, celebrating it without critiquing it. They feature a sense of humour that makes use of sexism, racism, and homophobia to reinforce hegemonic models of masculinity. The magazines are blatantly politically incorrect and feature endless pictures of semi-naked women, as well as sex tips and advice that position men as sexual predators and women as sexual objects to be mastered, and paeans to drunkenness and vulgarity. By way of example, Jackson, Stevenson and Brooks explain that the most downmarket of the magazines, Loaded, embraces 'an idealistic, nostalgic notion of the good old days of white, working-class (male) Britishness' (37). Locating themselves in the field of previous research on masculinity and consumption – namely, Frank Mort's Cultures of Consumption (1996), Sean Nixon's Hard Looks (1996), and Tim Edwards' Men in the Mirror (1997) – the authors of this work differentiate Making Sense through its exclusive focus on the emergence in the 1990s of more 'laddish' forms of masculinity and their associated commercial cultures. Rightly noting that work on men's magazines lacks the scope and depth of feminist work on women's magazines, the authors explain that: As with previous feminist research on women's magazines, there is also a characteristic emphasis on visual and textual representations of masculinity rather than an empirical engagement with different readings of these changing representations. (12) Interestingly, for a study of visual representations, not one visual/photographic example is included within the text. A study like this does, however, significantly open up a space for articulating the relationship between masculinity and consumer culture, and the relatively new concept of men as consumers. Historically, as feminism has shown, consumers were constructed as female – men as society's active producers, women its passive consumers. Of course, this led to the notion of mass culture as a debased and worthless (feminine) pursuit. In The Sex of Things, Victoria de Grazia explains that 'feminist thinkers have recognized the importance of consumption to the question of what processes transform a female into a women' (7). Similarly, Jackson, Stevenson and Brooks acknowledge the potential liberation from hegemonic masculine roles and identities contained within the pages of 'lad' mags like Loaded, and the ways in which the consumption of these images and narratives may transform a male into a man. Men's lifestyle magazines are a unique phenomenon, self-consciously targeting men, as Tim Edwards has noted, 'as consumers of magazines designed to interest men if not necessarily to be about men' (Men in the Mirror 72). The authors conceptualise masculinity 'as a discursive construction that assumes different forms in different places and at different times' (12). That is, masculinity like femininity shifts its meanings and forms in response to wider social and cultural changes. Masculinity is a site that is always contested and multiple, and today, it would seem, always fuelled by anxiety. Like the work of Judith Butler, this study also understands gender as both a performative and socially policed repeated act. Making Sense is divided into four key sections. The study works best when it addresses the responses of the focus groups participants to the content of the magazines themselves and how they relate this content to their lives. The authors interpret the interview material through the idea of 'men's talk'. This 'men's talk' – 'the more mundane level of magazine consumption' (111) – centres on the discourses (how they discuss them) and the dispositions (from where they draw their meaning) that men use to 'make sense' of the magazines. As is explained in the introduction: Put simply, we aim to understand the range of discourses on which different individuals and groups of men draw in making sense of the magazines ¼ and the different kinds of investments that they have in these discourses, embracing them or rejecting them for example. (13-14) The authors conclude that the men surveyed (of which only a small percentage were readers of these magazines) do not take the content of the magazines seriously, and in fact attach the label of 'sad loser' to those that do. The idea of an 'intended reading' of the magazines is rejected in favour of the reader as the primary maker of the text's meaning, 'making sense' of it from the particular social structures at his disposal and the cultural positions he occupies. The authors call this process of production and consumption the 'circuit of magazine culture' (4). Further, their interviews show that there is no ideological intent attached to the process of reading men's lifestyle magazines, indicated by the fact that most men only 'flick' through the pages (suggesting to this reader that the images of scantily-clad women dominates the 'reading' experience and the pleasure found in it). Certain ideas that structure the propositions throughout, however, contain some difficulties from a feminist point-of-view, and warrant further attention here. Making Sense contends, quite insecurely, that these magazines function to diffuse gender anxiety and consequently provide men with 'constructed certitude' about their manhood (a concept they borrow from Ulrich Beck's Risk Society, 1992). Here, the authors argue 'that the magazines provide men with a kind of conceptual map for navigating safely through their contemporary gender anxieties, whether in relation to their health, their careers, their sexual relationships or their place in 'consumer culture' more generally' (14). Further: While, in some readings, the magazines may be linked to the defensive persistence of heterosexual norms, they can also be read more ambivalently as embodying a number of fantasies about masculine behaviour and performance that continue to have a deep cultural purchase. For many of our focus groups participants, we have argued, the magazines offer a form of constructed certitude, providing a sense of reassurance amid all of men's contemporary uncertainties and anxieties. (146) Yes, ambivalence opens up the possibility of new and potentially revised models of masculinity. Yes, ambivalent representations highlight the nature of gender as a greatly contested space. It is my opinion that these two ideas – constructed certitude and ambivalent reading – are in fact at odds within this work. A comfort zone from anxiety is found in fantasies about traditional masculine pursuits, male bonding, and sexually objectifying women; the so-called ambivalent images of men do not offer multiple possibilities but very specific ideas and guidelines about male behaviour and particularly heterosexual relations. Is the problem the 'type' of certain male self this ambivalence affords? Further, I cannot agree with the idea put forward by the authors that these magazines, by virtue of their ambiguous constructions, 'signify the potential for new forms of masculinity to emerge even as the magazines are simultaneously reinscribing older and more repressive forms of masculinity' (23). This study must be praised for embracing more open and fluid definitions of masculinity; its uncritical engagement with the particular tropes of masculinity celebrated and promoted in these magazines is, however, more difficult to reconcile. Jackson, Stevenson and Brooks offer an uncritical stance toward masculinity's confrontational relationship with femininity and women in these magazines. They reject the moralistic tone of 'outrage' and 'blanket condemnation' that they associate with feminism. A barrier is erected by the excessively ironic tone that many of these magazines make use of, making a feminist, political analysis a difficult one. This irony, they conclude, ultimately protects the magazines from a political reading. The authors argue that 'the ironic content of the magazines allows men to experience many of the powerful fantasies that are traditionally associated with masculinity' and that 'to offer a political reading of the magazines could be perceived as a form of symbolic violence, seeking to silence some of the more informal pleasures of the text' (8, 38). To offer a political critique, therefore, is to 'miss the point' and not get the joke. Feminism, they warn, may again wear the charge of being humourless if it were to engage in a political critique of these magazines; they seem concerned that any critique of the masculine models in these magazines will serve to stabilise them in actuality, when nothing could be further from likelihood. Unpacking masculinity exposes its contradictions, displaces its hegemony – engaging with the implications of these particular models of masculinity and femininity (laddish men and sexualised women) resonates significantly in the struggle to reconstruct gender relations as a whole. The authors of this work 'apologise' for the lack of feminist perspective - and taking into account the predominantly heterosexist subject matter of most of the magazines discussed, this apology is necessary. It seems curious to this reviewer that a sociological study of men's lifestyle magazines would choose not to incorporate such a critical stance. These magazines are a cultural product that relies on the repetition of devalued and degrading models of femininity. If male anxiety is diffused at all in these magazines, it is not through the models of masculinity on offer, but in the way they return the female body to a passive, silent, sexualised space to be filled and controlled. The magazines attempt to resolve male anxieties by diffusing them all over the naked female body. Masculinity is reasserted at the expense of feminism and gender equality. Further, Making Sense repeatedly asserts that a backlash against feminism begun in many popular cultural products in the 1980s plays no part in the production and consumption of these magazines. While they concede that 'new lad' culture is based upon a fear of the feminine (86), the authors argue that the sociological context of these magazines is more complex than backlash discourse implies: In sociological terms the magazines can be made sense of by identifying the social and cultural contradictions that they are trying to handle, caught between an awareness that old-style patriarchal relations are crumbling and the desire to reinscribe power relations between different genders and sexualities. (79) But these social and cultural contradictions come from a specific source, and the upheavals to the male role are an effect of feminism's challenges to the social order and the private realm of gender relations. If men are feeling anxious about who they are and what they should be doing and consuming, they are anxious in part because of the constant rewriting of the gender order feminism generates. And, therefore, it would seem possible that the macho, hyper-masculine scripts permeating these magazines are part of a backlash that seeks to reinvigorate less ineffective and problematic (from the male viewpoint) ways of being a man. These men's lifestyle magazines must receive further attention, not only in terms of how they damage feminist struggles for equality but, importantly, for the ways in which this representational dynamic returns masculinity and its own potential revolution to pre-feminist days. Making Sense of Men's Magazines is aware of these issues, but places them on the periphery of its analysis, and is diminished by this absence. Joanna Di Mattia is currently immersed in a Ph.D, researching the shift toward anxious models of masculinity in the contemporary American cinema, in the Centre for Women's Studies and Gender Research, Monash University.