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R E C E N T L Y

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(01/05/99)

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BROWSE THE
UNDER THE COVERS
ARCHIVE

MAGAZINE RACKS | PAGE 1, 2
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Winter is a conservative season. You hanker for the same Christmas turkey or Sunday pot roast; you spend the same 18 hours on the couch Super Sunday; and you curl up with the same familiar ta-tas on the cover of your waistcoats 'n' whiskey guide. The men's magazines, in other words, are basically serving visual comfort food. And these are old-fashioned meatloaves indeed, looking all the more dated when the rest of the industry has long since moved beyond the two-squeezed-together-glands template that has more or less been the default since the rise of mammals. We now have, for instance, Boobs-on-a-Plate, which came strongly into vogue last year (model leans forward, breasts lie supported by a plane or the front of her dress like fresh mozzarellas); the Boob Runway (breasts taped to the inside of the model's top, exposing what is not really cleavage but really more like a flesh landing strip); the Five-Finger Brassiere (breasts cupped by either the model's or a third party's hands); even PoMo-Nostalgia Boobs (Anderson, again, copping a Fawcett pose on the cover of Details last fall).

Indeed, more interesting than the subtle-as-a-mousetrap baits of men's magazines are the myriad uses of cover cleavage in other magazine genres. The great mystery of the newsstand, to the male reader, is that women's magazines make men look like pikers, using caverns and canyons of flesh to communicate class and demographic differences with a vocabulary nuanced enough to stump the 17th century French court. For Cosmopolitan, cleavage has long symbolized its trademark full-bore sexuality, and the January cover is a textbook example: This is cleavage with shadows inside it, cleavage with an X, Y and Z axis, cleavage so deep you can practically read the tag on the back of the model's dress. Whereas Mirabella (January), which aspires to be the women's mags' intellectual leader (sic), is so good-girl that it puts Angelina Jolie in a turtleneck. Meanwhile, issue after issue of fashion glossy W melds the two approaches -- relatively small-breasted models exposed in Boob-Runway mode down to the navel -- to connote classy edginess. Shoshanna Lonstein's noble efforts aside, we still haven't shed our Audrey Hepburn vs. Marilyn Monroe complex: Full sweater equals naughty girl.

The motif has been picked up, with a twist, by women's sports and fitness publications; Self, Shape and the like (with the notable exception, so far, of the outstanding recent startup Women Outside) so aggressively push Lycra-bolstered pontoonage you wonder if they cover any exercise below the ribcage. On the Jan./Feb. Condé Nast Women's Sports & Fitness, Krista Cassidy heavingly "(takes) time out from snowboarding to soak up some southern exposure" in the balmy waters of Mexico. So why not just show her, oh, I don't know, snowboarding? Because nothing says, "I may be athletic but I'm still a heterosexual woman" like cleavage! You can shoot skeet, these covers tell us, and fry it up in a pan; you can ride a mountain bike and still land yourself a man. Just mind you don't knock yourself unconscious with those things, hon.

And what's breast meat for the goose has quickly been ganderized by the decade's hottest magazine genre. That's right: Male cleavage is where it's at in men's fitness, further complicating the sexual confusion of the booming pecs-and-sex journals, whose black-and-white models have developed such gigantic and cleft torsos, flexed and thrust out on each month's cover, as to rival the lad mags' hood ornaments -- and have reaped a sizable cut of the traditional men's audience for it.

In the shadow of these buff cover stars, Pam Anderson's robotically squeezed bounty is a tumbleweed-strewn valley of death. With their mammary stock-in-trade replicated across the newsstand, men's magazines have no way to make breasts breastier, and less of a clue than ever how to grab the attention of a male readership that just wants to move up a cup size. That may be the reason, in fact, that below-the-waist peekaboos are starting to steal the breast's thunder: recall Gear's oh-so-classy layout of Peta Wilson on the can last year; notice GQ's Klum shimmying the straps of her slight bikini bottom well below her waistline. Cleavage may never go out of fashion, but as these masculinity bibles remind us, it helps to accessorize. For men's magazine editors, standing desperate atop their too-often-summitted peaks, there may be nowhere to go but down.
SALON | Jan. 19, 1999

James Poniewozik's Under the Covers column appears in Media Circus every Tuesday.