“in the military, the media, the bedroom, the boardroom … America is undergoing a sexual meltdown. The New Yorker investigates.”
These words appeared earlier this summer on promotional inserts touting “Love Lessons,” the New Yorker’s current double issue on love, sex and relationships. But readers who seek information about America’s “sexual meltdown” will remain unenlightened. It’s never made clear, for one thing, which sexual meltdown they’re talking about. Is it the one embodied by Paula Jones? Or Lorena Bobbitt? Gary Hart? JFK? FDR? Grover Cleveland? “Love Lessons” is a good read, but it doesn’t blow the lid off an issue that has pretty much simmered uncovered on the national hearth since our first witch bake-off.
Accepting for the sake of argument, however, that there is a below-the-belt crisis unique to America in 1997, what can we say about it? You might safely assume, for starters, that Cynthia Ozick would be thousands of miles away from it — but here she is, in the issue’s first article, a rumination on lovesickness whose chief delight is that one gets to imagine its author playing Frisbee. You might think that it would have something to do with Americans, but you’d be wrong there too, judging by Allison Pearson’s “Letter from London” on the affair of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles. And you might think it’d be a big enough topic to fill up Talk of the Town at least, but it isn’t — unless Victor Navasky’s stock investments are sexy.
Almost all stories, Louis Menand notes in the opening Comment, are love stories. Plenty of articles, he might have added, are love articles, if you interpret the topic broadly enough. So not only does the subject make selecting fiction for this issue a slam-dunk, it allows the New Yorker, after catching arrows over past special issues — that the women issue was tainted by Roseanne, that Black in America wasn’t down with the underclass — to deliver a collection so widely ranging as to have no point at all. Well, maybe one: The new New Yorker is still, if you were wondering, not afraid to talk about sex. (Where the default New Yorker cartoon was once some caption slapped under a businessman talking into an intercom, today it is some caption slapped under a couple sitting up in bed.)
Take as evidence James H. Jones on the secret life of Dr. Alfred Kinsey, the researcher who redefined the sexual norm in America while, his biographer Jones reveals, hightailing it as far outside that norm as a circle of colleagues-cum-group-sex-partners and various improvised scrotal cuffs would allow. It’s a fascinating study, not just for the juicy bits but also for its dissection of the sociopolitical effects of Kinsey’s work and his hidden agendas and biases. It’s the sort of culturally minded New Yorker science piece you wish would last forever or was available in hardcover (as they often are). But it’s also an eye-opening commentary on America’s sexual meltdown of, ah, 1948.
Other articles extend the probe as far as the early ’90s. Julie Salamon covers the exploding (at some point over the past decade) field of prenuptial agreements, and Meghan Daum relates the face-to-face fizzling of a relationship that began with e-mail from a fan. These are hardly cordite-scented bulletins from the trenches. The schemer in me, though, applauds Daum for selling the New Yorker this chestnut, and the magazine proves just square enough to hawk her affecting examination of urban loneliness with the goggling contents tag, “Brave New World Dept.: A young woman’s romance and the dangers of cyberspace.” (Spoiler: She lives to tell the tale.)
In fact, as defined by the advertising department’s promise, the double issue consists of precisely one article, Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s “The Naked Republic.” Gates is one of the biggest surprises of Tina Brown’s editorship — he could have easily phoned in the occasional think piece to lend the magazine academic cred, but he has, almost perversely, contributed some outstanding journalism. His is the Best and Brightest Beat: He brings out his fellow opinion leaders as a viper of the media could not, this time assembling Dick Morris, Jerry Falwell, Susan Estrich, Anita Hill and others on scandal and sexual politics. In Gates’ piece, which calls for the restoration of sexual reticence and privacy, even at the risk of hypocrisy (“but don’t say it as if it’s a bad thing”), you get the first sense of a meltdown that is peculiar to our times, the result of “an intellectual and cultural movement that denounces the very ideal of privacy as an insidious vestige of patriarchy.” You might argue with his conclusions — he’s chasing a lot of genies with a pretty tiny bottle — but you can’t accuse him of not taking the assignment seriously.
Perhaps the real, missed theme of the issue, though, is in the implicit debate between its title and its editorial content: How, if at all, do we separate love and sex? For the answer, look to Roger Angell’s appreciation of “Lolita.” Angell, in an issue about sex titled as an issue about love, reconsiders a book about love misapprehended as one about sex. Nabokov’s accomplishment was that his first-person narrative had what our national sex dialogue lacks in spades: balance. “Forever changing sides and withholding judgment,” Angell writes, Nabokov “has contrived to forestall both our outrage at his nasty hero and our contemptuous dismissal of his trivial, complicit Juliet.” That Humbert Humbert can be both repellent and poignant — and Dolly Haze both victim and vixen — is a rejoinder, decades in advance, to our supposedly more sophisticated era, when everything but Megan’s Law has been enlisted against the release of the movie remake.
Whether their inspiration is lofty or commercial, Tina Brown’s double issues could become a means of distinguishing the magazine from pretenders, as its vaunted 25,000-word features once did. But not if they stick to core-sampling Texas-sized subjects — Love, Race, Women — that might have been chosen from a stack of ninth-grade civics papers. The magazine might learn something from Granta, which makes narrower and more idiosyncratic choices — Ambition, Nazis, The Last Place on Earth — letting the big picture take care of itself. (October’s “Next Issue,” on forecasting the future, seems more promising, and the fiction double issues have done better.) I wonder if “The Cuckoldry Issue,” “Self-Love” — or “Self-Abuse” — might have been more fruitful.
In the end, “Love Lessons” is a better-than-average issue, just not sufficiently better to justify the extra week’s wait for the next one; it’s a summer’s last fling designed to be discarded by Labor Day. I had some laughs — I really did — and the sex was good. I guess I was just looking for a little more of a commitment.
when I heard the footsteps coming toward me in the lobby, I almost dropped my mail: If anyone — if any woman — saw me with the magazine, I’d die.
High Society? Juggs? If only. What I was stowing under a copy of J. Crew and clutching to my chest was Esquire magazine; specifically, the August 1997 10th annual “Women We Love” issue. Buttman I could rationalize, but the garbage I’d have to spew to talk my way out of this one — “I only get it because they let me cash in these spare TWA flight miles and it was either this or Soldier of Fortune. I only read Mark Leyner every month and then I throw it out. I only read it for the articl … I mean, for the pict … I mean, for the, um, the ads.”
This is a lot of fear and trembling, I’ll admit, over a publication with Julianna Margulies on its cover. (But for her hand teasingly straying toward the zipper of her black dress, I could be holding the Delta in-flight magazine.) That a national consumer glossy to which I subscribe publishes “15 Great Photos” of “15 Great Women” in various degrees of submissive repose is, to be sure, no great stride forward for the sexes, but it’s hardly the first step toward mandatory chadors and forced-breeding camps either. So why should I feel like I’m feeding a notch up the chain from snuff literature?
The problem is this we character. See, if I wanted to ogle PG-rated boobs-on-a-stick, I could just as well grab the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue or the Victoria’s Secret catalog. I could watch E! network. And that might make me a pig or a sexual clichi or just a healthy heterosexual man, but I would remain a me — an individual possessed of free will using a product of his choice. But as soon as I pick up this issue, I am no longer alone. I have signed on, like it or not, for a Tanqueray-fueled circle jerk with a hot, steamy demographic group and the cream of the androliterati.
“Women We Love” is first and foremost an advertising vehicle — a “perennial reader favorite” according to the company’s online rate card — one of the many spawn of Rolling Stone’s 100 Favorite Albums of Potential Sport-Utility-Vehicle Buyers dynasty. But in form and title it is the spiritual descendant of the magazine’s Vargas Girl heyday as the fashion magazine that grew balls, that brought the postwar American man the New Journalism and the sexual revolution — all with a swinger’s sensibility and a damned firm wrist.
So it is that with our 15 fabulous women we get 15 (or so) marquee male writers to dollop creme frbiche on our cheesecake. For we, unlike the patrons of certain other men’s books, do not purchase magazines to leer at big gazongas slathered in suntan oil. We purchase magazines to look at big gazongas slathered in the unctuous prose of Ron Rosenbaum. Hence, beside a shot of Patricia Arquette sprawled over a countertop, letting a bent chrome faucet gush erotically across her mouth, we read Rosenbaum’s meditation on the actress’s Jewish-Catholic-Islamic upbringing: “In fact you can look at this photograph … as a kind of spiritual allegory of her partaking from the pure fountain of unmediated spirituality before it is subdivided into sex — I mean sects.” Or you can look at it as a prostrate woman in a tight dress giving a kitchen fixture a blow job. It works on so many levels!
The Women We Love are largely major babes drawn from entertainment, but because we’re men of the world they include sapphists actual (Anne Heche) and honorary (Lucy Lawless). Because we respect women with brains, one is a famous author (Kathryn Harrison, photographed laughing; the bank is not pictured). And because, well, we have to cover our ass, one is even a senior (Katharine Graham) — but let’s not get carried away. The only four women pictured in the appendix “And a Few We Don’t” are Ellen DeGeneres, Mia Farrow, Claire Bloom and Madeleine Albright. The epithet “Woof!” may not actually appear on the page, but we’re evidently welcome to supply it.
And yet this isn’t finally why the issue seems so retrograde. Yes, Esquire could drop babe-a-liciousness a bit further down its judging criteria. Yes, it could do without heebie-jeebie-rife lists like “Women We’d Be Willing to Wait For” (this year’s invites us to count the days until — brr, excuse me — Tara Lipinski turns legal). But none of that damns Esquire any more than an armload of newsstand covers offering teenage girls Six Great New Reasons to Induce Vomiting. What Esquire misses most, in fact, is not the woman of its postwar glory days but the man.
Who, after all, is we? It’s not me, I swear — in fact it’s not any male Esquire reader I know. And it’s not the American homme moyen sensual, whose choices are relegated to a random telephone poll headed “The Women You Love” (he, by the way, remains reassuringly constant in his uncomplicated affection for Pamela Anderson Lee).
But I think I’ve found we, hiding, elsewhere in the issue, in a John Mariani column on dining alone. Mariani notes that “Ernest Hemingway insisted a man can never (eat at a bar) with dignity.” And there is your vanishing Esquire male in a nutshell — the phantom, well-heeled, well-sexed, well-read American man who still gives a rat’s ass whether Papa H. would have approved of his dinner. The category includes perhaps five living American men not directly employed in publishing. And that does not bode well for Esquire, if not as a magazine, then as a cultural institution.
The men’s-magazine we is no mere above-the-masthead pronoun reserved for the occasional editor’s note. It is life and death: to thrive, a lifestyle magazine must offer a life, and its readership must be an organism — one that won’t pinch its gut next month and decide to buy Men’s Health instead. Thus the magazine’s declaration that it is you as you are it as it is me and we are all together, goo goo ga joob.
That a subscriber might instead want simply to catch the David Brock piece and the occasional Michael Chabon story is antithetical to this survival strategy. And the magazine’s too-desperate nudging — “Does that Salma Hayek have a sweet can on her or what? I said, does …” — only underscores how far we’ve grown apart. Esquire wants to mentor us in literature and lust, to teach us to dine like Robert Jordan. Whereas its demographic, increasingly, just wants a good 15-minute recipe for skinless chicken breasts.
Esquire still indisputably publishes some of the finest writing in American magazines. Yet it no longer publishes Esquire writers, because there are none of them anymore — only writers who don’t happen to be in Vanity Fair this month. The “Women We Love” guest-writer lineup underscores that, witty tidbits by Leyner and Roy Blount Jr., bumping up against a Wayne-and-Garthesque droolfest over cover star Margulies by Matthew McConaughey and Richard Linklater (if you enjoy Linklater’s movies, for the love of Jesus never read pages 40-41 of this magazine).
The we that declaims itself too loudly is a relic of the Era of Big — Government, Networks, Magazines — when you got your truth from Walter Cronkite and your lifestyle from Esquire. In the Era of Niche, when we all have our own truth and a boutique journal to go with it, Esquire is scrapping with GQ and even Details over the remnants of an audience dispersed by cable, cigar magazines and the Internet. In this environment, that we is perhaps too poignant to seem truly patriarchal or offensive, even when it’s breathing Canadian Club down Jennifer Lopez’s lithe young neck. It is the pronoun of a lonely man conversing with ghosts.
life is getting harder for the Dewar’s Man. Maybe he’s taking Ross and Rachel’s breakup a little hard. Maybe the long hours at work leave him little quality time with the Rollerblades. Whatever it is, he’s a step slower than he used to be, a shade poorer than he wants to be, and he’ll thank you kids to get your goddamn kickball off his lawn.
You may recall Dewar’s as the Mountain Dew of blended Scotch whiskey, which first set out to bring the ambrosia of the 19th hole to the bungee-cord set in the mid-’90s. The label launched a youth-oriented advertising campaign that positioned its beverage as both a reward and a challenge to a generation on the verge of accepting adult responsibilities — chief among which was to put down that damned Long Island iced tea and drink a civilized drink.
Set in a West Village of the mind shot slightly off plumb in a grainy black and white, the Dewar’s campaign was perhaps most notable for what it did not include: no pointless curricula vitae of second-string jazz musicians; no fox hounds; no Highland vales or hand-tied lures. Its characters are urbanites a few years out of college, still shedding the traces of an embarrassing youth that the captions both lampoon and promise alcoholic deliverance from: “If you don’t think your tastes have changed, look at your high school yearbook picture.”
The men look natty in their first sets of $75 suspenders from Barneys; the women have traded in their Phish jerseys and scrunchies for power bobs and little black cocktail dresses. These may not be Ross and Rachel exactly, but they might work the next cubicle over. They’re Dewar’s Youth, savvy enough to know that, after a night at the Met, one doesn’t offer one’s date a brewski; big enough to respect their elders (in one ad, a cinquegenarian squats, jacket slung over shoulder, at a son or daughter’s loft party, where he appears to be explaining amortization to the Ford agency’s A-list); and wise enough to crave their elders’ respect (in a second, a forbidding-looking older barkeep polishes a highball glass while the caption asks whether you really want to ask this guy to give you a Screaming Orgasm).
I might as well admit that I hated the campaign from the beginning. But mine was a fairly harmless, there-goes-the-neighborhood-bar kind of hatred: I’ve been partial to a Scotch, bourbon or Irish whiskey ever since I ordered an amaretto sour in the presence of a female fellow newspaper intern and was laughed off my bar stool for preferring a “girlie drink,” and I didn’t want to share that pleasure with an army of brokerage trainees who just yesterday were chasing down jello shots with Jdgermeister to the tune of “Space Cowboy.”
Yet the ads worked, and they worked among friends of mine who are plenty media-aware, who have sell-me-I-dare-you chips on their shoulders as big as anyone’s in their demographic. The campaign tapped into a simple but telling anxiety among people my age, which a good friend of mine confided to me as I ordered a Jim Beam — rocks — at my wedding: “Man, I need to find myself a real drink.”
Translated: I will never become an adult, will never figure out how, am not particularly encouraged to (since the white-collar job market has all the real adults it needs, and they need somebody to ring up their truffle oil). And here was Dewar’s wrapping its arm around our shoulders, like Uncle Phil pouring a splash into our Coke at a boring Thanksgiving, winking and asking if we were getting laid yet.
All this was fun for a while. But within the past few months the campaign has taken a turn toward the sour, in a disturbing, post-Oscars-David Letterman kind of way. In a recent magazine ad, for example, a young man stands at the altar with a beaming bride on his arm and mortal dread on his face. “Never say never. Dewar’s,” the caption reads. Another declares, “Becoming a man doesn’t have to involve beating drums or hugging a tree. Dewar’s.”
The kicker is a simple, text-only ad in the April 18 New York Times: “When you realize you’re still a liberal, in a conservative-lower-my-taxes kind of way. Dewar’s.”
Ouch. 1997, apparently, has not been kind to the Dewar’s Man. Oh, he got the job, the wife, the truffle oil, even, but in the process he’s become someone else. And here — like Uncle Phil with a few more drinks in him, pulling us in closer and breathing hotly in our ears about the fucking Vietnamese moving in up the street — the Dewar’s campaign has evidently modulated itself to match.
It is the rare advertising campaign that can make you nostalgic for itself. Heady days of the early Clinton administration! Back then, you had a Dewar’s because you were young but independent; your life was ahead of you; you were ready to sip the bracing amber liquor of adult responsibility and reap the gentle buzz of respect, sex and riches that would accrue. Today you have a Dewar’s because you need a goddamn drink.
This is no criticism. In fact, I can’t wait to see the ads run their natural course:
Close-up on a pair of male hands struggling to button a flannel shirt over a bulging gut: “Face it. You’re too fat to stage dive. Dewar’s.”
Angle shot of a young woman in a little black cocktail dress scurrying into a kitchen: “Her do-me feminism is no match for your shut-your-trap-and-get-my-goddamn-dinner-already masculinity. Dewar’s.”
Man cradles his balding head over a sheaf of papers at a dimly lit dining table: “$250,000 at 8 1/2 percent and three points. Payment due monthly for the next 30 years. Still feel like a wine cooler? Dewar’s.”
The genius of the Dewar’s campaign is that, in an age of air-quoting, it dares to take off its own mask, asserting that whatever creeping sense of reaction it once showed is no longer compelled to creep. It acknowledges the shift from self-satisfied young ironist to punch-drunk old fart, from Sinatra on the jukebox in an Avenue A cigar bar to Sinatra on the hi-fi in your finished-basement wet bar, shoves it in your face — and tells you to buy the friggin’ Scotch anyway.
And I suspect we will. Dewar’s hooked us by pitching a real drink for the real lives we could feel coalescing about us. It’s kept us, the new ads comfortably admit, with the realization that life is plenty real now, and only getting more so.
The Dewar’s Man paid for that refrigerator himself: top of the line, right down to the in-door ice maker. He clinks three perfect cubes into his 10-ounce highball glass, courtesy of the Crate and Barrel bridal registry, pours himself two fingers’ worth, and pauses a second to savor the notes of peat and Celtic mist. When he sips, the welcome, familiar shiver begins somewhere in his esophagus and radiates out toward his shoulder blades and the small of his back. The missus asks if he would fix her a Cosmopolitan. Sunday fucking night already. He takes another sip. He feels, curiously, not even a touch ironic.
