T A B L E_.T A L K

Remnick or Brown: Who do ya love? Critique the New Yorker's evolution in Table Talk's Media area

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R E C E N T L Y

Of Fallowships, Flynt, Republican phone sex and demon goddesses of love
By Susan Lehman
(01/14/99)

The century of the trial
By James Poniewozik
Clinton's Senate trial is just the latest episode in the long-running series of American Solomania
(01/12/99)

"Firing Line" ceases fire
By Susan Lehman
Plus: U.S. News goes on a hiring spree and Brill bashing is on the rise
(01/07/99)

Let the culture war rage
By Steve Erickson
It's time for America to decide what its true values are
(01/06/99)

The world is ending -- let's get to know our neighbors!
By James Poniewozik
As Y2K approaches, the Utne Reader advocates the book group to end all book groups
(01/05/99)

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BROWSE THE
UNDER THE COVERS
ARCHIVE

magazine racks
ESQUIRE, COSMO, SELF AND MEN'S HEALTH SHOW US THEIR TITS

BY JAMES PONIEWOZIK
So here's my theory. In a certain corner office at Esquire magazine, if you swivel the complimentary Propecia note pad on the leather desk set, a bookcase slides over, revealing a secret door. Behind that door is a winding passageway, with crackly pinups of Farrah Fawcett and Muhammad Ali taped to the walls. And the passageway leads to a tiny, humid room with leaky steam pipes and a bare light bulb swinging from a cord and a glass fire box on the wall, bearing an inscription that reads something like this: IF CIRCULATION DROPS BELOW X, BREAK GLASS.

It's just a theory. But if I'm right, that little glass panel is now shattered, the box emptied and the contents -- a cover of Pamela Anderson squeezing her bosoms together, the headline "Breasts!" and a salute to "The Triumph of Cleavage Culture" -- are available today for purchase on your newsstand. It is at least the best explanation I can come up with for this seeming self-parody, save perhaps to eradicate memory of the much-guffawed-over "Cocktail Culture" cover of 1997 (proving that, pace the old journalistic maxim, it no longer takes three examples to make a trend, just two Cs). Welcome to Cleavage Culture; your D-cup is ready.

Esquire is either America's worst great magazine or its best bad magazine, swinging harder, whiffing more grandly and occasionally connecting more dramatically than its peers. And the funny thing is, for several months running, Esquire's covers have been noteworthy and risk-taking for precisely the opposite reason of the bodacious current one. Bravely for a men's magazine, they featured unsexy men. Stack 'em up: January -- a bloodied Jerry Springer. December -- an ashen Bill Murray. November -- a creepy Fred Rogers. October -- a cracked bald head on the "What Did You Do After the Crash, Daddy?" cover. Despite its aging-Lothario rep, Esquire was looking far edgier than competitors like GQ, fronted by deadly dull objets of perfection month after month, or Details with its Tiger Beat for grown-ups pinups. It's as if Pam's mighty rack erupted unconsciously in furious reaction, an angry blast of magma and silicone heaved up by the hornier angels of Esquire's nature.

There is an editorial conceit justifying Esquire's package. Breasts, you see, are uniquely visible in our culture today ("Everywhere you look: tits"). In movies, on television, in magazines -- sometimes two to a customer! As you can imagine, this would be a difficult proposition to prove at any juncture in history, but Mim Udovitch -- an excellent writer who deserves the fat check just for biting her lip for this exercise -- provides the whatever the female equivalent of a beard is for the issue with an essay tracing the American breast from the falsies of the '50s ("an all-around culture of concealment that necessitated a breast that repressed and returned simultaneously") to the Wonderbras of today ("a falsie culture"). Comedian Sarah Silverman reveals that she has 'em; Thomas Kelly counters that men like 'em.

Whatever its philosophical pretensions, the Cleavage Culture issue just happens to come along at the heart of winter, when men's magazines compete to heat up their readership with V-for-Valentine's Day décolletage. And it's a rare month indeed when Maxim finds itself out-cleft: With Esquire boasting Anderson, with GQ sporting CAD-designed Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue cover girl Heidi Klum and with Gear's Model Issue hosting Adriana Sklenarikova, eyes wide and blank, lips parted and hair in a bedroom muss like a just-deployed sex toy, Maxim inexplicably has Bridget Fonda -- a lovely lady who notoriously needed padding to fill out her bikini top in "Jackie Brown" -- to tout its "Lingerie Runway" feature (and even there it's aced by Details, which dedicates its entire issue to lingerie).

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