Catering to Cable Guys

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

A guy walks into a bar--a lesbian bar in Manhattan, in fact. Disguised as an unattractive woman--a look, he admits, that is almost effortless for him to achieve--he sets out to see how many attractive women he can pick up. It's an experiment to determine the relative superficiality of gay females vs. straight males, or something like that. The punch line: well, there isn't one, really. Our social scientist is eventually recognized by a patron as Toby Young, a 35-year-old writer for the men's magazine Gear. Young denies being on assignment ("Not me. My name is Jennifer"), makes an abrupt exit and goes home to recount his experience in a piece titled "I Was a Lesbian for a Night."

It is this element of teenage pranksterism and boorish humor--combined with pictures of women in the sort of bathing suits that would remain on for a millisecond were they ever deployed for actual bathing--that typifies the new breed of men's magazines, among them Gear and Maxim. The latter has become so popular with its twentysomething male audience that it recently spawned an even more vulgar offshoot called Stuff. Stuff endorses products like Belcher soda and flaunts cover lines that leave no doubt about how far the magazine will go to capitalize on feelings of hostility men may possess toward the opposite sex--"A Grizzly Tale: 'I Saw My Wife Get Killed by a Bear.'"

This homage to manhood at its most base has not been confined to the printed page. If lughead chic is the reigning ethos of men's periodicals, it is also spreading its reach further into the culture as an increasingly dominant force on cable TV. The cartoonishly staged wrestling programs airing on USA, TNT and TBS continue to draw millions of young male viewers, occupying a majority of the top spots on lists of cable's most watched shows. Next month the FX channel will launch The Toughman Championship Series, a program that will pit real-life paunchy men against each other in purportedly unscripted boxing matches. Since January, TNN has offered RollerJam, a venue for voluptuous women in Lycra to go at one another on Rollerblades. Dancing women without Rollerblades--or much clothing--are the main attraction on Happy Hour, a relatively innocuous, if boring, hourlong USA variety show that made its debut in April, with Frank Zappa's sons Dweezil and Ahmet as its hosts.

The next few weeks will usher in two new and ostensibly humorous nighttime talk shows: The X Show, premiering on FX this Wednesday (11 p.m. E.T. each weeknight); and The Man Show, a weekly series making its debut on Comedy Central June 16 (10:30 p.m. E.T.). Clearly influenced by the get-a-babe-and-grab-the-largest-brew clubbiness proffered in the men's magazines, the two shows have hosts almost interchangeable in their ordinariness, sets that look like a freshman lounge, and a fair amount of Fred Flintstone-ish whining about the demandingness of women.

With four relatively unknown young comedians and actors as hosts, The X Show will attempt, as the pilot brags, "to filter out all the c___ and just give you the WD-40 that you need." That WD-40 seems to consist of words of wisdom from exotic dancers and a segment called "Gettin' It," which, for example, might instruct men on how to fake being sensitive. Also featured is the regular modeling of men's underclothing by women.

The Man Show, which was snapped up by Comedy Central after ABC passed on it, is sure to generate the most chatter, given its time slot following the channel's successful animated comedy South Park. Instead of words of wisdom from exotic dancers, here we get household hints from adult-film stars, girls jumping on trampolines, and hosts Jimmy Kimmel and Adam Carolla (the show's creators) drinking beer as they make fun of marriage, Oprah and movies starring Bette Midler--subjects lots of awful sitcoms already skewer, and for free.

There are, however, genuinely unnerving moments on The Man Show. One segment has the hosts setting up a table on the boardwalk in Santa Monica, Calif., and getting women to sign a petition to end suffrage. Their point is that women are not smart enough to know the difference between the meaning of the words suffrage and suffering. (It goes without saying that any number of men might have responded exactly as the women did.) But for the most part, The Man Show, like its FX counterpart, is less offensive for its sexism--most of which is just silly--than for its comic unoriginality. After all, Howard Stern has been getting strippers and porn stars to say and do outrageously stupid things for years.

One could try to make the contrarian argument that the ghettoization of crude male programming on cable television represents some triumph for feminism, however minuscule. But what the trend really signals is a feverish effort on the part of cable enterprises to reach a segment of the population not yet served by its own self-identifying slice of not-very-good television entertainment.

Men ages 18 to 34, according to media analysts, have traditionally watched fewer hours of TV than other demographic groups and remain an especially elusive audience today. "These guys have more media options than any other age group in history," notes FX president Peter Liguori, "and their tastes are more eclectic than ever." Advertisers find it hard to tap into this desirable group, says Larry Divney, president of Comedy Central, the No. 1 cable channel among young men. "Advertisers can get them through network sports, etc.," he says, "but then they have to pay for the waste"--marketers' parlance for middle-aged and older viewers.

Despite the demographics and marketing, we are still free to debate why the celebration of men as regressive louts--as opposed to the celebration of them as something else--is cropping up in the popular culture at this particular moment. The FX's Liguori argues that "only recently has it become O.K. for guys to be guys again. Men are attracted to women. Ten years ago, that was harder to articulate in an entertainment product, and in reality." Or perhaps it's that men's magazines and TV shows are simply offering up images of masculinity that stand in high relief to the ones recent pop culture has provided: the wimpy and neurotic males on Friends, the fey brothers Crane on Frasier, the emotionally broken Detective Sipowicz of NYPD Blue, the guys in the movie Swingers, whose nostalgia for Rat Pack swagger never really expresses itself in anything beyond a taste for suits and cocktails.

Of course, it also appears to be true that the new men's magazines and TV programs are preying on a class of young men who may feel disenfranchised because they do not belong to the world of 26-year-old Internet millionaires with whom the news media are so endlessly enthralled. The median income for men 25 to 34 decreased from $27,656 a year in 1989 to $25,996 in 1997, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Moreover, according to the research firm MRI, the number of 18-to-34-year-old men earning $60,000 a year or more (the market-research industry's affluence standard) is growing at a slower rate than it is for adults on the whole.

Backlash author Susan Faludi, who explores the subject of male alienation in her upcoming book Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, puts it this way: "If you don't have a lot of money, you're not a player. That's what the culture has taught young men. It's hard to feel like a grownup man. Maybe there is comfort in believing that it's O.K. to be a boorish kid with a baseball cap turned backwards forever." And that it's O.K., throughout that long boyhood, to keep your room wallpapered with pinups from Baywatch.