In a truly amazing expression of honesty, Alex Bilmes, who edits Esquire UK, used the opportunity he was given as a speaker at a conference to explain how low his estimation of his readers are:

“The women we feature in the magazine are ornamental,” he said, speaking on a panel at the Advertising Week Europe conference in London on Tuesday. “I could lie to you if you want and say we are interested in their brains as well. We are not. They are objectified.” Bilmes, speaking on a panel hosted by Cosmopolitan editor Louise Court about feminism in the media and advertising, added that men “see women in 3D” in many different roles in life “but at certain times we like to see them sexy”. “[Esquire] provide pictures of girls in the same way we provide pictures of cool cars,” he said. “It is ornamental. Women’s magazines do the same thing.”

That’s a pretty sad set of ambitions for a magazine that published Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold.” And it’s a reminder for all that magazines like Esquire and GQ purport to serve sophisticated men, they’ve been pulled down by the lad-mag market rather than rising above it.

Whenever a contemporary men’s magazine, or someone employed by one, does something particularly stupid, I’m always reminded of this terrific piece Jon Zobenica wrote for The Atlantic in 2007 called “Are We Not Men?” which is all about the decline of the form. In it, he particularly cites the Playboy Advisor as an example of the kind of real talk that made that magazine refreshing—in fact, Zobenica argues, “I developed a respect toward women in part by reading Playboy as a young male.” He wrote:

In the October 1973 Advisor, a man on the verge of marrying a small-breasted woman wonders if he can honestly go ahead with the nuptials, given his fears of desiring more-ample women. To which he gets, in part, this response:

It’s not a question of honesty; it’s a matter of maturity—yours, not hers. A marriage is more than the sum of its anatomical parts; success depends on qualities of love, respect and compatibility.

In the February 1976 Advisor, a woman writes in that her boyfriend, who’s miffed that he can’t bring her to orgasm (though he claims he’s successfully done so with every other lover), has tried to pressure her into a threesome with another woman as a remedy. The response reads in total:

Your partner has come up with a rather novel excuse for experimenting with a third party (necessity is the pimp of invention or the mother of deviation), but we doubt that a ménage à trois would be the answer to your problem. While a triangle might show him by direct comparison that all women are different, it might also double his failure rather than his fun. Since you are more familiar with your response than he is, do what you can to increase your pleasure. Patience is not something that can be measured or corrected with a stop watch: By making orgasm the goal of your lovemaking, you may have changed the event into an endurance contest with no winners. Love for the moment, not the finish. Sex is a mystery, but when it works, it reminds us of what Raymond Chandler said: The ideal mystery is one you would read if the end was missing.

Thirty years on, in March 2006, Playboy was still at it, offering this response to a writer who defended (on grounds of “intimacy or commitment issues”) another man’s reluctance to label his partner a girlfriend:

You may be correct about his issues, but he should work them out on his own time rather than wasting hers. Labels may be confining, but after three months “girlfriend” threatens no man.

Now, he’s writing about the content rather than the pictures. But the fantasy, Zobenica argued, was in part about what you got to do with that pretty girl, and it didn’t involve driving her like a car. “When, at nineteen, and living in my very first apartment, I cleared out half my medicine cabinet and half my closet, and gave them over to the California blonde who’d just moved in with me, it felt as true to the life I’d seen and imagined as my red Camaro and my Brutini Le Sport shoes. This was no capitulation; this was part and parcel of the dream,” he wrote. “This was, it seemed to me, exactly what Playboy had espoused: finding a nifty chick and sharing the good life with her.”

We can debate the relative merits of cheesecake, and whether it actually counts as some sort of feminist appreciation for female forms. But I’m not going to assign Blimes credit for featuring women in their forties, or women of different races in his pictorials—and yes, that’s something he actually asked for. Claiming you’re able to make a broad range of women into fetish objects is decidedly less ambitious than aiming to make your readers see the full potential of a woman, and of themselves in a relationship with her.

This post discusses plot points from the April 20 episode of The Americans.

“None of the agencies are working to share the information,” Phillip in his guise as Clark tells Martha in last night’s episode of The Americans. “Each one wants to be the hero.” His weary description of bureaucratic breakdown and self-interest is a perfect framework for the episode. Interagency communications troubles have created the problem that Elizabeth and Phillip have to solve tonight, stopping a KGB agent who isn’t available to have his orders countermanded. Stan and Nina’s relationship is first enabled by the needs of one bureaucracy, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and then complicated by the workings of another, the Rezedentia. And Elizabeth and Phillip, after a thawing in their marital Cold War, are forced to reckon with the extent to which their relationship is a bureaucratic arrangement rather than an organic, living thing—and to confront the possibility that they may need to engage the legal bureaucracy to dissolve their union.

“We have to stop an assassin,” Elizabeth says when she explains their assignment. “They need to straighten things out at the Center. Ordering hits, then countermanding them?” Phillip asks her in the understatement of the year. Part of his reaction is to the Center’s apparent incompetence—how do you hire an assassin and not retain the ability to stay in touch with that person? And part of it is that the organization is acting emotionally rather than rationally, making one decision and then changing its mind. It’s hard to devote your life to fulfilling the missions you’re given if they can alter at a moment’s notice, forcing you to be as dedicated to one goal at one moment as you were to its antithesis a moment before.

And the KGB’s display of incompetence is juxtaposed with the FBI’s reaction after three of its agents are murdered by the explosives expert Phillip and Elizabeth could shoot, but not neutralize, given his penchant for time bombs. Stan and his colleagues are personally shattered by the news, and how could they not be? Working for a large bureaucracy doesn’t actually strip the component employees of that organization of their humanity or capacity to react. But they don’t allow their feelings to dramatically shift their mission or operational playbook. You don’t go to war over the loss of three men, however badly you might feel about their deaths in your personal capacity as a functional human. If the Soviet Union and the United States are locked together by the idea of Mutually Assured Destruction, a concept that’s more promise than threat, the United States just demonstrated a command and control that could help it avoid self-destruction.
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The bridge is yours.

-I would totally watch a block of shows about middle-aged comedians.

-Why the 21 Jump Street adaptation worked.

-How Playboy pitched itself to advertisers back in the day.

-It’s possible to condemn Mike Daisey’s lies and believe that Apple—and all electronics and consumer goods companies—can do better.

-How does a robot become a real boy?

When it comes to the reasons men’s magazines publish much more ambitious journalism than women’s, Ta-Nehisi suggests that it’s because the expectations of how to be a classy man or a classy lady differ:

The “gentleman” is expected to know about politics and the world, hence his “journal” would cover such matters. The cult of Ladyhood includes no such requirement, indeed in many cases it considers politics impolite. The result is that a Ladies Magazine would not be particularly likely to run a hard-hitting profile of, say, Sarah Palin or Michelle Bachman. It just isn’t very lady-like.

His outline of that dichotomy (which I think is more about gender roles than class, which he suggests) reminded me of this piece Jon Zobenica wrote for The Atlantic in 2007 about the aspirations he took away from Playboy:

The typical Playboy guy — arm candy, sports car, Canadian Club, pinkie ring — may or may not have been an exponent of marriage (I knew some who were), and certainly his getup wasn’t complete without a cool splash of patriarchalism, but it’s just as certain that girlfriend didn’t threaten him. So when, at nineteen, and living in my very first apartment, I cleared out half my medicine cabinet and half my closet, and gave them over to the California blonde who’d just moved in with me, it felt as true to the life I’d seen and imagined as my red Camaro and my Brutini Le Sport shoes. This was no capitulation; this was part and parcel of the dream. She and I would get dressed up (in ensembles no less silly in hindsight) and go to classy restaurants. Or we’d cook in and watch a movie, and drink wine and grown-up cocktails. We went to clubs on Sunset, hit the slopes in northern Arizona, caught a striptease act in the French Quarter with another couple, and spent a night among friends hot-tubbing and sipping daiquiris in the Santa Cruz Mountains after a day of crabbing near Half Moon Bay. This was, it seemed to me, exactly what Playboy had espoused: finding a nifty chick and sharing the good life with her. Not that it was all good, of course (the Advisor had prepared me for that, too). We had our fights, fretted about school and work, nursed each other with less and less sympathy through various hangovers, moved into separate places, lived together again, got furious, got bored, and after five-plus years and a long, cold decline, gave it up. At the age of twenty-five, I felt like I’d been divorced but never married.

There seems to be an emotional imbalance between men’s magazines and women’s magazines and how each tries to prepare its readers to satisfy the other’s readers. Is an Esquire man really looking for a Cosmopolitan woman — and vice versa? Sugar and spice and everything nice may be what little girls are made of, but nifty chicks seem to be allowed a good deal more complexity and sophistication.