Tuesday, October 24

Quality vs Quantity

Men are such primal creatures. Or maybe the word is shallow. Or maybe we just think with parts of our body other than our brains. This is is what the majority of men's magazines would have us believe.

Who cares about the quality of the magazine. Just make sure there is quantity and you have the recipe for success. Quantity for mens mags seems to mean big boobs and lots of them.

As a magaholic, I find this quite disappointing. There is much to be said for style, class and magic when it comes to magazines. I am not being all snobish and talking about the niche and art-like publications that I normally go on about, but even with your main stream stock standard titles, some stand out from the others.

Take these two mags. GQ Style is almost 3 times the price of Loaded. The latter has quantity in quantities. GQ appeals to our desire for style rather than drooling. What I have never understood is why those of us out there who buy the latter type of magazine don't simply buy Hustler, have a good wank and be done with it.

We have sold much more GQ Style at mag nation than Loaded, despite the price point. Kind of restores my faith in the male gender. Quality is important.

But the cynic in me says we are buying GQ Style so we can learn a thing or two and eventually get laid anyway. Perhaps quality is our guise for ending up with quality. Taking this argument further, men would buy business magazines to help them get rich so they can impress women and eventually, end up with someone like Loaded girl. All way too confusing. Maybe I should just stick to music mags...

1 comment:

lauren said...

Hey Mag man! I'm digging this blog! i popped into the store on saturday, but you weren't there to say hey to - but i did see your sign about this blog! so here we are.

i'm glad you broached the subject of 'men's mags' i submitted a theory a while back (in the high quality arena of a myspace blog) that tacky mags like Loaded, Zoo, Picture, etc, were the men's equivalent of NW, Who and Famous. It's all about fantasy really.. but now i have to think of it all in terms of Quality vs Quanity! .... i'm liking it!