It is a world where sports games and beard grooming play significant and active roles, a world where the fastest cars, latest fashion gadgets and the most welcomed food never be unnoticed. Who exactly hold the power of such particular realm that you ask? It should be the ever dashing species which we called, men.
Men’s magazines today
Similar to women magazines, men’s magazine also affects male identity to a great extent. Wether it’s sports or fashion, food or gadgets, men’s magazine fully demonstrates what the majority of men have ultra interest in that they just can’t seem to get enough of.
According to the research done by Statista in 2019, which presents the monthly reach of 10 selected UK male magazine from October 2017 to September 2018 (in 1,000 individuals).
It is obvious that Auto Express (a leading magazine for automobile related information introduced in 1988) has the greatest reach with roughly 2 million individual readers monthly, where GQ had only a monthly reach of roughly 1.2 million individuals. Still, GQ ranks the third just after Auto Express and BBC Top Gear (a magazine designed for car enthusiasts introduced in 1993), and famously known for the fashion bible for men in the modern society.
Masculinity
Masculinity as properly defined as a set of behaviors, attributes associated with natural-born men. Traits traditionally viewed as masculine includes courage, strength, independence and violence in some way, and examples could be James Bond, Sean Connery and Conan the Barbarian.
The concept of masculinity are frequently mentioned in men’s magazines, such as GQ and Men’s Health. And it indicates the meaning of being a real man, which is physically strong and heathy, stoic and unemotional, does’t show weakness or ask for help or expose vulnerability.
Research shows that these stereotypes about masculinity can have destructive consequences. One example could be a lower possibility of men seeking mental health treatment than women. And data represents that men are more likely to commit violent crimes that women reported in the United States each year. There are downstream outcomes of not having a healthy way to let out emotions and receive some understandings.
“If you bottled up all the time, it’s like Whac-a-Mole, it will pop up behaviorally in another way.”
Dr. Powell
Challenge masculinity
While the newly launched publication “Pansy” set an reversed trend of traditional masculinity. In general, pink blush, pearl earrings and crown princess headdress are not what readers normally expected in a men’s magazine, but that’s exactly the point of “Pansy”. It’s playful yet powerful and it delivers a message of a fresh masculinity, one that is not bound up to typical social norms.
Actually, there are an increasing number of people trying to find their true identities rather than wearing “a mask of masculinity”. As Wade Davis, a professional football player once stated in a TED talk in 2016, “As little boys, we learned that being labeled as tough grants you a certain type of social capital”. He also confessed later about his pain by hiding his identity and always performing masculinity and manhood.
Media Era 