shop til' you drop men

ACP's Shop Til You Drop has a new sibling, or should I say live-in partner, SHOPmen. The magazine is in September 2009's usual Shop Til You Drop. SHOPmen is not a pull-out so I'm assuming men who want to read it will have to do some snooping unless they don't mind getting caught reading a 'women's magazine'.

I unashamedly read men's lifestyle magazines so it naturally follows that I wouldn't have such a problem with this new addition to the market. I do and it's with editor Justine Cullen's letter on page 228. Cullen writes "One thing we didn't want, was for our special men's issue to feel like ... a mag for guys put together by a bunch of girls".

There's nothing wrong with the idea nor the sudoku toilet paper that features at #5 in the list of Top 10 Buys for Men in September; but, in taking stock of what men "need" they've pigeon-holed and typecast male consumers in the worst of ways. Guest editor Sam Elson is a 'surfing, guitar-playing blokes' bloke' who clues up the predominantly female editorial team on what "real men" want. In Cullen's own words they wanted to be "doubly sure" not to make the magazine "overly styled [and] metrosexual", so an additional 6'4 surfer-tradie became their muse. Obvious choice.

This practice of regarding consumption as preeminently feminine and subsequently "making masculine" anything in the same vein for men is a little outmoded. SHOPmen appears to have assumed use one kind of masculinity (surfer-tradie, guitar-playing blokes' bloke) as all-encompassing and an adequate typification of what men will even consider buying. Who knows? I'm interested to know what others think. In any event, I just found something new to do on the toilet so it can't be that bad.