It’s Time to Bring Back the Men’s Magazine

Hear me out: reading, but for guys

Photo by Rainier Ridao on Unsplash

A few months ago, I found myself in a hip Brooklyn bookstore. I was on vacation and needed a book to read, and I decided I wanted a new novel written by a man. The whole “is the publishing industry now dominated by women?” debate was relatively fresh at the time, and I wanted to make a gesture of solidarity, half as a joke — though it became less of a joke when I realized that I could barely find any contemporary non-genre fiction with a male author¹. Where were all the fellas?

Before anyone can accuse me of male fragility, I should clarify that I was not upset by this absence of literary masculinity. I didn’t cultivate resentments in my heart against this particular bookstore or the publishing world in general. I simply noticed, not for the first time, that in the realm of elite culture, and in particular the world of the written word, men have been taken down a peg.

Traditionally masculine interests and the perspectives of men have pretty much fallen off the page. Feature-length sportswriting is pretty much dead at this point, for example, replaced by podcasts and Barstool Sports. Writing about heterosexual relationships is dominated by women, to the point where you can have a whole discourse about “heteropessimism,” the idea that it sucks to date men, without really hearing from men themselves. Women got “hot girl summer” and “brat summer,” they get trends like the “clean girl aesthetic,” while men are just sort of lumping around, maybe hoping the clean girls or whatever will date them, maybe gaming, maybe “gooning,” probably gambling on their phones, who cares? Even caring about men and what goes on inside them seems somewhat cringey.

But the plight of men is now in the discourse thanks to the recent viral Jacob Savage essay in Compact, rather grandiosely titled “The Lost Generation.” The thesis is that in the past decade, employers in certain elite industries — media, TV writing, universities — attempted to diversify their workforces while retaining senior leaderships made up largely of older white men. The only way to do that was by focusing on hiring women and people of color for entry-level positions. As a result, DEI-driven hiring practices made it much harder to break into these fields if you were a white millennial man. The statistics Savage pulls out throughout the piece are revealing:

In 2011… white men were 48 percent of lower-level TV writers; by 2024, they accounted for just 11.9 percent. The Atlantic’s editorial staff went from 53 percent male and 89 percent white in 2013 to 36 percent male and 66 percent white in 2024. White men fell from 39 percent of tenure-track positions in the humanities at Harvard in 2014 to 18 percent in 2023.

Savage focuses on white men, but at least in the media industry, you could tell a story about men of all races receding from some workplaces. Diversity reports cited by Savage show that in 2021, new hires at Conde Nast in 2021 were 75 percent women²; at BuzzFeed, 69 percent were women.

This does not represent any kind of immiseration of men. As lefty blogger Matt Bruenig has pointed out in a response to the Compact piece, white men in their 30s are still disproportionately likely to both be high earners and to be employed in the arts, according to U.S. Census data. Bruenig writes, “The institutions Savage discusses in his piece employ approximately 0% of the US population.” DEI efforts amounted to “a lot of empty talk [and] no real significant change,” Bruenig concludes.

This implication that DEI actually didn’t do anything, though, seems obviously incorrect. Savage’s key point is that a number of high-profile publications really did go out of their way to change their workforce demographics — a shift that was sorely needed, even if Savage doesn’t think so, given their historical white-maleness. These initiatives may not have been economically significant enough to show up in Census data, but they definitely impacted the stories these publications published. Cultural output is often downstream of hiring practices.

I saw this firsthand at Vice, which as Savage notes went from employing mostly men in 2014 to mostly women in 2019. During that time, Vice launched Broadly, a women-focused website, while also toning down the raw but sometimes vile masculinity of its flagship website. (At some point, we stopped publishing photoshoots of waifish women firing automatic weapons.) This was part of a larger trend: The late 2000s and 2010s saw a proliferation of women-focused websites, from Gawker’s Jezebel to New York’s the Cut to the Awl’s Hairpin to Slate’s DoubleXX; even ESPN started up ESPNW. And publications not clearly labeled “for the ladies” began to hire women and make good-faith attempts to appeal to women readers.

To be clear, this was a necessary shift — women deserved to have publications that took them seriously as an audience, and women journalists deserved to have platforms worthy of their talents. You can look back at the DEI era and conclude that demographic changes in the media industry were absolutely needed, and also acknowledge that to hire more of one type of person, you need to hire fewer of another type of person.

So Savage has identified a real phenomenon, but that does not make him or the anonymous white men he quotes particularly sympathetic. One failed former TV writer “has recurring fantasies of changing his name and moving to Thailand to escape his creditors.” A journalist who worked his way up to “senior reporter” nevertheless complains of being “born in the wrong year.” Savage himself, a struggling screenwriter, admits to scalping tickets to pay his bills and complains that he’s “an ordinary talent — and in ordinary times that would have been enough.”

To be blunt, since we’re all men here: Dude, stop whining. Anyone pursuing any kind of creative career knows from the outset that the odds are stacked wildly against them (and typically has a supply of self-confidence to buttress them against failures). You’ve always needed luck to make it as an intellectual or a journalist; the gatekeepers have always been frustratingly fickle. You were “born in the wrong year,” white boy? Try being, for instance, a Black woman trying to be a science-fiction writer in the ‘60s. Ordinary times? No such thing.

If cultural institutions have shifted against men, it’s clear what we need to do: Build new institutions. In the ‘90s and early 2000s, when media companies were decidedly not catering to women, female writers struck out on their own, creating a loose network of unaffiliated blogs until established media brands took notice and started hiring those bloggers and competing for their audiences.

The situation is obviously not analogous, but men can do something similar. There are already a ton of men on platforms like Substack, and there could always be more, writing not necessarily, like, men’s rights-adjacent political takes³ but covering stereotypical masculine subjects that highbrow publications are currently uninterested in. Sports, history, self-improvement, dating and parenting from male perspectives — there’s a lot of directions to potentially go in.

From there, the next step is male-focused publications. Of course, some of these exist, but GQ and Esquire, to name the two most prominent, are not what they once were. Both websites are extremely heavy on fashion and celebrity coverage. Esquire has a resistance-lib-type politics blog; GQ does stuff like Dua Lipa’s Favorite Books of 2025⁴. The most recent viral moment from either publication was when an interviewer for GQ disastrously tried to press Sydney Sweeney to talk about her American Eagle ad. Clearly, these magazines could use some competition.

What I envision is something like the Cut for guys⁵. The Cut started out as a fashion website but now covers a wide range of topics: celebrity news, wellness, relationships, horoscopes, politics from a feminist lens. I read the Cut sometimes, especially when it runs a particularly compelling feature, but I’m clearly not its target audience. The Cut’s ideal reader is probably a woman in her late 20s or early 30s, college-educated, who lives in a major metropolitan area, earns a six-figure salary, and is interested in celebrity gossip in a semi-ironic way.

Where’s the publication targeted at her boyfriend, who also makes six figures, tolerates but does not believe in astrology, and is increasingly interested in military history? Where’s the website that speaks to his inner life?

There’s no guarantee such a magazine would be successful. It’s not easy for new publications to find audiences. Maybe men are predisposed to read less than women these days. Maybe men don’t have inner lives. Maybe the type of man who reads doesn’t want to read something that is explicitly marketed to men, because branding something “for men” has become unfashionable. The last high-profile men’s publication to launch was Mel, originally funded by Dollar Shave Club, and it ended up closing down in 2022.

I don’t think, as Savage seems to imply, that men deserve jobs in media — no one deserves a job in media. But male readers deserve to read stories that are about and for them. They deserve media outlets that don’t see masculinity as something to be ignored or apologized for. They deserve journalists who will take their problems seriously, as well as their dreams and ambitions. One thing’s for sure: If you started such a magazine, you’d have a lot of writers lining up to contribute.

If you liked this essay, please tell someone about it in real life. And if there already are a bunch of men-focused publications out there I don’t know about, please drop links in the comments.

1. I bought Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte, which is as good as everyone says.

2. In 2024 that figure dipped down to 67 percent.

3. Bleh.

4. She likes a bunch of contemporary award-winning literary fiction and also Mark Ronson’s book, which “makes me want to hit the clubs and dance all night.”

5. Disclosure: I work for the company that owns the Cut.