THE BALL says the headline to an article in Men's Health urging early detection of testicular cancer. Maxim, a rude import from Britain that has just published its premiere issue in America, features a photograph of author Tom Clancy standing behind a pool table. He's got balls.
Women are comfortable talking intimately to other women.
Guys are not comfortable with that. So says Art Cooper, the editor in chief of GQ, who, unlike Vogue's Anna Wintour, must somehow find a way to talk intimately to his readers without provoking embarrassed sniggers. These are tumultuous times for Cooper and his competitors, what with flattening circulations, the introduction of a number of new magazines and the messy firings in the past month of the editors of two of the most prominent titles, Esquire and Details. I mean magazines that seek to define a masculine life-style, that are about maleness in the way that Martha Stewart Living is about an unnatural hunger for order. He's your bud, man.