Esquire Men’s Magazine

Esquire, though not the most popular Men’s magazine, certainly has a very large following. It is a monthly supplement that gives men advice on cooking, how to dress, what’s fashionable that month and how to be like the starts of TV and Film.
They have a regularly updated online website that keeps readers happy in between months of editions. Though their monthly magazine is still in popular demand.
The covers are extremely different to the women’s monthly and weekly magazines. They often have a lot of different headlines made to capture the reader’s attention – often having trigger words such as ‘SEX’ in bold or ‘LIFE’ and often ‘WOMEN’, but the images are also striking.
However, when the magazine began in 1933 the covers were often modest paintings which eventually moved on to a small clay caricature that would often be accompanied by one or more female clay caricatures.

It often covered political news, funny stories, cooking tips and poking fun at what is happening in the world. This is much like today, only the increase of the normality of female nudity and rise of ‘sex talk’ has filtered its way into many of the headlines, covers and stories.
The covers today have changed dramatically from the early days. In the 50’s women who were sex icons began to appear on covers and so did famous political, art, music and film celebrities.

It is clear and evident as mentioned, that as time progresses, nudity and women become more overt and almost exploit the female as opposed to the men. These men are in suits and are fully clothed looking commanding and in a high position, looking down on the reader. This is juxtaposed to the submissive stance of the females. This has lead to a very exclusive to men magazine that has no appeal for a woman.
The online magazine has many posts about very different topics. Its headline bar reads like this:

The bar across the top has very simple headlines. Ones you would even see in a woman’s magazine. Only the middle image is clearly aimed at the man’s part of the brain that relates to the hierarchy of need – sex. However the title underneath has nothing to do with the image. It reads: 15 Extremely Underrated Films The Every Movie Buff Needs To See. So although the reader may not have any interest in that particular genre, we often ‘judge a book by its cover’ and therefore click the image thinking it is something different to what the title suggests.

This section is interesting in terms of how they assume a watch means a lot to a man and who he wishes to portray himself as. This is comparable to women’s magazines advertising all the different types of beauty products. Makeup brands can show what a women feels she is worth as a watch does to a man.

Fashion tips like in women’s magazines.

How to appeal to the opposite sex is something both genders have in their magazines. However in a growing populous of gender fluidity and the acceptance of LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans, Queer) the articles are getting more and more universal to those reading. This article doesn’t mention about what gender you wish to be irresistible to and also has humour within it to show that it isn’t a serious article.
Esquire has a habit of trying to appeal to the ‘normal’ man and so use strong language that would almost NEVER be found in a women’s magazine. The language used is intended to be humorous but is also quite strong as shown in this article:
Overall, though the magazine can appear to be sexist and a misogyny filled mansplainer’s heaven, it is in fact a good way for men to find respect for ones self, for women and for the world. It simply appeals to men in ways that work but is never as shallow as it initially seems.