I noticed a friend’s Facebook share the other day of a Maxim “article” along with a critique of the language of “lads mags.” Here’s the magazine feature, which is disgustingly violent in the most straightforward of ways, in order to give some context, but what I really want to talk about are some of the public conversations that have followed it.

I noticed a friend’s Facebook share the other day of a Maxim “article” along with a critique of the language of “lads mags.” Here’s the magazine feature, which is disgustingly violent in the most straightforward of ways, in order to give some context, but what I really want to talk about are some of the public conversations that have followed it.





The Maxim page is a horrifying how-to project, complete with diagrams (for scientific precision!), that teaches young men on how to “cure a feminist” and turn her into an “actual girl.” (Here’s a link to a JPEG of the page where you can zoom for easier reading). If the magazine’s program works, the return on your educational investment is a skinny white lady in see-through underwear who has unlocked “her repressed Malibu Barbie fantasies.” Magic! Maxim uses the popular trick of giving the oppressive lines to the group they’re used to oppress by quoting a female co-author of Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future (2000) who confirms that there’s no need to “eschew things like shopping, makeup, or boyfriends.” (I haven’t read Manifesta, but with about .01 seconds of Googling, I can see there are lots of good critiques of the book).



The critique of the language of “lads mags” like Maxim came from a recent study described by the original Facebook poster as having found that “people can’t tell the language of men’s mags and convicted rapists apart, and men even identify more with the rapists’ words.” So yeah, magazine features like this aren’t “just a joke” and humor doesn’t exist in a parallel world without any discursive effects in reality.

I thought that blatant misogyny was pretty straightforward. I knew how I could analyze it (alongside the class and race norms it implied and along with the currents of heterosexism and anti-environmentalism also found in the article). In comparison to the complex discourse analyses of the global and the local, and the nuanced historical materialist studies of the way gender justice is an integral part of any justice, the Maxim piece seemed like an easily recognizable form of oppression. But my friend’s repost carried with it a comment thread that was 100+ posts long, so obviously many people felt there was still a lot to debate about Maxim’s take on “how to cure a feminist.” And I became interested because the comments looked awfully familiar to me.

There’d be no more wars of all penises were cut off! Argh!” is “Hmmm, that might actually be true.” The blog author ends with a fantastic analysis of the final-phase “actual girl,” whose speech bubble reads: “Your Camaro makes me so HOT!” The author writes: “This [image and speech bubble] sends a disorienting message that is beyond confusing, since women are often the objects of extremely vicious misogyny because supposedly we are ‘materialistic’ and only use men for money. We are also the object of ire for being ‘brainless bubble heads’ and ‘sluts.’ But it looks like that’s what men want. So first they turn us into objects, and then they hate the object they created.” Yes. But then she follows up with this in conclusion: “I hate YOU, Maxim magazine. May all of your penises fall off, so that women may finally have peace on earth.” One of her readers admirably pointed out that two wrongs don’t make a right. This reader commented on the fact that it’s also sexist “to suggest that men are solely to blame for war, and that mass genital mutilation wouldn’t be a bad thing.” But so far, the discussion has been wrapped up by the author and other commenters, who concluded that the above suggestions are “based on FACTS and EVIDENCE, not ideology” and require “a sense of humor” to interpret.