by Mark Dapin
The UK men’s lifestyle magazines publish seasonal fashion specials. These are ad-driven, packed with high-quality product, glossy, ‘creative’, and bought largely by the people who buy the ads. They aim to establish their monthly parents as fashion-based style leaders, not pornos with pants on.
In 1999, I began arguing for Ralph Style, an all-fashion biannual title which, I hoped, would win backing from the rag trade that would then trickle into Ralph. My ad guys hated the idea, with good reason. It was tremendously difficult to sell fashion into Ralph. They did not want to waste their time chasing low-yield, notoriously difficult clients who disliked the magazine, when they could be selling expensive ads to the deodorant and foot-cream manufacturers who formed our client base.
They stalled and they furphied and they filibustered. I fought to get a dedicated fashion ad rep, to match the woman FHM had employed since 1997. After an interminable, draining, frustrating and stupid series of consultations with senior ad people, who opposed the project on the grounds that it did not exist, Natalie was hired to launch Ralph Style and bulk up the ad content of the fashion section. She tried for a couple of months, then Advertising came to a secret (from me) agreement with Brad that allowed her to sell outside the rag trade, and made her pointless.
By the time Ralph Style finally came out, it coincided with FHM’s bid at the same market, FHM Collections. This would have made the sell much harder for my ad staff, had they actually tried to sell the magazine. They did not. FHM Collections was a similar title to Ralph Style in every way but one: it carried about 40 pages of ads, about 35 of which were fashion ads. Ralph Style carried 18 ads, only six of which were fashion, and only four of which were paid for.
My ad team would not put fashion ads into Ralph, so I had to lose the ad manager. First, I refused to talk to him about anything other than fashion. We used to speak or meet a dozen times a week, but all that stopped. He started to send up his deputy, Dave, to ask me things, but I told Dave I would only talk about fashion. Next, I refused to speak English to anybody from Advertising. Whatever they said, I would answer in Spanish. A typical conversation would run:
Ad guy: ‘Total Tinea wants two pages of advertorial in the next issue. Can we do it? They need an answer now.’
Me: ‘Discupla. No puedo hablar inglés.’
Ad guy: ‘Please, this is very important. Can we have the pages?’
Me: ‘Tinea no es una ropa. Quiero las ropas en mi revista. Ropas. Entiendes?’
Ad guy: ‘Please, Mark, I don’t speak Italian.’
Me: ‘No es mi problema.’
When it became obvious that I would leave before I would budge, Scott was moved to key accounts. This was my first attempt at ruthlessness, it was wholly successful and gave me a wholly false confidence. I felt sorry for the ad manager because he was good at his job and nobody had stood by him, but I had put the magazine before everything and the magazine had won.
The ad manager’s job went to educated, effervescent Dave. Against my judgment, Dave hired the statuesque Nicola as his fashion rep. This showed what appalling judgment I had. Nicola was a fashion-ad-selling genius. Her long legs, big eyes, insistent energy and the fact that she actually wore fashionable clothes lifted our rag trade profile measurably. Within eighteen months, twenty-five per cent of Ralph’s ad revenue came from fashion and fragrance clients, bringing us in line with every leading men’s lifestyle magazine in the western world.
Amanda, the editorial assistant who been elevated to fashion editor largely because there were no other candidates, revealed herself as a fashion editing genius, too. She had understood what I wanted from the beginning – male models who did not pout as if they were about to give a boy a blow job, and female models who did. Amanda made the shoots brighter but still interesting, realistic but not ordinary. More importantly, she chose clothes beyond my narrow band of leather and denim. Ralph played a huge part in popularising skatewear in the wider market. The small underground brands could not understand why we called in their clothes, since they had no budget to advertise and no ambitions outside their own circles. When the readers saw the clothes, they liked them, and because they trusted Ralph, they bought them, and when the skatewear brands grew large enough to buy space, they spent their money with Ralph.
We had to give up using normal people on shoots, because the clothes did not fit them. I wanted to show short blokes, fat blokes, muscle monsters and coathangers, but next season’s gear is only available in a limited range of sample sizes: men’s trousers have 34-inch waists, men’s shoes are size eight. Oddly, even most models do not have size-eight feet, and we sometimes had to crop photographs of men in suits to hide the fact they were not wearing shoes. Any South Australian Green MP who blames magazines for only promoting images of thin women should try to obtain even a new-season size-12 skirt for a fashion shoot.
There used to be an organisation called the Australian Society of Magazine Editors. It included the editors of newsstand magazines and newspaper inserts. It gave awards for good journalism, many of which went to the newspaper inserts such as Good Weekend, because they are better written than any of the newsstand titles.
The newsstand publishers saw this as unfair competition, withdrew from the organisation, and set up their own Magazine Publishers Association, which included commercial success and – God help us – good marketing in its awards criteria. I did not want to enter these awards – what was the point of being the best of the worst magazines? – but the company supported them. We nominated ourselves for a handful of prizes, and Brad duly sent an email asking which five members of my staff I would take to the ceremony.
Once again, I said I would not go if everybody could not go. He said every ACP magazine was restricted to five key staffers. I said he could choose five, but I would not be one of them. The company still did not understand: the staff did not simply ‘care’ about the product, they thought they were the product. They wrote the words, they chose the pictures, they laid out the pages, they put their names on it and their lives into it. It was the way they were judged in the world, from the editorial coordinator to the editor-in-chief. To leave behind any one of them would be to say, in corporate terms, ‘We do not sufficiently value your contribution,’ or, in human terms, ‘You are a worthless piece of shit.’
The awards dinner cost the company about $180 a head. Brad went to see JA, told him we had not had a party to celebrate our circulation increase, and won his agreement that Ralph would be the only ACP title with its full complement of staff present. Brad baulked, however, at paying for Ash, who was employed as a casual. I arranged a whip-round, and we each gave $10 for Ash’s ticket.
The awards night built Ralph into a stronger team than a whole season of abseiling weekends and obstacle courses. We were like an army, albeit a scruffy, undisciplined army that was not very good at fighting (the Dutch army, for instance). We did not win anything, but we marched from the dinner to the pub to a nightclub on Oxford Street, drinking and drinking and drinking until 4 am, and Ash spent at least $180 buying beer for everybody.
At the dinner, I met Phillip Thomas, then managing director of EMAP. He told me that if we had crushed FHM at the start, EMAP Australia would not have launched its other titles. He could not see why ACP had not gone in harder. I told him everything was me: I had fuelled the tip-on war, kept down our price when they had raised theirs, changed our on-sale dates to match theirs, increased our magazine size, forced the fashion issue. I was the conspiracy. All me.
A few months after ACP had refused to pay for journalists and designers to attend the MPA awards, the company held a conference for its executive team. It flew all the managers and their partners business class to a five-star resort in Victoria, laid on a couple of joke discussion sessions, paid for their golf and their banquet dinners, and a private performance of the ABBA musical Mamma Mia.
Brad put up with a lot, but he and I finally fell out over another senseless directive formulated by accountants who had never worke
d on magazines. Editors were told they if they needed to look at a particular magazine, they had to order a subscription. This was a money-saving idea on a par with Claire’s labour-saving plan of juicing her own oranges to make orange juice. Most of the time, there was no reason for us to buy, for instance, the smaller overseas men’s titles. Once every few months, they might run a cover shoot we liked. Instead of paying, say, $8 for that issue of the magazine, I would now have to shell out $80 for an annual subscription. Worse, if a new title came onto the market, I could not buy it at all, since I would have to subscribe from the second issue.
I assumed this particular expression of imbecility would be ignored, bought the latest Inside Sport, and was refused a refund. I tried to get my $7.95 back from advertising, who had a virtually unlimited budget to spend on ‘entertainment’, but even they could not override the directive (at first – it was, of course, effectively abandoned in a couple of months).
I was furious, and wasted half a finance meeting complaining about it. Brad asked if I wanted him to go to JA and specifically request I be made the only person in the company with an exemption – as if it would be a badge of dishonour, like a white feather or a yellow star. I said I did. Brad got me my indemnity, and tried to turn it into a curse. He told the other editors they could not get their magazine money refunded but I could, so they were to bring the receipts to me. I suffered a flurry of requests for specialist pornos, and my name went down as the bloke who ordered Celebrity Flesh and a publication for men who admired very fat women.
They all forgot to ask me for their money back, so I made about $30. Brad – with some evidence – seemed to feel I was willing to get into a fight about anything, since I had only just resumed the use of English in interdepartmental communications. He began to talk to me only when he had to, and got it over with as quickly as possible.
Brad made up with me at the Christmas party, possibly because he did not have many others to talk with. He had become more isolated, more disappointed. The more people he worked with, the more they let him down. He had always surrounded himself with a small circle of trusted operatives, but that circle had shrunk to the size of a navel. Almost everybody on the P-mags had lost his trust. He had grown bitter with his own success, just as I had.
Sometimes I stopped to think about what I was doing, instead of simply trying to work out the best way to do it. I no longer wanted to waste my life on something worthless just to prove that my life was worthless. I poured all my energy into Ralph – all my words, all my love – and I needed it to mean something.
Although every word in Ralph was true – or, at least, truly reported – I worried it told lies about life. Most of the women in the magazine were barmaids, lingerie models, prostitutes and strippers. They were defined by sex. The only men were soldiers, gangsters, hitmen, sportsmen and blokes who had been bitten by sharks. They were defined by violence. This is how I had wanted it to be, these were the demimondes that interested me, but they were not the real world. Ralph’s strapline, ‘the Aussie blokes’ bible’, was forced upon us by the readers. Every month, I received more emails saying, ‘Your magazine is my bible.’
At first, I was horrified. I thought the media was a con trick, a vehicle for reactionary ideology, a cultural weapon of the ruling class. I assumed ‘people’ believed everything they read and acted upon it, like a legion of Captain Stupids. I did not give readers the credit of my own intelligence. They were reading Ralph for entertainment: for rough, pulpy fun, for one hour a month. When they put down the magazine, they could see that their town was not full of big-breasted bisexual barmaids in bikinis panting for a threesome, any more than it was home to talking penguins or walking kebabs. That said, I was disturbed when one schoolboy wrote in and said he could not wait until he was grown up, so he could drink in pubs, go out with girls and keep penguins as pets.
I joined the march over the Harbour Bridge to say ‘Sorry’ to Aboriginals in May 2000, stuck behind a banner that read something like ‘Drag Queens for Reconciliation’. I became a member of Amnesty International, because of the fierce pleasure I had felt whenever I read in a Latin American newspaper how Amnesty’s lawyers were hounding the murderer Pinochet across the world. In my efforts to ensure my own prejudices did not leak into Ralph, dress the girls in berets and bandoliers and drape the penguins in red flags, I probably made the magazine more apolitical than it needed to be. Carl commissioned two strong features – one about the effects of nuclear testing on Australian soldiers in Maralinga; the other the horrifying story of a Hazara refugee from Afghanistan – that I would not have accepted because of the subject matter. I inherited the refugee story, and ran it when the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Two readers sent emails thanking us for showing that boat people were desperate human beings fleeing persecution and death, not benefit-bludging, queue-jumping millionaires.
I said nothing as the government turned 1990s Australia into 1980s England, bought off a generation with the dividends of privatisation, and no thought that the inheritance they were trading was not theirs to sell. I watched another short-sighted, small-minded, cynical suburban populist exploit racial bitterness to win the votes of fools, and blame the poorest for the plight of the rich. It was only in 2001, when John Howard took the country back to 1930s England, where boatloads of Jewish refugees were sent back to Germany to die, that I felt I had to speak. (The country was, after all, going back at a markedly accelerated rate. If I had allowed the slide to continue, we would have been in late-Medieval England by 2006.) I contacted Amnesty International, and offered to be a tattooed, blokey, trusted-by-the-apolitical-masses Ralph-editor spokesperson for refugees. I also offered Cosmopolitan’s elfin editor Mia Freedman as my female counterpart, although I forgot to ask her permission. Amnesty did not call me back. Nevertheless, my gesture seemed to slow down the national decline to the extent that in 2004 we have only returned to early-1900s England, when concentration camps were invented for Boer women and children in Africa.
The Tampa crisis reminded me that some things were more important than Ralph, an idea with which I had become quite uncomfortable.
On Friday nights, I drank at the Globe, and argued happily with former Australian Women’s Forum editor Helen Vnuk, who was working for various ACP men’s magazines including Ralph. Helen’s position was that Ralph was pornography. As she was in favour of pornography, she did not have a problem with that, but she felt I should come to terms with it. I conceded Ralph had pornographic elements – and so did Cleo or Cosmopolitan – but I thought the magazine was more than that. I knew if I had been younger and I had bought it, I would not have used it to masturbate over – which is what I assumed would turn it into pornography. In her book Snatched, however, Helen accepts a definition of pornography as ‘the explicit description or exhibition of sexual activity’, which would only encompass Ralph if you accepted the minority verdict of the censors looking under the black spot at the OFLC in February 1999.
I told Helen I was not sure if pornography damaged it users, but it hurt the souls of the performers. I said no woman who had posed for Ralph had ever ended up having sex with dogs, like the stripper in Andrea Dworkin’s film.
Helen – who, coincidentally, had also once edited Dogs’ Life – asked me how many strippers I had met who had had sex with dogs. It was the first time I had considered the question. It’s possible it simply does not come up in conversation, but perhaps not many women ever have sex with dogs, or make their babies have sex with snakes. Pornography – at least in Australia – might not be as it was depicted in ‘Against Pornography’.
Women often felt hurt by men’s lifestyle magazines. Time and again, I was told the magazines promoted the idea that only one body shape was desirable. It is true: we fattened breasts and trimmed fat from thighs, turned real women into Jessica Rabbit. Unlike women’s magazines, however, we were not saying to women, ‘This is how you should be.’ Nor were we saying to men, ‘This is what you should want.’ We were saying, ‘Gwoah,
look at her!’ or ‘Emmaaah!’ – and that was embarrassing enough.
For a glimpse at the infinite range of body shapes ordinary men found desirable, there was always Brad’s best-loved baby, 100% Home Girls, the Category 1 monthly in which shaved fat women standing on their heads were presented for truck drivers to masturbate over.
Daz had taken over from James as picture editor, and a new entrepreneurial spirit gripped the department. Daz loved to chase down bargains, negotiate discounts, cut deals, come out on top. It thrilled him to save us $1000 on a shoot, but he was equally happy making 20 cents on a can of Coke. When I returned from South America, he was running a small business, retailing soft drinks at 70 cents when the drinks machine dispensed them for $1. He hoped to earn his Friday-night beer money this way but, classically, he wasted his profits by drinking the product. He expanded his range to include chocolate (in competition with the charity chocolate box) and an unsuccessful line of two-minute noodles, of which he only ever sold two packets.
Daz dealt very well with cover girls, and we hired a former model, Madison, to help him make the initial approaches. Reality TV was a gift to Ralph. Suddenly, the girls every man fantasised about were ordinary-looking women without agents or egos. The first Big Brother series was huge and it yielded Jemma Gawned and Christina Davis. The readers watched them obsessively, staying up all night for glimpses of their underwear.
Jemma ran in our summer special, a magazine that came about because I had moved our on-sale dates so often that we had to put a thirteenth issue into the year to get back on track. I wanted it to be the best Ralph ever, a handbook for life, something wholly for the readers, with no concessions to journalists’ egos. It included Yvonne’s 100 Sex Positions, Dom’s 100 Fight Moves, and Amanda’s 100 t-shirts. It showed them how to fuck, fight and dress. I ran full-page pictures of the top 20 girls from our Australia-and-New-Zealand sexiest poll, and a board game based on Captain Stupid. It sold 156 229 copies – about 100 000 up on my first issue of Ralph, and the most copies of any men’s lifestyle magazine ever.