The case for The Cut for Men

I’ve written deeply reported, meticulously crafted feature stories that failed to cause the faintest ripple, and I’ve had 250-word blog posts I riffed out in under an hour get read by millions.

I was reminded of this two weeks ago when a snippet of our back-and-forth about the men’s content ecosystem — about how there’s no male equivalent of The Cut — went viral and elicited a week’s worth of discourse.

After my tweet went viral, I discovered that several contemporaries of mine have been circling the same idea. Harry Cheadle, who used to edit me for Vice, had, unbeknownst to me, pitched a “Cut for men” two months prior on his Substack. (Great minds think alike.) Magdalene Taylor, my former colleague at MEL Magazine, posted on X that she is trying to strike that centrist, male-focused balance in her new role as senior editor at Playboy.

With so much interest in this idea, and with so many pre-existing men’s publications, why then, doesn’t this idea already exist? (Katie Notopolous, correspondent for Business Insider and perhaps the best chronicler of internet culture for the past 15 years, wondered this aloud on X.)

The overwhelming majority of responses were along this same line of thinking — that a male version of The Cut, a publication that explores the inner lives of men and the myriad cultural, professional and health issues they face, but without resorting to Leftist male feminism or reactionary, chauvinistic conservatism, is exactly what the world needs. Here’s my argument

Mainstream publishing has become too leftist and too feminized in its coverage of men’s issues, thus alienating male readers and leaving them susceptible to the far-right podcasters and YouTube that constitute the so-called manosphere. But this polarization of men’s content has created an enormous white space in the middle — a place for men who are neither woke anti-capitalists, nor hard-right MAGA nationalists to engage in frank intellectual discourse about challenges that are unique to the male half of the population.

It’s telling that former editors at Vice and MEL — two publications that, in their original iterations, were aimed at male audiences — now see the need for a centrist men’s magazine. Both of those publications suffered from the leftward, feminist political drift that occurred across all of mainstream publishing in the late 2010s.

“I saw this firsthand at Vice,” Cheadle writes on his Substack. In 2014, Vice employed mostly men. Just five years later, its staff was mostly women. 

“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.”

The same thing happened at MEL, the men’s publication I was hired to help build in 2015. The founding ethos of MEL was “Vice meets GQ,” a men’s publication that was less obsessed with Rolexes and Armani suits, and more focused on issues that actually afflict men — his job, his friendships, his dating and sex lives. But after Trump’s political ascendence and the gender reckoning of #MeToo, I watched MEL’s editorial sensibility drift to the left and become increasingly feminist, to the point it was sometimes outright hostile to the regular dude reader we once tried to court.

Thanks to the diversity and inclusion reports many media companies have felt compelled to release in recent years — the reports themselves being evidence of media’s Leftist political bias — we know that the numbers back this up:

This industry-wide initiative to hire more women started as well-intentioned efforts to right the historical inequity in publishing, which has long been dominated by straight white men. But they amounted to an overcorrection, to the point that men’s voices are often unheard, even on subjects directly affecting men.

The problem is not women occasionally writing about men’s issues. Men’s issues affect women and vice versa. The problem is that the content mix is entirely out of balance. Whenever men’s issues are covered in the mainstream press, it’s through a feminist lens. Meanwhile, I don’t see many editors assigning men to write about the feminist movement.

The rightward shift among young men is exactly why The Cut for men is needed. Turns out that when you tell men they’re inherently toxic and responsible for all of the world’s ills, they vote with their feet and go in the other direction. In this case, that has meant a startling rise in far-right extremism among young men, both culturally and politically.

What I am proposing is a third way — a publication that doesn’t resort to misogyny nor feminism; something that can help men better understand themselves, without scaring them away with rhetoric that registers as anti-male.

You make a compelling case of an overcorrection. And yet I’m still unconvinced there is a true market need for this kind of brand, particularly a faceless institutional brand rooted in text. I am a wordcel; there is a vanishing market for long-form journalism geared to men. In fact, young men don’t read much at all. Video games shape culture, not magazines. Memes are more influential.

The Cut for Men strikes me as good in theory but likely DOA in the modern media market, both in terms of audience and business. It would need to be a collection of distinct voices under a vision of what it means to be a man. Most publishers are shifting to be talent managers. Individuals are simply winning in the market. 

I think of a brand like the Bulwark. It got off to a bit of a slow start. And I thought it was a bunch of neo-con retreads, but it has succeeded at offering a differentiated political publication because it has focused on talent: Tim Miller, Sarah Longwell and Jonathan Last are stars. You’ll need that. And I would be very wary of betting on words on webpages.

What’s your vision for this brand?

All of my most successful pieces in terms of engagement and number of readers have been deeply-reported longform features. In a world of instantly forgettable “content,” substance stands above.

You’re right that young men don’t read, which is exactly the problem I’m trying to address. Reading is a skill like any other; you have to cultivate it. The problem is we haven’t given young men writing they want to read because we don’t feature the straight male perspective in mainstream publishing anymore. This isn’t explained entirely by generational tastes. Novelists Otessa Moshegh and Sally Rooney, for instance, are wildly popular with Gen Z women because they capture the contemporary female experience. There is no such male equivalent right now. I only got into reading and writing because I discovered Bill Simmons, who introduced me to Chuck Klosterman (SPIN magazine, Esquire), who introduced me to Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace.

Young men need that equivalent, so yes, I see this media brand as primarily text-based, composed of a smattering of writers offering fresh perspectives on the state of modern masculinity. Podcasts and short-form video content, which are cheaper to produce than ever, can be integrated into the mix as the title grows. The Bulwark is a good example of a successful collective of individual talents, as is Semafor, Puck and Barstool Sports. Not every writer wants to be a one-man show on Substack, which requires not only intense content churn, but also handling the business side of publishing. There’s power in numbers.

I know you think I’m delusional for prioritizing text, but I think you’d be surprised at how popular the written word is among the young creative class. When ephemeral digital content is mainstream, the printed word is cool and rebellious.

This is the kind of brand that needs to have a real vision. Most of the men’s magazines became shopping catalogs and the digital equivalent of SEO-bait affiliate gift guides. You need to put forth a compelling case of at least the outlines. My belief is media brands like this will be less maniacal about a singular point of view and have it instead be broadly in the same direction but with many personal variations. 

On the business side, this kind of brand needs to make money outside of advertising. I don’t see subscriptions working. It will need to be events and activations. The reality of lifestyle publishing is that it’s a hustle nowadays. It’s telling that Playboy brought in Phillip Picardi, who is a mix of an editor and a marketer. 

Thanks for arguing with me again, John.