Maxim Dudes: Q&A with the Guys plus, William & Mary & Sam &...GQ
by Russ Smith & John Strausbaugh
There's no denying Maxim's been on a phenomenal roll since the U.S. version debuted in 1997. It was Advertising Age's Magazine of the Year for 1999, both for its stunning gains in advertising revenue (up 211 percent in 1999) and its extraordinary total paid circulation growth?from 175,000 copies to 2.2 million in just three years.
In the context of other men's magazines, that's almost three times the paid circulation of Penthouse or GQ and twice that of Vanity Fair. It's beginning to look like Maxim on the way up could pass the currently sagging Playboy (now at around 3 million, but sliding) on the way down.
Maxim looks fat and happy. The 280-page November issue is chock-full of ads not just for the expected CDs, video games, films, youth fashions (Hilfiger, Diesel, Doc Martens), cigarettes and liquors, but also some surprisingly upscale and mature-market products like the Lexus and De Beers diamonds.
Then again, the magazine industry generally is entering a downturn. Newsstand sales are down across the board. The windfall that was Net advertising is a thing of the past, and advertising in general will shrink as the economy cools. Postal rates are about to be jacked up, and paper costs continue to rise. USA Today reports that some publishers are deep-discounting subscription rates to prop up the total circulation figures they show advertisers.
Maxim is one of the few titles bucking those trends, for now. We note that its companions in fortune include Industry Standard, Red Herring and Fast Company, still fat with tech ads?for now. Blanchard argues that Maxim represents a paradigm shift in magazines; we consider it more a fad. He says it's like tv brought to print. We say The Man Show might be the most apt analogy.
We met with Blanchard and with Dave Itzkoff, an associate editor, at New York Press' offices a couple of weeks ago. Bright and affable fellows, both Princeton grads, they were good sports about our haranguing them, and did a very good job of defending a bad product.
Russ Smith: How long have you guys been at the publication?
Keith Blanchard: I've been there since we started working on the launch issue in '96.
Dave Itzkoff: I came over in December of last year, having been at Details before that.
RS: How long were you at Details?
DI: April through December of '99.
RS: So that was under the [Mark] Golin regime? [Golin was the first U.S. editor of Maxim. He left there to edit Details. He was fired from the struggling Details early this year?]
DI: Actually, I was hired to be his assistant. I left there just before the ax dropped.
RS: Well, it's not like the new [Details] is any better.
DI: The half-naked-man-on-the-cover strategy is very interesting. Not one that we subscribe to.
John Strausbaugh: I think they're returning to their roots.
DI: I've seen the first issue, and I didn't mind it so much. I think from a design standpoint it's certainly nice to look at.
RS: I don't know how nice it is to look at. It's interesting. The new editor's highfalutin language about it...it's like he's presenting Monet on a monthly basis. Give me a break. It's Jakob Dylan.
DI: Something to read in the dentist's office while you're waiting for your root canal.
RS: Speaking of redesigns, New York magazine's new design is just a nightmare. It looks like People magazine.
DI: That's basically what they are?it's People magazine for the Upper East Side. Might as well have a design that reflects that.
RS: How are [the men's magazines] related? Maxim is the [Dennis Publishing] flagship in New York?
KB: Right.
RS: FHM is what?
KB: FHM is meant to grow into Emap's flagship over here. FHM is their flagship in every country they've gone to.
RS: What about Stuff?
KB: Stuff is a spinoff of Maxim. There was a section of Maxim called "Stuff," which was just gear. Over in the UK they split off Stuff as a separate title, which was very gear-based. Over here, we changed strategy. I was actually the launch editor of Stuff over here. We decided to [make it] a more general interest magazine, just with the name Stuff.
RS: How old are you guys?
KB: I'm 34.
DI: I'm 24.
RS: What's your background, Keith?
KB: I've done a lot of freelance writing and editing, for virtually every magazine in the city, I guess. From the Cosmos and Vogues to Entertainment Weekly and US. I took part in two big launches before this one?when Young Miss relaunched as YM. That was my job out of college. I was the guy on staff. And then Marie Claire.
RS: You've got an interesting background for this [Maxim] kind of stuff. I read almost everything in the world. But my blind spot is women's magazines.
KB: It' a really bizarre universe. Because there's sort of a cycle. The same articles come out on about a one-and-a half-year frequency in a typical women's magazine.
RS: Felix Dennis, how old is he?
KB: He is 53?53 going on 23.
RS: Was this his concept in the UK?
KB: Maxim wasn't the first of these magazines in the UK.
RS: He's made a bundle of money.
KB: He's like the 111th richest man in Britain. In Britain he has about 30 magazines. Mostly computer titles. There's a music title. Maxim's the flagship there.
RS: Isn't it true that the fortunes of Maxim in the UK are going downhill a bit?
DI: No. I knew this was going to come up. Someone said that along the way, and it's basically just sloppy reporting. In the UK [Maxim] saw about a 5 percent increase in their last audit.
KB: [Dennis] increased as a group in the UK. There are a few titles that have dipped.
RS: What's Maxim's biggest competitor in the UK?
KB: FHM. It's FHM, Loaded and Maxim in the UK [in order of magnitude]. Maxim has never been at the top in the UK. They came to the game late there. For a while, I think the product was not as good. It's improved tremendously.
RS: I've got two general observations, and I hope you don't take offense. [Going through recent issues of Maxim], my first thought was, how astonishing that the advertising is the same?as far as demographics?as GQ or Esquire or Details or whatever?only there's more of it. There's Ralph Lauren, Hilfiger, obviously a lot of booze stuff... Which tells me a couple things. One, it's a desired title for media buyers. Two, that buyers are not at all discriminating?
DI: Well, I guess I would take issue with that?
RS: Let me finish, you'll wanna take issue with a lot of things. And three, it leaves me wondering, if your circulation is so much higher than GQ and Esquire, are your rates proportionally higher?
KB: Our per-page rate is in the six figures now, just over $100,000.
RS: So you're getting more per page than GQ?
KB: Absolutely.
RS: That to me is astonishing.
DI: Well, why not?
RS: What's your [readers'] average age? Twenty-four?
KB: Thirty.
RS: Thirty? Really?
KB: And the average annual income is $60,000.
RS: Is that low compared to GQ and Esquire?
KB: No, it's higher than GQ. I don't know what Esquire's is. We reach a better demographic than GQ.
RS: That surprises me.
KB: The fact of the matter is, there seems to be the impression that Maxim is somehow lowbrow because it appeals to things that are basic and common in men. It's the same argument that bands get when they become successful. Everybody says, "Oh, now they've sold out."
RS: I don't think that's true. I mean, if Maxim was [only] 100,000 circulation, I would still find nothing to read in it, as well as now that it's two million.
DI: So you personally find nothing to read in it?
RS: No. It's a horrible magazine. So I find its success...
DI: Troubling.
RS: No, no. As I've said, I admire your owner... I think you guys have a tremendous base to work with. Eventually you'll be able to sneak some good editorial in.
DI: I wouldn't hold your breath for the editorial to change much. You may be under the impression that people are only buying it for the titillation and sort of accepting the editorial?
RS: Look, models are models... I particularly had trouble with [pieces like the one about] "I've always had trouble peeing in public. What can I do to get things flowing?" What's new about that? That's only been done for the last 30 years.
DI: When I was at Details we did a much longer piece, more sensational piece about that?
RS: Some guys are pee shy.
DI: But you know what, that is a legitimate concern of men, so why not have a space for that, a forum where?
RS: But what's new about it?
KB: Why does everything have to be new? Let's keep in mind that men don't read general interest magazines. That's the whole point of Maxim, the reason that we've been able to come in and just make a clean sweep of the population?it's like opening up China. These men are not reading anything right now. It's very bizarre when you research what guys are reading right now. They're reading Sports Illustrated, ESPN, but they're also reading National Geographic. No guy is reading general interest magazines... Don't forget you're in the business?you read a lot more out there than the typical man does.
DI: You know, this is not Russ Smith: The Magazine. You have to understand that you're not anywhere near our demographic. Speaking as a 24-year-old guy, not as someone that works in the magazine industry, there are a lot of guys my age, not just in this city but around the country, that read this magazine and find it highly entertaining. We get letters and e-mails all the time saying there's just nothing like this and we're glad that a magazine like this finally came along.
KB: We have a ridiculously high subscription-card return rate, which to me is the best measure of how well you did as editors across the course of the magazine.
RS: How deep are your discounts on subscriptions?
KB: It's one year for $17.94. Which is not very deep by magazine standards.
JS: What's the sub versus newsstand?
KB: The newsstand is between 1 million and 1.1, and the subs are 1.2 million right now.
RS: So you say that the average age is 30. With what kind of education?
KB: College, maybe some postcollege. They're all really rough averages, because we have a broad bell curve in terms of our demographic. Most magazines reach a much more targeted market, whereas Maxim is more like Sports Illustrated in that it stretches from 18 to 55.
JS: I can't imagine that when I was 30 I would have found anything to read [in Maxim]. And it's not just you guys. It's the whole genre. Nothing.
KB: Somewhere, two million people are finding something to read.
DI: The volume of rabid fan letters we get would astonish you.
KB: Not all of it is from prisoners. Many are from people who walk the streets.
DI: The people that I hang out with, they like to imagine themselves New York hipsters. I went to Princeton, and I have Ivy League friends. Even before I went to Maxim, when I was still at Details, they would tell me how great Maxim was. That was unsolicited.
RS: But the stuff is so juvenile?
DI: What the hell is wrong with putting out a magazine that actually entertains people?
RS: I don't think it's entertaining?
KB: You don't, but a lot of people do?
RS: We're not talking about that.
KB: We're talking about why doesn't our magazine entertain you more. I mean, surely the issue isn't whether this magazine is popular.
RS: Obviously. I'm asking you, as intelligent fellows, how you can possibly defend this magazine as one of substance.
KB: Because every magazine doesn't have to be a magazine of substance, okay?
DI: It would be nice if we could print 10,000-word essays every month on why Nietzsche's conception of?
KB: We already have that in Esquire and GQ.
RS: You don't have that in Esquire and GQ!
KB: Nobody wants that kind of stuff. Why don't men read magazines? Because magazines don't talk to them the way they talk to each other. Maxim is a very populist magazine, there's no question about that. I was just speaking with Good Morning America this morning about the notion that magazines in this country?the culture has always been very top-down. Magazines will tell you what is cool, what is hip, what you will wear, etc., across the board, men's magazines, women's magazines. And Maxim is part of a new breed of magazines coming out that feels as if it's put together by readers for readers. We've faced all the arguments that that's a lowbrow thing, or that's pandering. You know, we're succeeding where nobody has gone before because we've taken this approach. ESPN, as a franchise, is much more about you, the fans?look at their ads on tv?and that's why it's better than Sports Illustrated.
RS: I agree with you there.
KB: What's the newest magazine to come out of Conde Nast? Lucky. It's really very consumer-friendly. I predict success for that magazine.
RS: As do I. One, it's got a dynamite name. But two, the quality of writing isn't bad, for the very narrow niche it's pursuing.
DI: So is it such a bad thing that we produce the kind of magazine that isn't maybe what your conception of a magazine is, but it's getting guys to read a magazine?
JS: Are you sure they're reading it? Or are they just looking at the girls?
KB: We're positive they're reading it. We rigorously test every single issue. We'd be happy to show you some of the research. We take focus groups, we have them go through the entire issue. We ask them did you read this? What was good? Somewhat good? Very good? Bad, terrible, didn't read?whatever.
DI: There's a very easy control group for this magazine, and that, I think, is Playboy. They cannot sell pictures of naked women to men right now. And why is that? Because the old stereotype about "I only buy it for the articles" proved not to be true. If they don't put a celebrity on the cover, if they put some no-name bimbo on the cover, then it doesn't sell. People are only reading it because they want to see the latest WWF star naked. People are reading us regardless.
RS: It's a little unfair to knock Playboy, because Playboy was the pioneer. It's a little like knocking a future Hall of Famer when he's 45.
DI: Why shouldn't there be a natural life cycle to magazines?
RS: I agree. Playboy did its job, it was a pioneer. It sucks now.
DI: Exactly. There's no reason why a magazine can't consistently reinvent itself, or at least find a way to find its readers...and Playboy couldn't.
RS: But Playboy in its prime?and you guys are certainly heading into your prime, I mean numbers-wise?was a fuckload more sophisticated and better written than what you guys are putting out... I mean, you guys have a golden opportunity. Playboy in the late 50s and in particular the early 60s was running amazing articles... It not only had, for that time, racy photos, which was liberating, but it also had a lot of really good writing... You've got such a large [edit] well, because of your huge amount of advertising?don't you guys aspire to anything more than articles about pee-shy guys?
DI: We did a story in this November issue that also came out in The New York Times Magazine. And I think we did a better treatment of that than they did.
JS: The LAPD rogue cop story.
RS: That's not a real defense to me.
KB: Well, that's surely a step above stories about guys that can't pee in public. In the December issue we're doing a piece about the Russian sub disaster. The actual story that's unfolded after the news media sort of dropped it... It's really a phenomenal, fascinating story. I take issue with the notion that the writing's all bad in Maxim, that we should aspire to something other than what we're doing here. You two guys don't get it: We've got 2.2 million yes votes and two no votes so far. Why should we redesign the magazine more toward what you would like? We actually think it's a phenomenal magazine, hilariously funny, deals with topics that men care about. We produce something that we think will reach guys right where they stand, pick up magazines and actually read.
DI: Is there an example that you actually read and you like right now, just out of curiosity?
RS: I like The New Yorker. I like The Weekly Standard. I like The Atlantic.
KB: Are there any mass magazines that you like?
RS: I read People every week. I read the Enquirer and Star.
KB: Do you like People or do you [just] read it?
RS: I like it. I like to read about the 4-H kid in Iowa. I really don't care about celebrities whatsoever. I do find it interesting to read about the people in Scottsdale who won the rattlesnake contest. That's Americana to me. So, no, I've got pretty broad reading habits... John, what do you read?
JS: I read The Economist, I read Scientific American. I don't read People, I don't read Entertainment Weekly. I read New York. I read The New Yorker. I think you guys are participating in the dumbing-down of the magazine industry.
KB: By what actual dynamic do we dumb down the magazine industry?
JS: I think if you compare Maxim or Stuff or FHM or any of them now to Playboy, when it was in its prime?and you guys are saying you're in your prime?every month they'd get an enormous interview with somebody important, the kind of interview you couldn't read anywhere else.
RS: I think our point is, you guys have a golden opportunity. GQ sucks. I get it, I toss it.
KB: Finally, a point of agreement!
RS: Talk magazine. I get it, I toss it. Vanity Fair's music issue was a nightmare, and I usually like that magazine. Esquire, of course, is even worse than Maxim, because it's condescending and pretends to have some intellectual merit.
KB: I mean, we have these traditions, we have Esquire and we still have The Atlantic, and men aren't reading it. If we produce the magazine that you're talking about, our circulation will drop, because that's not what men want to read... It's a new kind of journalism that takes into account people's incredibly busy lives, their reduced attention spans?it's a different world out there. We can't just pine for the glory days of Esquire. That's so baby boomish.
RS: But when I was 24 and I wanted to read a magazine like this, I'd get Penthouse or Penthouse Forum.
KB: I'll tell you guys, as a 34-year-old guy today, the things I was reading, I did read Scientific American, I read Rolling Stone, Sports Illustrated, but I never found one that spoke to me. I think that it's wrong to think that every magazine has this great societal purpose to elevate and educate. A magazine doesn't have to be that. There are magazines that can do that. Maxim is an entertainment vehicle. Maxim is more like a tv show brought to print, or more like television generally brought to print, with all different cable channels inside.
RS: A Fox show brought to print... I think you're focusing too much on what you perceive as an elitist point of view of ours. I don't agree with that. I think People magazine is a good magazine. And that People magazine is really at the epicenter of magazines, because Rolling Stone is People magazine for music, Vanity Fair is People magazine for an Upper East Side demographic. People magazine is really at the core of magazines.
KB: Right. And People magazine accomplished exactly what it wants to do. Let's just give people exactly what they want. The red carpet photos at premieres, we'll throw in a couple of sob stories... What's an example of a substantive People piece?
RS: Not a thing.
KB: So why is the lack of substance acceptable for People but not for Maxim? I would suggest that in a similar fashion we're trying to entertain, in a way that People has no greater purpose than to entertain its readers. That's what Maxim does... The problem is that there are so few magazines in the men's market that everyone feels compelled to make them all parallel. So we always have to fight off Maxim versus Playboy, Maxim versus Esquire, etc. With Maxim emerging as the very central mass market men's magazine, as the general interest magazine of record, GQ suddenly becomes a fashion magazine. And Esquire is a literary magazine...
I see the magazine world going in two directions. There's an increasing fragmentation. Now instead of [just] Dog Fancy magazine, there's tiny-dog fancy magazines and big-dog fancy magazines?and at the same time, just as with television, where the networks still remain strong even with the proliferation of cable channels, because people still want to know what the culture at large is thinking. The position of a magazine like Maxim is to say here's what's happening in the world of men.
RS: You say you've got the same economic demographic as GQ. Tell me something about your [regional distribution].
KB: I know that we are more widely dispersed in general... Magazines like GQ and Esquire are more focused on the coasts.
RS: You're not saying that two million magazines are going to Macon, GA.
KB: No, but a lot of our magazines are going to the middle of the country. We're serving that middle part of the country a lot better than those urban hipster magazines. Details was the worst offender at that.
RS: Following that logic, is part of Maxim's philosophy to strike back at that elitism of a Details, the New York-centric?
KB: Absolutely, absolutely. Why should the interests of somebody in Cleveland or Dallas be less important than those of somebody in New York... The big shift that we're doing, and it's often misread as lowbrow, is that we want to be an affirmational rather than an aspirational magazine. Those are the buzzwords. Most magazines have talked down to people. We want to say, "Your life is okay."
RS: Isn't that condescending in itself? You guys, both Princeton grads, saying, "Your life is okay, take it from Keith and Dave"?
DI: We don't force our opinions on them.
JS: What distinguishes Maxim?because I don't see any distinction?from FHM, from Stuff, from Loaded? To me it's all the same.
KB: There are definitely a lot of similarities.
JS: What about circulation? What's FHM's?
DI: Let me say that Stuff's circulation is 800,000 now. So Stuff, our spinoff title, outsells GQ. [Actually, they're about equivalent.]
KB: FHM is different. You understand they're a different company. They've only just launched in the U.S., so I don't know that they've actually had [a circulation] audit yet. They say they're 400,000, and that their rate base is going to 800,000 for the first half of next year.
RS: That would be believable, given Maxim's track record.
KB: This is a new breed of magazines, no question. There will be more.
RS: I don't know about that... The rapid explosion of Maxim and its adjuncts is really unparalleled, except for tech magazines in the last year?Industry Standard, Red Herring, Fast Company. My suspicion is that a year from now, those tech magazines will be very much thinner.
DI: Right. But those magazines are tied to very specific economic trends.
RS: But do you think that Maxim, because the ascent has been so rapid, that the descent could be rapid?
KB: No. I think that's sort of an entertaining visual metaphor, but really, I think that as a guy, just as a reader, I think, "Oh thank God this is here now. Let this never go away."
DI: I think that the magazine industry for a while more or less conceded if you were going to do a men's magazine, there was only one way to do it, and that was to do it in the vein of a GQ or an Esquire.
KB: And if you were lucky you could hope for a 500,000 circulation, which was always the Details barometer that they never quite got over... Felix has this expression, "We're the first into the desert with a beer truck." People always will want beer...
The big question is, is this a trend or a paradigm shift? From someone on the inside, I think this is much more like MTV, this is a new way of looking at things that guys are eating up. This is the most basic nature of guys: sex, sports, beer, gadgets, clothes, fitness. Whatever you two personally think about it, the fact that guys are embracing it on such a deep level tells me that we struck a chord with them. Whether Maxim is around in 10 years depends on too many factors, but this type of magazine is here to stay.
RS: Which of the men's magazines considered broadly to be in your field do you consider to be the worst or the best?
JS: Well, Dave, you have a problem with Gear.
DI: Well, actually the most recent issue, the one that's out now with Patsy Kensit on the cover, is okay. It's a lot more cohesive than the ones they've done in the past. It struck me, for the most part, as pretty slapdash?just not a pleasant layout to look at, number one. But number two, in general, the editorial choices that they make seem also very haphazard. It's much more a window into Guccione's psyche rather than what a reader probably wants to see.
RS: See, I think that's pretty cool. It shows to me he's flying by the seat of his pants.
DI: But at the end of the day, he has that luxury that he can put out whatever he wants. I think we want to put out a magazine that people want to read.
KB: I think the magazine world is big enough for all of us. My problem with GQ and Esquire is that they don't speak to me. GQ is targeted toward somebody who is not me... Somebody who derives a significant part of their identity from their looks, their appearance, and that's not me.
RS: Yet you've attracted the same advertising.
KB: Well, advertising is just paying the bills, though. We attract advertisers because we reach the guys they're trying to reach. It's more coincidental than anything else. There's nothing about the content of Maxim that in particular draws high-end fashion advertisers. They come to us if we don't cross-message with them too harshly.
RS: I find it stunning the level of advertising that the magazine has.
KB: The only thing that's put a slight stall in the engine is that advertisers are not used to paying these rates, so we have to train them that if you want to reach this many guys, it's just making out that six-figure check that's hard.
RS: I bet.
KB: If a couple of other magazines would come along with this kind of success, if would help us.
RS: Advertisers hate that. They want fewer magazines... What about The New Yorker?
DI: You know, I wish I read that every week, but I find I only read it when I see something in it that appeals to me. But I can't make the effort, if you work 120 hours.
KB: That's an important point to make. Definitely enjoy Vanity Fair, when I get a chance to read it, definitely enjoy The New Yorker when I can read, haven't had the chance to read either in the past eight months, with starting up the magazine and working. And I don't think that's atypical now.
RS: Well, even 30 years ago people had a finite amount of time they were willing to read, and that's what makes it so difficult for a new product to succeed?they've got to knock off 30 minutes of a person's finite reading time. That's why most magazines don't make it. What did you think of a magazine that just went out of business recently, P.O.V?
KB: I think that any magazine targeted specifically toward one of these "generations," particularly these days, is automatically doomed to fail. Like Swing. Because nobody wants to identify with a demographic because it makes you feel like you're being advertised toward. "Hey, twentysomething guy!"
JS: I think that applies to twentysomething start-ups on the Web, too.
DI: Right, even something like Ironminds. You know, "We want to give you what a twentysomething guy wants to read," and twentysomething was branded into every article they ran. I want to believe that people my age, are, for lack of a better word, cosmopolitan, and that we don't want to just be lumped into that kind of a category.
RS: Maxim sure doesn't seem cosmopolitan to me.
DI: Well, listen, I don't agree at all, and we're going to come back to this point again and again. When I can, I read The New Yorker. I still read Vanity Fair every month. I read basically everything on the newsstand I can get my hands on. And this is still the one magazine that I want to work at. You know, if I didn't want to work here, I wouldn't work here, I would work somewhere else, but I really do enjoy working here and I don't feel ashamed of it.
KB: I think we're at a quantum moment in magazine publishing, a real shaking up of the old-world icons, even with magazines like Rolling Stone and Seventeen. I think we're also having a brand backlash across culture.
DI: When I think just about myself and people my age, we haven't been trained?"You must read Saturday Evening Post, you must read Life magazine." Then one day you wake up and Life got canceled and nobody bothered to even shed a tear. It just made itself obsolete.
KB: Generations ago, your father's magazine was what you wanted to read. Now you specifically want to get away from whatever your father did.
William & Mary & Sam &...
By Ben Domenech
The arrival of the October issue of GQ in Williamsburg, VA, wasn't greeted with much fanfare. The stacks of copies, with Kevin Spacey's smiling mug on the cover, were piled on newsstands alongside the rest of the fashion mags. Within the next 48 hours, though, it'd be impossible to find the issue anywhere in the town or the surrounding area. It appears that even in the post-Clinton era, sex scandals still sell.
Williamsburg (affectionately nicknamed "The 'Burg") is a relatively quiet town. Despite its status as one of the biggest tourist draws in the nation?for its authentic year-round reenactment of life in colonial times?the city has long been comfortable in its role as a peaceful Southern college town. The College of William & Mary (America's second-oldest university, after Harvard) shares this atmosphere of calm tradition. The beautiful campus is shrouded in mystique, the administration avoids controversy and the student body is notoriously focused on its studies. W&M, joke some students, is the only place where the campus library has to keep its study lounge open on Friday nights.
Into this tranquil academic atmosphere is thrust the latest copy of GQ?and the sex scandal that is laid out in its pages. Most students learned of the story in The Flat Hat, the college's weekly campus paper, which splashed the headline "Professor Confesses In GQ" across its front page in oversized tabloid type.
The article in question is entitled "The Professor of Desire," and was written by one Sam Kashner. It tells, in lurid detail, the story of Kashner's sexual exploits with numerous female students at the college over the years. In particular, the tale focuses on a relationship with one student that led the woman's husband to commit suicide.
The essay, which is labeled "First Person," has a note on the first page that reads, "All names have been changed except that of my wife." It describes the college as a "moral mosh pit," where lustful female students prey on susceptible professors, luring them into nets of desire within the tiny coffeeshops of Colonial Williamsburg. Kashner describes the Virginia girls who come to the school as "loaded for bear?they knew how to cut out a deer's heart and gut a fish," girls from the sticks who long for the love of a "sensitive" man. It's an egotistical romp, full of after-hours visits from scantily clad students who can't help but be drawn to Kashner's "man of the world" aura?and toward the possibility of an easy A+.
What a joke. W&M does have a large population of Virginia girls?but almost all of them hail from northern Virginia, the suburbs of Washington, DC, preppie rich kids who were in the top 10 percent of their classes. Pickup trucks are few and far between, and most students here could no more gut a fish than they could miss the next sale at Banana Republic.
Kashner worries about "who will protect" him from the next crop of sex-crazed freshmen. Frankly, I don't think he has anything to worry about. Kashner taught one of my own English classes this semester?that is, until this article came out. He's a short, balding man, with limp, wiry black hair and a penchant for dark turtlenecks and corduroy. His nose is long, his voice Woody Allen whiny, and his teeth have a certain ferret-like quality. With all due respect, I speak from experience when I say that William & Mary girls aren't that easy.
While the student body and most of the campus women's groups are yelling for Kashner's head, his future at the school is actually more complicated than you might think. Kashner is a former Writer in Residence and an adjunct professor at the college, and one of the school's most successful published authors. You might have heard of his bestseller, Sinatraland, or his book on "Superman" George Reeves, written with his wife and fellow W&M English Prof. Nancy Schoenberger, which was the basis for a special on E!. Privately, administration officials admit that the college is reluctant to sever its ties with Kashner?and they have a ready-made loophole. The actual guideline for student-faculty relationships doesn't technically forbid affairs with students, so Kashner didn't violate a specific college policy; and while badmouthing the school and its female student body may earn him a slap on the wrist, it's likely he'll be back teaching classes again in the spring.
There's another side to this story, though: while Kashner and his wife both claim that the melodrama in GQ is true, and not some form of academic satire, it appears that a "Fiction" label might have been more appropriate for the piece. "It's all true," Kashner told the student paper. "It's a tell-all, a confessional for me." But Schoenberger has a slightly looser perception of the article.
"Everything's true, but there are also elements of dark humor," Schoenberger told a class of students in the wake of the Flat Hat story. "My husband's an artist, like I am, and we enjoy experimenting and stretching the boundaries between truth and fiction."
So is the piece true? Some of it, yes. But not everything that happens in the GQ article actually happened to Kashner; much of it is decade-old gossip from the halls of the English department, and some facets are derived from stories circulated at other Virginia schools. (Kashner's opening anecdote, for instance, which tells of a female student who slept with all the male professors in one department, is actually an urban legend from the University of Virginia.)
According to Kashner, early drafts of the story actually didn't mention the college by name, and the piece had a more fictional feel to it?it was at the urging of GQ that Kashner inserted W&M's name and made the piece more factual in nature. This might have allowed the piece to escape the "Fiction" label, but it also served to disparage the college and its female students. That isn't just wrong; it's irresponsible on the part of Kashner and GQ.
It's up to the administration to decide whether to fire Kashner or not, but one thing's certain: the next time he decides to "experiment" with the lines of truth and fiction, he'd better leave the college out of it.
Ben Domenech is a contributing editor to National Review Online and a student at the College of William & Mary.