Chaos to Control

Abstract

As certainties dissolve, meanings around heterosexual relationships become increasingly puzzling. Recent changes in academic/media recognition of “what it means to be a man” exacerbate this predicament. Men’s magazines attempt to escape this disorder by offering individual men a shared sense of direction. The present study looks for evidence of this in six issues of For Him Magazine (FHM) and six issues of Loaded, using a form of qualitative research closely related to grounded theory. Along with the simultaneous construction of certainty and uncertainty around intimate relationships, the analysis reveals two themes: the “sexual mode of production” stresses the practices of management, rationalization, and science and “relationship utopia” envisages a fulfilling sex life for the reader via his accomplishment of intimacy. The study concludes that the magazines move readers from chaos to control by constructing a masculinization of intimacy, whereby intimacy is incorporated into a schema broadly consistent with traditional masculinities.

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