Maxim is a Textbook

Less to the fantasies of young American men than it is to their various pathologies. Take, for instance, Maxim editors' decision - in a magazine ostensibly geared toward titillation - to publish a list of women whom they had determined to be the 'unsexiest' women alive. The list should be understood as an entry in the long chapter of a fixation on the part of young males with women determined to be ugly - a fixation manifested in baseball players' use of the 'slump buster' and, certainly, in trope and feature of much fraternity house banter.

What can we draw from all this 'unsexiest' business? For one thing, we can begin to discern the interdependence and proximity of disgust and lust. Both, it seems, are libidinous. In that sense, a magazine dedicated to titillating young men is not exactly deviating from that end when it publishes a list - along with supposedly cringeworthy bodily descriptions - of a supposedly sad selection of the female specimen. The libidinous fixation with 'ugly women' would appear to stem from the twist in sexual power relations presented by such women - in the minds of these men, that is: They are thought to be vulnerable and damaged and deserving of punishment and humiliation. The specter of the 'ugly woman' would, it seem, be a sort of caricature of the already existing notion of any other woman for these men. The will to rape would stem from the same structure of arousal.

The humiliation - the spreading - of women across the magazine's pages thus fulfills a need: It answers to the call of an originary terror. That is, the terror of powerlessness.

In Maxim's proclivity for the bizarrely disembodying inspection of each intricacy of the female body - both in word and image - we can discern the terror of aesthetic powerlessness: '23 pounds of Funyun fudge' and 'Barbaro-faced' were among the piece's descriptions of its honorees. Most of Maxim's young male constituency is in the throes of expanding torsic girth and quickly receding hairlines. They are, meanwhile, preparing for the long American corporate slog. Most of these men will not marry women deemed to be beautiful.

It is perhaps enough then that they can get off on the 'ugly' ones.