A (sort of) manifesto and a bit of a rant

There are a lot of things I dont understand. Working in the media one of the things I dont understand is the popularity of Men’s Health magazine, bizarely this is now the most read men’s magazine in Britain. Its true that over the last few years the men’s magazine market has taken a battering, mainly its own fault in that it has become hugely out of step with modern man – w**k mags like Nuts & Zoo sell well to teenagers and fair play to them, you know what your getting,

There have been major casualties over the last year or so, Arena has folded and Maxim is now only on line, GQ continues to sell well but is manily a mouth piece for Dylan Jones and his increasingly worrying Tory views (oh, is that another “can I pleeeeaaaaasssseeee suck your cock David” David Cameron interview....erm, yes it is). If you needed any other reasons not to read you could try this months cover and the fact that he who shall not be named writes for them. Esquire sells a piddly amount – but amazingly the only “quality” mens mag still flying off the shelves is Men’s Health.

Every month a toned adonnis graces the front cover, each months cover star indistinguishable from the last, not unlike the airbrushed identikit “babes” that adorn your traditional “lad mag”. Adonnis is surrounded by bold proclamations (loose 5 stone in one month, eat your way to a great torso, write Glamour at the top and it looks identical to the cover of that publication). MH now also comes in handy hand, oh sorry, i meant Man – bag size.

This is Man today then, worried about calories, about having a washboard chest, its metrosexuality gone completely mad. We desparately need to redefine Man, being a man isnt about spending hours in the gym knocking back protein shakes and pumping iron, this is aspirational nonscense and is no doubt leading to all sorts of neurosies, manorexia and the rest.

Manual is about feeling better, bettering yourself but not through greed or want or competition, it’s about having a connection with the world around us. Cutting through that layer of PR, advertising and image and connecting with something that is real and tangible. Yes, at times this is going to sound romantic or idealistic but that is the way it’s going to roll, we arn’t hippee’s though. We wont be sporting tie-dye t-shirts or wearing compost shoes or getting in touch with lay lines, we’ll be doing real things and we wont be seen in a gym, knocking back protein shakes (or leafing through Men’s Health). So welcome along, we hope you enjoy the ride.

The last words are those of Geoff Barrow of Portishead (click here to download their track Chase The Tear, all proceeds go to Amnesty), they are worth thinking about....

'You've got the surface world - the absolute unreal world that everyone is supposed to live in - and then there are the actual real things that are happening, and then there's this ginormous layer of media which divides the two,'