Back in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, if you played sports in high school or lived in a dorm room, fraternity house or college apartment, there was a good chance you couldn’t walk ten feet without spotting a copy of Maxim or Stuff magazine. They were on coffee tables, bathroom floors, bedroom nightstands and stuffed into gym bags and lockers. Most of us had a stack somewhere.
Those magazines captured a very specific moment in guy culture.
They were essentially frat life, locker room talk and guy culture distilled onto the page. The covers were loaded with 90s ‘IT’ girls. Britney Spears. Lindsay Lohan. Alyssa Milano. Jessica Alba. Jennifer Love Hewitt. Pamela Anderson. Carmen Electra. Tara Reid. Rebecca Romijn. And you can probably think of twenty more.
The pages were filled with cool cars that were way too expensive for you to own, bar reviews for places you couldn’t get into, photo shoots at hotels you’d probably never stay at and stories that felt like they were written specifically for guys like us.
There were columns ranking the best basketball teams in movie history or debating James Van Der Beek’s quarterback play in Varsity Blues versus Keanu Reeves as Shane Falco in The Replacements.
In fact, I wrote that column.
If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you subscribed to a dozen magazines back then. I know I did. My personal goal was either to write for Sports Illustrated (which I never got to do) or to write for what used to be called ‘lad mags’, basically men’s lifestyle magazines. In my early 20s, that meant Maxim, Stuff, Details, Men’s Fitness, Men’s Health and on and on.
I’m happy to say I eventually wrote for all of them.
It was a blast.
I covered NFL players, MLB players, NBA stars, actors, UFC fighters and too many WWE superstars to count.
As I got older, my writing leaned more toward the Men’s Health and Muscle & Fitness side of things, where I eventually ended up on staff. My tastes changed. The things I wanted to write about changed. Those magazines became a better fit, and I wrote for them for a long time.
There’s a good chance if you subscribed, you read dozens of my articles without ever knowing it.
But something happened in my late 30s and early 40s.
Much like Matthew McConaughey’s character in Dazed and Confused, I got older, but the readers of those magazines stayed the same age.
Slowly but surely, I stopped subscribing to all of them.
And I stopped writing for all of them.
I got married. I became a dad. I spent a lot less time consuming a million magazines and a lot more time living the life I actually wanted to live.
By the time I reached my early 40s, my kids were a little older, and I found myself looking for some leisure reading again outside of books. It occurred to me that while all those magazines still existed—whether online or in print—there really weren’t any men’s lifestyle magazines that made sense for guys over 40.
The readers of Men’s Health, Men’s Fitness and Men’s Journal were still largely in their 20s and 30s, maybe their early 40s. But the things I wanted to read about (and the things I wanted to write about) didn’t really have a home anymore.
Around that time, Greg and I started talking about launching Midlife Male in its current form.
Cut to a few years later, and here we are with more than 50,000 readers every week, writing about the topics that matter to us and topics that matter to you across our six Fs: Family, Fitness, Finance, Fashion, Food and Fun.
As you no doubt read in Greg’s column on Wednesday, we’re moving Midlife Male to a premium subscription model. If you’d like to read Greg’s explanation of why, you can find it right here.
For my part, I spent more than a decade inside magazine offices where too much of our time and too much of our energy was spent creating content that would specifically please advertisers.
That isn’t necessarily a bad thing when your advertisers and your readers are completely aligned.
But as advertising dollars have shifted more and more toward AI apps, crypto ads, gambling apps, streaming, prediction markets, biohacking products and whatever the latest trend happens to be, the mission we’ve built at Midlife Male doesn’t always line up with the deliverables advertisers are looking for.
Again, that doesn’t make anyone the bad guy.
But it does leave you stuck between writing what you genuinely know readers will enjoy and writing what you think will keep your sponsors happy.
Greg started Midlife Male to be relatable, credible and aspirational for guys like us. That’s what we talked about on Day 1 and that’s what we’re committed to doing.
You can’t fully do that when you’re beholden to generating clicks for products, even products you believe in.
The way forward for us, and the way forward for you, is the same model magazines successfully used for decades.
A subscription.
We’re not reinventing the wheel here. We’re simply returning to the model that made great magazines possible in the first place.
If you’ve been reading us every week… if you’ve enjoyed Greg’s How I See It column, my Manologue, The Middle, Ron’s finance columns, our interviews with guys like Troy Aikman, Chris Pronger, Jesse Itzler and Laird Hamilton, our weekly recommendations on fashion, food and fitness, our Strength Issue or Fashion Guide, our annual book recommendations…
…then the natural next step is to subscribe to Midlife Male.
Beginning August 17, everything moves onto the subscription platform.
Join us before then and we’ve got an awesome deal for you. Over 30% off, which comes out to less than seven dollars a month when you subscribe annually.
Thanks for reading Midlife Male.
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Jon Finkel
Editor-in-Chief, Midlife Male
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Check out my latest books at jonfinkel.com
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