Cultureshark Remembers Stuff Magazine

Time to remind everyone that I am indeed...a guy.

Stuff Magazine is the latest lad mag to join the graveyard, outlasting FHM by mere months. Supposedly, Felix Dennis Publishing will carry on the Stuff tradition by including it as a section in older sister (hot older sister, I guess) mag Maxim, but I have to wonder if that one is next.

I still remember telling a friend about seeing Stuff on the newsstand. He mocked the "from the makers of Maxim" label. "If Maxim's not doing it for you..." he smirked. Well, he was right to mock it. Nobody really needed another magazine like that. I subscribed for a few years, and I certainly didn't need it. It was in many ways more of the same: slickness, snarkiness, and sexiness. A lot of pictures of babes, some nonthreatening celebrity infotainment, and some "stuff" to make the advertisers happy.

But it did have a niche. The title came from all the features on cars and gadgets and boring advertorials like that, but that's not what I noticed. The layouts in Stuff were better, slightly less airbrushed. The articles in Stuff--and yes, there were articles--were often funnier and more provocative. There weren't as much of those damned "men in stylish clothes" fashion layouts. Stuff was, dare I say, better than Maxim.

One hallmark of the mag's style was its tendency to make every single caption a smart-assed one. That was amusing for a while--"Hey, every caption is snarky!" But it quickly got out of hand, and soon it was more like, "Does every damned caption have to be snarky?" The whole publication got way out of hand with the sarcastic style, and it was often kind of a chore to read for any length of time--not that it really mattered. It was something like 8 bucks a year to subscribe, and that's why I got it.

And, hey, it was "Stuff," not the "Paris Review." You have to admire a periodical that recognized the hotness of Daisy Fuentes post-MTV and Stacy Keibler pre-Dancing With the Stars. The scantily-clad women adorned the cover and sold the issues, and if they weren't quite the big names that appeared in Maxim, so what? It actually made Stuff better. Frankly, the subjects were often more attractive and more willing to--well, they wore less clothes, OK? There, I said it.

I said good-bye to it years ago right about the time I moved in with my wife, then my girlfriend. Would you believe me if I told you that was a coincidence? It matters not. No, I didn't really need Stuff, but it was nice to look at for a while (and if you think I'm working towards a metaphor involving my wife, forget it!) before I moved on. Maybe there were some guys out there for whom Maxim WASN'T getting it done, and for them Stuff served its purpose.

At any rate, let's be honest. It was never a bad thing to have Alyssa Milano, the Miller Lite catfight girls, or Catherine Bell on another cover at the bookstore. Uh, especially if they were wearing a bathing suit.