When Tom Friedman bangs on for 400 pages about how flat the world's getting, the launch of Maxim magazine in hitherto conservative India probably wasn't what he had in mind...
Containing such delights as "100 things you never knew about women", a "how to" guide on professional begging, and a must-see article on the police inspector in Uttar Pradesh Panda, who fervently believes that he is the incarnation of the Hindu Goddess Radha, it's the usual formula... To 20-something males, sex sells, wherever you are in the world...
But just because there's a market for it, should adaption be so easy? I can't help but feel the '100 things' articles probably already run in the UK and the US. And notice the wholesale translocation of a Trevor Beattie UK Wonderbra ad line. Couldn't Maxim have aimed a little higher than a testosteronic lowest common 
denominator?
I'm sorry, I forgot, this is Maxim we're talking about... Cue a nightmare vision of the future where young (ish) males from Ulan Bator to Uganda vegetate glazed-eyed to identically articled copies of Maxim differentiated only by the ethnicity of their cover 'starlet'. With apologies to Orwell, the boot's not quite stamping on a human face, but it probably is crushing a few brain cells...
Tuesday, January 24, 2006
Culture: Global Lad-dom...
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2 comments:
the brilliance of the Maxim's expansion into India is boundless. A)The country has explosive population+economic growth, B)The sexual repression (right word) is just starting to loosen (even their Bollywood movies still have that America in the '50s style coy innocence to sexuality). India is due for a big sexual revolution, and those who get in early will rake in big dough!
Having seen some female friends endure courtship by a group of young Indian dudes enthusiastically "bhangra dancing" (there description)in front of them in an Edinburgh pub, I hate to think what bizarre cross-cultural sexual advances this is going to encourage...
While we're on it, I can also highly recommend anything Bollywood as a post pub/club entertainment. AsiaNet in the UK was great for this... not sure what TimeWarner and Comcast have to offer though.
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