So who gets interpellated by each magazine? By looking at the covers alone, people who want to become a guy and are interested in wanting what guys want buy into Maxim. In his work on Maxim, James P. Davis claims, "...the Maxim reader... is a loathsome, unhygienic, congenitally dishonest, opportunistic, disorderly, selfish creature of unrestrained animal appetites" (Davis 1018). While certainly expressing bias, Davis does offer aspects of the interpellated audience that overlaps with my own findings. Through my work, I have found that the magazine's lower middle to middle income demographic consists of heterosexual, white males who want to smell nice, have a desire to sleep with women like Ashley Tisdale, and will buy products and ideologies in order to achieve this goal. The interpellated audience of GQ has a slightly higher income level, has a desire for fashion, and is not as strongly constrained by ethnicity, but still consists of heterosexual males. Unlike Maxim, however, the GQ readers tend to achieve masculinity through identifying with masculine males instead of through the desire of women. This difference seems to set the two magazines apart more than any other factor Despite the difference in power and agency given to women, as well as the clash of identification versus desire, several aspects of masculinity still remain fundamental to both magazines. For one, they both interpellate heterosexual males. Moreover, smelling nice, the acceptance of drugs and tobacco, the approval of alcohol, and the recognition that as men, they have not yet reached the ideal stage of masculinity that these magazines produce, all feed into the mindset of the interpellated audience. Through a social semiotics, psychoanalytic, and discourse analysis, one can begin to discover how masculinity is produced and visualized by Maxim and GQ. Through the eyes of the interpellated audience, however, these two magazines produce a set of products, role models, guidelines, and skill sets needed in order to know and have what guys want, know and be able to look sharp and live smart, and ultimately be able to become the ideal masculine male.

Back: Race
Overview	Analysis: Covers	Works Cited