As we assemble each issue, I have an image of you, the reader, in mind. (Hey, nice shoes.) It is, naturally, an idealized picture. (Very nice shoes.) I think of you as smart and curious, fun-loving but serious when the occasion calls for it. One of my favorite things about you is your nuanced perspective—your ability to grasp the relationship, or the lack of one, between different things. (More on that in a minute.) I'm able to maintain this ideal because, except for a few of Sonja's more, um, ardent fans (the restraining orders are in the mail!), I don't actually know most of you.
So it can be a little jarring when you make yourself known in a way that pokes holes in my picture. The other day, a reader named Diane wrote to say, essentially, that we're kinda sucky. "Every week I see what you call culture," she wrote, "and realize how you resort to advertising almost-naked women just for someone to pick it up."
We hear this every so often, and except for the confusion between the functions of ads and editorial content, it didn't bother me much. But a few e-mails later, she made a couple of remarks that did stick in my hide.
"I realize that you guys make oodles of cash off of the ads," she wrote, and added, in apparent reference to our use of sexy cover models, "It's just really hard to take your magazine seriously as a cultural guide."
Those two sentences are worth examining for what they suggest about Diane and those of a similar mind-set. Between the dismissive quality of the first—her obvious distaste at the idea of us making oodles of cash—and the disconnect of the second, something interesting is being said, if not necessarily what's intended.
First, Diane, let me tell you this: We don't make oodles of cash; the odd bushel, maybe. Second: It requires oodles of cash to keep this thing going. Try as I do, I can't get writers, artists and photographers to work for free.
As for the covers, I confess I have a hard time fathoming the argument that they make the whole paper unreliable. Does that really happen? Do you, Diane, read Chuck Twardy's art reviews and think, "I'm not going to take him seriously because there's a scantily clad woman on the cover"? In my mind, you, the ideal reader, bring to each page a flexible intelligence, an adjustable sensibility: a breezy sense of fun to the cover, a more serious curiosity for Jeremy Parker's political column—without having to infer something about one from the other. (And why do critics never suggest that the serious material upgrades the cheesecake?) This, I submit, is a compliment to you. I assume you like to bounce between serious and silly, straight and goofy. To me, that sort of friction is an antidote to boredom.
Expressed together, the idea that a little mildly naughty fun spoils the whole operation, and that a paper like the Weekly oughtn't make money doing so—suggest a weird kind of puritanism, a sideways kind of political correctness. I hope I'm misreading Diane, and that she and you and I and everyone can have our cheesecake and eat it, too.