No girls allowed!

Either I'm crazy, or someone in magazine-land has been watching too many episodes of Mad Men. On the back of the latest issue of the London Review of Books is a full-page advert for a new magazine called Port.

From the look of it, it plans to publish the sort of intelligent, long-form journalism that Kate and I love, and for the most part can only be found these days in American magazines like the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and indeed the LRB. So far so good. But, of course, there's a twist. There has to be a twist with a new magazine. Port is marketing itself specifically as a men's magazine--its motto is: "The Magazine For Men."

Am I alone in thinking this is a bit weird? I can understand why you would have men-only publications in fashion (think GQ), exercise (Men's Health) and even, inevitably, soft porn (examples are legion). But if you're just publishing good thoughtful journalism, in what sense is that a gender-specific market?

I suspect part of the answer is that the ad sales department wants a gender-specific market because the thing is going to be funded by glossy adverts for Ralph Lauren, Ben Sherman et al. Looking at their website, I can see that, sure enough, one of their six sections is "fashion". But the other articles on the page--covering comic books, British culture, and Afrobeat music--all seem to be subjects of equal interest to women.

Kate and I are both huge fans of Mad Men. But I find it quite baffling that the pat fashion/culture/media response to this series--about lives blighted by the strictures of American gender mores before the 1960s feminist revolution--has been: "Oh my god! Unreconstructed men in sharp suits are so now." And this magazine seems to me a product of that thinking.

After all, if your mission is just to publish great journalism and make a profit while doing so, shouldn't your audience and choice of subjects be as broad and catholic as possible? What do "men-only" subjects, in this context, even look like? In-depth profiles of bespoke tailors, gritty accounts of life inside Colombian prisons, nerve-jangling extreme sports reportage? And again: if the writing is good, why wouldn't women, too, be interested in those subjects?

I'm sure I'd probably enjoy the articles if I picked up a copy, but the high concept annoys me. Perhaps it is really all about high-end fashion ads. But is it really so inconceivable--nearly 50 years after the publication of The Feminine Mystique--that intelligent men and women might be content to share their ad space, and even their fashion pages, with the opposite sex?

UPDATE: Ta-Nehisi Coates has some great ideas about this at his blog--on The Atlantic's site, of course