How low can they go?

Says Nellis, "GQ, Esquire and Playboy try to say 'We think you're cool enough to have these facets in your life, one of which is being well-informed and well-read. And so you can feel that you're well-informed and well-read if you read us.'"

The idealized male, as depicted in the ads and editorial content of men's magazines, is interested in wine, cars, style, the perfect shave and naked women, as well as fine writing. Meanwhile, the ideal woman of the glossies is apparently devoid of literary interests, perhaps even unable or unwilling to read more than a couple of paragraphs at a sitting.

"There's something deeply insulting about assuming a woman can't read anything longer than 500 words," says Nellis. "What [glossies] are saying is that we're not even going to give you a chance [to read something more substantive]. We know you're not interested." Gross, who has also served as an editor at Vogue, Elle and the defunct Mirabella, adds: "I've had experiences at Vogue where we'd commission a writer and get something in baby talk. I've always been allergic to baby talk, this talking down to women. I don't know if there's an equivalent in men's magazines. Perhaps there's a whole other macho testosterone-driven language or tone."

When Helen Gurley Brown took over Cosmo, advising the Everywoman "was absolutely revolutionary," according to Nellis, "but it doesn't take into account how women have changed since then." Today, just as in the late 1960s, "women's most urgent needs are assumed to have to do with family or relationships, appearance, health and self-esteem," says Brown Weissman. "Women's magazines may be more honest and unpretentious than the sometimes self-important features of the men's magazines. But women usually have to get their literary nourishment someplace else."

And they do. Fifty-six percent of the New Yorker's readers, and 48 percent of Atlantic Monthly readers are women, according to the Mediamark Research Inc. (MRI), the leading U.S. provider of total magazine audience counts. Women also go behind enemy lines: They comprise 40 percent of Esquire's readership, 37 percent at GQ and 17 percent at Playboy. (Men, on the other hand, rarely peruse women's magazines: They make up just 17 percent of Cosmopolitan's readers, 14 percent of Harper's Bazaar readers, and 13 percent at Vogue.)

There is no way to know if women may are reading men's magazines solely for the fiction, but according to Levine, they have traditionally picked up men's mags in search of in-depth features and more extensive news coverage. "Women have always read Esquire because it is perceived as a serious issues magazine. And Playboy is this strange hybrid -- the joke was that people read it for the interviews and the fiction," she says. In the case of women, that may be true.

New arrival O magazine, with a staggering 14 million readers, was introduced as something of an antidote to classic glossy fare for a female audience. Under the direction of publisher Oprah Winfrey, established novelists like Amy Bloom or Susan Choi address the familiar theme of self improvement in O, but rather than suggest makeovers, they tend to offer articles and advice columns about intimacy, spirituality and self-confidence.

Yet despite Winfrey's status as a patron saint of novelists, her magazine does not publish fiction. "Oprah doesn't like a short read," according to editor Gross, "and the interest [of readers] has been increasingly about real life -- memoir, biography and personal journalism."

Given the success of O -- without the benefit of fiction -- it is unlikely that short stories will find their way into the pages of glossies any time soon. But the magazine's determined (though not always successful) attempt to address readers with respect and intelligence is reason for hope. So too is the trend in magazines like Elle, with 4.5 million readers, and Marie Claire with 3.14 million, of devoting more pages to news features and even investigative journalism.

This is not to say that glossies are necessarily being hurt by this hunger for intellectual heft: Vogue still has more than 10 million readers, Glamour, an estimated 12 million, and Cosmopolitan, in the vicinity of 17 million -- almost twice as many as Playboy and Maxim, and three times the readership of GQ. But the heavy hitters, if they stick to old formulas, will most certainly have to share their readers, who, for the time being, will have to buy more than one magazine to satisfy their needs as thinking human beings.

"The magazine business has gotten so niche-oriented that things you used to find in one magazine, you now must go to so many different ones to get what you need," says Levine. Given the current economy, and a potential lack of generosity among readers of glossies, it is unlikely that this buying habit can be counted on to continue. More plausible is the triumph of "women's" magazines that take their cue from the general interest model of the past, filling their pages with news and fiction, as well as fluff.

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