Backgrounder: Charles Coxe

By No'u Revilla

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Lecture: Charles Coxe

Around the office, Charles Coxe, the co-executive editor of Maxim magazine, is known as the "Griller Chiller." According to promotional materials provided by Maxim's publisher, Dennis Publishing, Coxe earned the nickname because "one hand keeps the hot stuff hot while the other keeps the cold stuff cold"—his officemates' arcane way of saying that Coxe is good at what he does.

Starting as an editorial assistant at the magazine in 1997, Coxe took his first step up the corporate ladder on the second day of the job when he volunteered to re-write a hockey article that was little more than an introductory paragraph followed by a list.

"I was always begging for work, staying until two in the morning and asking for more responsibility," said Coxe, in an interview with Gabe Pell of The Daily Princetonian. "I hate being thought of as someone who's not working hard." Even now, he puts in 60-100 hours a week at the editorial grindstone. Nor does he cut himself much slack as a writer: Coxe's self-editing process involves endless rounds of re-writing.

Charles Coxe, on his early days at Maxim: "I was always begging for work, staying until two in the morning and asking for more responsibility."

As far back as his days at Princeton University, where he majored in history, Coxe "worked hard and produced," recalled William Howarth, a professor of English and environmental studies with whom Coxe took two classes. Before his promotion to co-executive editor, a title he shares with James Heidenry, Coxe was the executive editor of the magazine's "Maxim Goes to the Movies" section; the editorial director of Maxim Online (after its re-launch in 2000); and a member of the team that launched Maxim's spin-off publication, Stuff, a magazine devoted to technology and other boy toys. He has also contributed articles to Cosmopolitan magazine.

Much of Coxe's writing has the wiseass snap of a gym towel, flicked with deadly precision. Professor Howarth described Coxe as a smart student with a great sense of humor. Press materials from Dennis Publishing note that Coxe has "kicked the crap out of [co-executive editor] James Heidenry in everything from foot races and soccer skills to video games and office pranks."

Yet Coxe warns that writers who "try too hard" to add shock-jock or frat-boy humor to a story inevitably flop, often generating material that is merely misogynistic or gratuitously offensive. Nonetheless, he insists that Maxim's brand of in-your-face humor has broad appeal, an assertion he claims is evidenced by the magazine's 1.4 million subscribers, one out of every four of whom is a woman. For Coxe's money, such stats puts to rest the idea that Maxim is a sexist, softcore glossy for beer-guzzling frat brats.

The women quoted in "Protesting Maxim Girl Search at Lakehead University," a 2004 article published on an IndyMedia-affiliated website, would beg to differ. Upon hearing that Maxim magazine was planning to hold its "Maxim Coors Light Girl Search" on her campus, Shannon Cruickshank, the director of Lakehead University's Gender Issues Centre, rallied the university's feminist organization to demand the cancellation of the event, which she said overlooked intellectual beauty.

The all-male trinity of Lakehead University executives refused to cancel the event. Two of the three men said Maxim wasn't problematic at all, while the third offered no comment.

In a letter of dissent to the student union and university administration, Lakehead University lecturer Taina Chahal wrote, "Maxim magazine and the ads of its corporate sponsors…are encoded with meanings that validate a particular group of people over others—that is, white, heterosexual males over others."

Not exactly news to most Maxim readers. In November 2000, the magazine sent Coxe, along with four other reporters, to evaluate the in-flight service on five different airlines. When he asked a female flight attendant if an issue of Maxim was available for him to read, he got the curt rejoinder, "Of course not." Coxe kept himself entertained by urinating in the bathroom during heavy turbulence. "We had two stewardesses," he wrote, in the article. "One took 11 minutes to respond to my buzzer. The other looked like Gorbachev with tits. I was afraid to ask for another drink."

Another one in the eye for political correctness.

No'u Revilla (nar248 at nyu dot edu) is a sophomore at New York University, where she is double majoring in print journalism and Spanish.

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