Is it really the end of the battle between the sexes?
"Yep. That's it. We're going to beat our date books into plowshares. It's over. We'll have to focus more on gadgets," said Keith Blanchard, editor of Maxim, the raunchy men's magazine that puts sex ahead of gadgets on its covers and that, in its March issue, will publish a "Treaty Between the Sexes" hammered out with Cosmopolitan.
But oops. This doesn't end the battle, "nor would we want it to, because it's a lot of fun," said Cosmo editor Kate White, who is publishing the treaty (though in slightly different form) in her March issue, on newsstands next month. But she doesn't consider it binding: "We wouldn't want the Cosmo reader to feel she couldn't be flexible."
In a rare liaison between magazines from different companies (Dennis for Maxim, Hearst for Cosmo), the glossies, which both feature deep cleavage on their covers, collaborated on a treaty both editors call "irreverent."
But they couldn't settle on the number or order of the "articles," which detail such items as (his) buying gifts, (her) wearing lingerie and (his) changing toilet paper rolls.
"We're men telling men how to handle women, and they're women telling women how to handle men," said Blanchard, who said he got the treaty idea while discussing "the video-rental problem: You inevitably end up with a movie neither one of you wants to see."
He called Cosmo (and, as a backup, Jane magazine guys are fickle). White said she had an idea around the same time of asking Maxim editors to tell her readers how to get picked up at a party (see Cosmo's December issue), and they've been using each other's Web sites for polls for two years.
It's more than a marketing ploy, say the editors. "We're compatible," White said.
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