At first glance, Esquire magazine seems harmless enough. In fact, I often thought of it as the magazine for an unenlightened J. Alfred Prufrock. J. Alfred Prufrock was the dissatisfied upper class crybaby created by T. S. Eliot. Both Prufrock and Eliot himself choose to use initials instead of full names to accomplish an air of upper classmanship. This is very much in the same vein as naming a magazine Esquire which, according to my computer thesaurus, is synonyms with such words as sir or aristocrat. Certainly not terms of the lower or middle class. Upon further inspection I find that to be somewhat true. The overall messages seem to reiterate certain ideals held valuable among the young, urban, professional male. The magazine frequently deals with that lifestyle by focussing on fashion, sex, top of the notch booze, designer cars and even preys on their fears with fitness and hair saving products.
             To begin my research I literally tore apart my copy of the March 1999 Esquire. Once all pages were ripped out I began to organize them and make calculations and judgements upon that. All in all, including cover pages and ads, there were 201 total pages. Of these 201 pages the advertisements add up to 93.33 pages or 46% of all pages. For reference, I also calculated two other Esquire issues for a frame of reference. The findings were similar there too. For instance, in June 1999 66 of 168 pages were ads equaling roughly 39%. October of 1998 was also close with 74 pages of 185 equaling 40% approximately. There weren’t any real surprises to be honest. Of these pages almost everything I thought there would be a ton of didn’t really add up to much. Alcohol ads only account for 8% of all the ads. Tobacco companies accounted for 10% of the ads. The tobacco ads were tricky to count. The Davidoff Company has three pages worth of ads. This company produces some of the world’s most popular cigars. Here in the ...