New York Magazine has finally come out with a men's style issue, its first ever, and the cover they chose to announce it with is Elliot Page, shirtless. The source says the cover has sparked fierce debate over masculinity and identity, and I believe it, because half the internet has an opinion about it and the other half is pretending not to.

I'll say what I always say in these situations: I don't care what Elliot Page wears or doesn't wear. I care that the whole thing feels like a press release wearing a magazine cover. There was a time when a men's style issue meant something simple and even beautiful. Esquire in the '60s, clothes photographed like architecture, men who looked like they'd earned the suit. Now the first one out of the gate leads with a debate starter, and we all know it was chosen to start the debate. Magazines used to want readers. Now they want replies.

Page is a capable actor, and I mean that sincerely. Hard Candy was a performance that stayed with me for weeks, and I've said so since long before any of this. But this cover has nothing to do with a performance, and everyone involved knows it. The editors wanted the loudest possible framing of masculinity and identity for the news cycle, and the news cycle obliged on schedule. In my experience, arguments like these flare the moment the cover drops, and I'd wager that's precisely the outcome the editors were hoping for. You can't buy that kind of publicity. You can only bait it.

What gets me is the cynicism dressed up as courage. Putting a controversial cover out and waiting for the outrage is the safest bet in modern publishing; it's the marketing department's version of a layup. Real style, the kind that lasts, never announced itself this hard. Think of Newman in a plain white t-shirt in Cool Hand Luke. Nobody had to explain it to us. The camera did the talking and the man did the standing.

Meanwhile the actual men's style in this country, the barbershops and the bootmakers and the guys under 30 buying vintage suits because the new ones are garbage, gets ignored entirely. That would've made an issue worth buying. Instead we got a provocation with a subscription card tucked inside.

I'll flip through it at the newsstand, the way I do. And then I'll go home and watch Clark Gable in It Happened One Night. Hollywood legend has it that when Gable undressed onscreen without an undershirt, undershirt sales took a nose dive; film historians have argued about the numbers ever since, but the story survives because it says something true. A man could start a fashion trend just by being magnetic. Nobody had to hold a press conference about it.