Maxim Model Girls, Miami, Florida, United States

Maxim has been criticized for encouraging excessive alcohol consumption and sexual objectification of women. In 2004, Maxim was protested by the gender issues department of Thunder Bay, Ontario's Lakehead University during an on-campus "Maxim Coors Light Girl Search". In 2002, the popular German football club FC St. Pauli removed Maxim magazine advertisements from the team's stadium in response to fan protests over the depictions of women in the ads.
In June 2007, Israeli diplomat David Saranga invited Maxim to the country. In what came to be known as "beers and babes", the magazine did photo shoots of near-naked Israeli women who serve in the army. The campaign drew an angry reaction from lawmaker Colette Avital, a former diplomat who served as Israel's consul-general in New York City in the 1990s. Prof. John H. Brown of Georgetown University described the spread as the first event in a new branch of public diplomacy.
In February 2008, Maxim was criticized by the rock band The Black Crowes for a review of their upcoming CD, Warpaint, with the band claiming that the magazine reviewed the album without hearing it. According to Black Crowes manager Pete Angelus, the magazine stated in an email that "Of course, we always prefer to hearing music, but sometimes there are big albums that we don’t want to ignore that aren’t available to hear, which is what happened with the Crowes. It’s either an educated guess preview or no coverage at all, so in this case we chose the former." The magazine's editorial director James Kaminsky later apologized, stating "It is Maxim's editorial policy to assign star ratings only to those albums that have been heard in their entirety. Unfortunately, that policy was not followed in the March 2008 issue of our magazine and we apologize to our readers." Facing more criticism over rating albums without listening to them, Maxim magazine maintains it was previewing CDs in its March 2008 issue, not reviewing them, and the mistake was to include star ratings.