Screengrab by Various Today in Hooksexup's film blog: Holiday special - 35 people, places and movies we're thankful for.
The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Michael Phelps indulges Anderson Cooper in some watersports and Dexter makes a 'bitch move.' Plus: the secret of Tina Fey's scar, revealed!
Dating Advice From . . . Engineers by Steph Auteri Q. For optimal functionality, what should go into a first-date emergency kit? A. Fine wine, road flares, a snake-bite kit and Ghirardelli chocolates.
Not long ago, media-on-media pundits announced that brace yourself men's magazines are obsessed with breasts and sex!
No duh. What will they take note of next: that little boys like playing with guns? That priests like playing with little boys? The question is not, Why have men's magazines suddenly become so fixated on women? The question is, at least for me, What took them so long? Men's magazines, where were you when I needed you?
Long ago, in the days when an affable cowboy named Ronald Reagan was loping into office and my own pituitary gland was first announcing itself as my dictatorial master, men's magazines were decidedly unsexy entities. (Unless, of course, your idea of hot is a Wayne Gretzky cover in Armani! and articles on the Fed.'s battle with inflation.) In those days, if it was take-me-to-your-leader cleavage and titillating text you wanted, and you were unfortunate enough to be the one kid on the block whose old man didn't keep a stack of Playboys under the bathroom sink, there weren't a lot of options.
Jocks who happened to be literate were blessed with a Sports Illustrated subscription, which was, of course, more than worthwhile for its annual swimsuit edition. But the operative word there is "annual" a long time to wait when your glands are screaming, "What have you done for me lately?!"
For a more reliable source, one could turn to the department store. Establishments like Sears or Montgomery Ward put out catalogues on a near quarterly basis, and always included a much-appreciated lingerie section. Yet the offerings were still more utilitarian than erotic, featuring buzzkills like that drastically less appealing successor to the corset the girdle and a type of bra known as the "minimizer" an anti-Wonderbra. Add to that their colorless photos and phonebook-inspired, tissue-thin paper and one couldn't help but feel a teensy bit desperate paging through. Fortunately, there was another option, one that more than fit the bill: women's magazines! With their sea of female images women in sexy clothes, women in lingerie, women on the runway, women at the beach, and, yes, women naked they were like our libidinous Christmas lists made real.
On top of the inherent sexiness of all that content, there was the kinky fact that women's magazines were accepted by the mainstream. Far from being wrapped in brown paper and off-limits to minors, they were on sale everywhere and purchased by women of all walks of life, and thus were especially easy to gain access to. The odd issue could easily get "lost" without the owner becoming suspicious. And with new batches arriving every month, women would actually leave stacks of them right out in the open on top of the garbage! where any mildly enterprising kid could happen upon and, careful to brush off the stray rotting lettuce leaf or eggshell, retrieve them for his under-the-mattress non-lending library.
Inspired by this line of thinking, I recently went so far as to ask a fashion editor at one of the top magazines if the higher-ups didn't slip in content to appeal to the hairier sex. Her response: "Yeah, right." But honestly, take out all of those articles about "getting him to say those three magic words" and all those too-much-information topics (yeast, cellulite, the glass ceiling), replace them with something relevant (the college draft, why size doesn't matter), and slap on a new title (Gentleman's Bizarre), and you'd have a hit. The dark secret is out: Women's magazines the other men's magazine. Just to prove the point, I settled in for an evening with a stack of today's versions of some of my old companions. The pictures had lost none of their allure. With summer's impending arrival, the spring issues were a collective homage to the bikini. And then there was the striking pictorial of a naked Kate Moss in British Vogue material that would have warranted a "sick day" at thirteen. Overall, the images were pretty, sexy, weird, perverse. In a word, pleasing. Yet while the younger me, with the adolescent hair trigger, would have never made it through an entire issue, the older, more sober me was surprisingly able to consider Kate Moss and all the rest for a full hour before my stoicism was toppled by a sheer, tangerine-colored nightie.
Now, in the resolution phase, I see with clarity the great advantage of women's magazines: it's liberating to enjoy images I have been programmed to desire without the unhappy burden of knowing that my all-too-predictable desires are being preyed upon. It's like catching a glimpse of the neighbors having sex instead of renting an "amateur porn" video.
Of course, it's still a guilty pleasure. But as long as I can forget, for the requisite hour, that women's magazines prey on the insecurities of women duping them into wanting to be svelter, sexier and more fashionable and face-lifted than they could or should ever be I can recreate my idle teenage bliss.
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
