Buzz Bissinger’s long, strange chronicle of his shopping addiction, particularly to Gucci, which was published yesterday in GQ makes the case for many things, including higher taxes on anyone who can afford to blow $638,412.97 on luxury clothes, mostly from Gucci, over a period of three years, and gag orders to keep parents from hopelessly embarrassing their children. But in between Bissinger’s tossed-off mentions of the medication he’s taking to treat bipolar disorder, his meandering and inconclusive discussions of his evolving sexuality (some of which seems shockingly at the expense of his wife), and his cluelessness about the extent to which his Gucci personal shopper must be having a high old time taking him for a very expensive ride, there’s a kernel of an interesting idea, particularly appearing in a magazine that does a lot to set the standards for men’s fashion.

Bissinger writes:

Some of the clothing is men’s. Some is women’s. I make no distinction. Men’s fashion is catching up, with high-end retailers such as Gucci and Burberry and Versace finally honoring us. But women’s fashion is still infinitely more interesting and has an unfair monopoly on feeling sexy, and if the clothing you wear makes you feel the way you want to feel, liberated and alive, then fucking wear it. The opposite, to repress yourself as I did for the first fifty-five years of my life, is the worst price of all to pay. The United States is a country that has raged against enlightenment since 1776; puritanism, the guiding lantern, has cast its withering judgment on anything outside the narrow societal mainstream. Think it’s easy to be different in America? Try something as benign as wearing stretch leather leggings or knee-high boots if you are a man.

Whether stretch leather leggings look good on Bissinger is one question. But the other, more relevant one, is how does men’s fashion relate to men’s bodies and men’s sense of their own sexual self-presentation? And how will men’s fashion and male body image issues change, particularly as men start to have an experience that’s been most squarely the provenance of women: being objectified?

There’s something fitting about the fact that Bissinger’s screed dropped the same day as these new Gillette spots which, in the interest of getting men to buy new shaving products, is encouraging men to start acting rather like women. Specifically, the company wants men to start worrying about how much of their body hair they can retain and still be sexually attractive to women like Kate Upton, who apparently doesn’t like back hair, New Girl’s Hannah Simone, who likes a smooth stomach, and a third lady who wants her gentleman friends to go completely bare:

This is a natural expansion of Gillette’s business, of course. Once you’ve got women removing as much hair as is humanely possible from their bodies, you’ve got to start targeting other people, and other body parts if you want to crete new markets.

These business interests have real consequences, of course. Hair removal is one thing—razor knicks and skin irritation aside, it’s not as if there are long-term health consequences to shaving your legs or chest, or a lot of Olympic swimmers would be in a fair bit of trouble. But what about steroids, or heavy lifting regimens among teenage boys who are still growing? Men’s sizing for things like suits is more nuanced than sizing for say, women’s dresses, but how will more off-the-rack sizing, and popular cuts of clothing, shift to accomodate new expectations of male body size?

Body image expectations and grooming requirements have long been more stringent for women than for men, but women and women’s fashion have responded with a great deal of innovation, and flair, and fun. Men seem to be at an earlier point in this cycle, when the standards are rising, but fashion norms haven’t yet broadened as dramatically as they are for women. Someone other than Buzz Bissinger will come up with something more insightful to say about what it means for men to get pulled more aggressively into an alternately enamored and antagonistic relationship with fashion and their bodies—and what it means for that relationship to expand to include men who aren’t worried about trying to fit into tight-fitting made-to-measure Italian suiting. But Bissinger is not wrong to argue that there’s powerful, unexplored territory out there when it comes to men, fashion, and the presentation of their sexuality. He’s just missing the fact that it’s not just his personal style, but powerful business interests, that are going to push that discussion forward—and in ways that he and other men might find as difficult and uncomfortable as women have for years.

GQ has named Beyoncé Knowles the sexiest woman of the millenium, an assessment with which I have no quibble. But what’s most interesting about the resulting profile of her, written by Amy Wallace, and the interview for which took place on the condition that Wallace consent that it be recorded by Knowles in an inversion of the normal agreements between source and subject, is that it’s all about Beyonce’s experience of being watched, often by herself. There are stories of Beyonce watching DVDs of every performance she’s ever made. There’s mention of the autobiographical documentary she’s making for HBO. And then there’s the intense, almost unnerving, archiving Knowles appears to be doing of even her most private life:

Anytime she wants to remind herself of all that work—or almost anything else that’s ever happened in her life—all she has to do is walk down the hall. There, across from the narrow conference room in which you are interviewing her, is another long, narrow room that contains the official Beyoncé archive, a temperature-controlled digital-storage facility that contains virtually every existing photograph of her, starting with the very first frames taken of Destiny’s Child, the ’90s girl group she once fronted; every interview she’s ever done; every video of every show she’s ever performed; every diary entry she’s ever recorded while looking into the unblinking eye of her laptop.

“Stop pretending that I have it all together,” she tells herself in a particularly revealing video clip, looking straight into the camera. “If I’m scared, be scared, allow it, release it, move on. I think I need to go listen to ‘Make Love to Me’ and make love to my husband.”

Beyoncé’s inner sanctum also contains thousands of hours of private footage, compiled by a “visual director” Beyoncé employs who has shot practically her every waking moment, up to sixteen hours a day, since 2005. In this footage, Beyoncé wears her hair up, down, with bangs, and without. In full makeup and makeup-free, she can be found shaking her famous ass onstage, lounging in her dressing room, singing Coldplay’s “Yellow” to Jay-Z over an intimate dinner, and rolling over sleepy-eyed in bed. This digital database, modeled loosely on NBC’s library, is a work in progress—the labeling, date-stamping, and cross-referencing has been under way for two years, and it’ll be several months before that process is complete. But already, blinking lights signal that the product that is Beyoncé is safe and sound and ready to be summoned— and monetized—at the push of a button.

Given how invasive paparazzi already are, I can’t imagine inviting more documentation into, say, dinner with a spouse or boyfriend. But I wish the profile had gone longer on this point. Because there’s something fascinating about a woman responding to the relentless commodification of her life by taking very direct control of the process. If you have an archive of every commercial photograph ever taken of you, you’re not going to be surprised when something surfaces. If you have better footage of yourself than anyone could ever put on the market, you have enormous control of what your final image is. And if you’re going to be nitpicked to death, becoming your own most careful critic and curating your image is a way to satisfy yourself, rather than satisfying someone else, even if the standards you’re striving to meet remain enormously high. I’m not sure I could live up to the standards Beyoncé sets for herself, and I wonder if they represent a capitulation to some really horrible cultural norms. But I admire her discipline.

When Cameron Crowe’s We Bought a Zoo came out last year, I was not particularly amused: it’s always seemed to me that treating the welfare of wild animals as all fun and games ignores the safety and needs of everyone involved. And now two stories about a huge private menagerie in Zanesville, Ohio where the owner let the animals lose, killed himself, and left the local authorities to try to contain a hugely dangerous situation (mostly, they had to kill the animals) have made clear precisely how un-cute this situation can be. As y’all know, I’m not particularly in favor of regulating entertainment. But when the thing that entertains you both has physical needs and can pose a danger to you, your neighbors, and itself, I find it stunning that wild animal ownership is unregulated as it is. In Esquire, Chris Jones points out that Terry Thompson’s animal ownership was less regulated than his gun poessession:

Lutz had tried for years to strip Thompson of his personal zoo, but the one animal-cruelty charge the department managed to make stick — concerning the fate of some starved cows and a buffalo — hadn’t had the desired effect. The truth was that Thompson was doing nothing illegal, at least not according to the laws of Ohio. So long as he wasn’t charging admission, he could have all the animals he wanted, virtually unregulated. But Thompson was less fortunate in his handling of another of his hoards, an arsenal of more than one hundred guns. With the assistance of the ATF, Lutz had seen Thompson charged with the possession of illegal firearms after a sting had found some with their serial numbers carefully filed off.

At GQ, Chris Heath goes into more detail on both the regulatory, cultural and ethical issues involved in what I think is a less action-movie-y but more comprehensive piece:

One of the surprising facts about owning animals like these in America right now is that while keeping them may not be cheap, buying them frequently is. Tom Stalf at the Columbus Zoo suggests to me that you can buy a lion for $300—cheaper than many pedigree dogs…Just as “good” private owners explain why they should exist and why “bad” private owners should not, sanctuaries may suggest that they should endure while private owners are phased out, and zoos can loftily assume there are clear reasons that they should be cherished while most kinds of non-zoo ownership should be frowned upon. I can see a logic in some kind of extreme libertarian position (people should be able to do what they want with animals unless they are clearly shown to be doing harm) and, conversely, in a hard-core animal-rights position (no animals should be used for any human purpose whatsoever), but the arguments for everything in between seem murky. Frequently these are based on a confident assessment of the animals’ happiness (a thorny notion), and on the pragmatic need to save animals from a place worse than where they are. (Everyone knows somewhere else worse.)

I’m not a wildlife expert, so I’m not the one to lay out a set of standards here. But I’m not clear what the argument should be for why the requirements for both animals’ and humans’ safety and well-being should be different depending on whether the animals’ owners are zoos or private individuals. In both cases, it seems like we should try to guarantee that the animals have adequate room to move around, a steady, healthy food source, and that the humans in proximity to them who are not their owners are guaranteed a level of safety. Such regulations seem like they’d end up imposing reasonable restrictions on the number of wild animals any one person could own and support. It’s one thing to say that someone has the right to take the risk that an animal who lives with them will rip them to pieces: it’s another entirely to say that their friends and neighbors have to accept being exposed to that risk.

Punchline Magazine wants to know if it’s good for women in comedies if Mila Kunis scored the cover of GQ’s comedy issue, a first for a woman, if she’s scantily clad on the cover.

Out of curiosity, I went back to 2000 in GQ’s cover archive to confirm the suspicion that I had that Kunis’ shoot is completely typical. In all that time, Angelina Jolie is the only woman who landed a cover and who got to wear an outfit for the shoot that she could have worn out in public to some place other than a beach. Her closest runners-up were Charlize Theron in hot pants and a top that shows she’s clearly not wearing a bra, Anna Kournikova in a crop top, Jamie King in a see-through top, and Eva Mendez in a mesh dress. Jennifer Anniston memorably posed topless in a jeans skirt when she was named the magazine’s first Woman of the Year. And Sacha Baron Cohen reciprocated a little when he posed naked for the comedy issue in 2009. In this context, where men generally wear full outfits and women wear very little, the treatment of Kunis isn’t out of line with GQ’s practices, where the men are role models and the women are objects of worship. It’s a pretty boring decision for a cover shot, but I don’t think it’s sexist. Given that male comedians who get the cover for this issue usually end up looking silly or not particularly attractive on it Kunis may actually be one up on them.

And if the pictures get guys who skipped Tad Friend’s Anna Faris profile to read a piece that touches substantially on sexism and comedy, I’m okay with that. We do not live in a perfect age. I think it’s very smart that Kunis called out Lucille Ball, Sarah Silverman, and Tina Fey, all women with substantial creative control over their shows (I’ve always loved that Lucille bought out Desilu after her divorce so she could own her own production company outright — this seems like a substantially overlooked issue when we talk about representation in pop culture, period) as role models. And frankly, I really respect her for agreeing with the interviewer that Tina Fey’s ongoing efforts to act as though Liz Lemon isn’t that attractive are getting tired. Kunis apparently told GQ “You want the attention to go to the joke itself rather than be distracted by who’s delivering it…But look at Bridesmaids. That movie’s full of beautiful women who are hysterical. I’m so proud of those ladies.” Comics, be they ladies or dudes, are stronger when they can execute humor on more than one track.

At the end of the day, I would be sort of sad if magazines aimed at heterosexual men weren’t able to acknowledge that women are attractive. That doesn’t feel like any sort of feminist victory to me.

GQ Editor Sarah Goldstein jumped in the comments on my post yesterday on the magazine’s Chris Evans profile to make two points, which I think are fair, though I don’t agree with them entirely. First, she says that women write things other than profiles of celebrities for the magazine. This is totally true! And it’s true of other men’s-oriented magazines, too. I, myself, wrote a snarky guide to getting your Cyrano on for Esquire‘s Valentine’s Day package, and got dandy editing, and had a fine old time.

And second, she says if I concede that women write a bunch of different things for the magazine, then my question, “If the only way for women to published in certain kinds of magazines is to take these kinds of cheesecake assignments, should we say yes, and dunk them and then insist on better for the next thing in the hopes that there will be a next thing?” is unfair. I’ve thought about this, and while yes, women may make it into GQ and its ilk in other ways, that doesn’t mean that assignments like these don’t pose a dilemma if a magazine like this comes to you and asks you to write a celebrity profile on the heels of a profile like Jessica Pressler’s camping trip like Channing Tatum.

The importance of magazines like GQ and Esquire to women writers comes in part from the fact that there simply isn’t an equivalent among magazines aimed at women. As I was thinking about this, I looked through the American Society of Magazine Editors’ database of National Magazine Award nominees and winners. If you count Vanity Fair as a general interest magazine rather than a women’s magazine, which I do, a women’s magazine hasn’t published a nominee for a Feature Writing prize in the last twenty years. Unless the interior design magazine Nest counts, no women’s magazine has ever produced a nominee for profile writing in the two categories that have existed to recognize that form. If we count Self, six Public Interest award nominees have come from women’s magazines in the last twenty years: two in that magazine, one in Golf for Women, one in Redbook, one in Glamour, one in Family Circle. Between 1991 and 2001, no women’s magazine has produced a winner or a nominee in the Reporting category.

It’s weird and hugely frustrating that women’s magazines have made such totally different choices. That’s not to say that all women’s magazines should be high-end bastions of literary journalism—certainly all men’s magazines aren’t that way—but certainly we should be able to support one or two publications that tell us about hot accessories and do groundbreaking, beautifully-written reporting. That kind of committment would both make women’s publications better, and provide material support for the kind of empowerment places like Marie Claire are ostensibly supposed to supply along with beauty advice. But they just don’t do it. And because there isn’t a parallel infrastructure for great reporting, profiles, and public service journalism among women’s magazines, access to assignments at the high-end men’s magazines, and to the amazing editing and resources that come with those assignments, and that produce major awards, is incredibly precious.

Sometimes those kinds of assignments don’t come with difficult choices, like deciding what physical risks you’re willing to face especially in circumstances where it might be more dangerous to be a woman, or whether you’re comfortable putting yourself out there in a One Crazy Night profile. But sometimes they do. Acknowledging that those kinds of choices exist and aren’t easy, especially when it seems like prestige magazines are expressing preferences for certain things, needs to be part of the conversation if we want more women writing more kinds of stories for more magazines.