Esquire, attempting to do for men what Cosmo does for women

A few weeks ago I started subscribing to the Esquire magazine website RSS feed in Google Reader, and I've been kind of dumbfounded by what I've seen there. Some very representative titles of articles:

• How to Eat Like a Man Anywhere You Go
• Why is Clint Eastwood Still The Man?
• What You Can Learn from Mad Men's Season 4 Style, a feature that includes tips such as "Your clothes begin to tell a story about your character, without overpowering it. ... Start seeing your shopping habit as opportunities to invest in your character's wardrobe" and "We ladies love a good vest because it defines your torso under the jacket. It looks rakish and cool when you pull off your jacket. Please do not scrimp on quality, though, and make sure your vest fits you perfectly."

What the fuck!? Why don't they just call the magazine Tips for Clueless Guys with Terminally Insecure Gender Identity?

That "Mad Men Style" feature alone is a masterpiece of insinuation, scorn, and impossibly high standards, written by a woman who apparently thinks men spend more time thinking about their clothes than they do about pussy. In other words, apparently Esquire is a magazine for closeted gay men.

Clint Eastwood, really?? They think 35-year-old men regard an 80-year-old as a role model?

All of TIME's sex covers

Weirdly, you can search the TIME magazine site for covers by topic. Here are all the covers related to:

• sex
• Bruce Springsteen
• jobs

The latter query gets both covers on employment and on the Apple co-founder. Anyway.

Friends' sites, links and projects

San Francisco author Michelle Richmond had a reader so entranced with her novel The Year of Fog that he took a Flickr photo set of the places and things mentioned in the book. The novel is being developed for the screen by Newmarket Films.

Stephen Elliott and some other folks have a new online magazine, The Rumpus, and they're having a benefit reading on Jan. 14.

Focus on the Fundies: Xtian bookstore chain refuses magazine with female pastors

A bookstore chain owned by the far-right Southern Baptist Convention has carried a magazine called GospelToday for many years, but recently refused to distribute an issue depicting female pastors on its cover, because of the denomination's rule that only men can be pastors in its churches.

It wasn't that the magazine was saying the five female ministers were, or should be, pastors at Southern Baptist churches, or that the SBC should change its rules. The denomination simply didn't want customers at its bookstores to be exposed to the fact that other denominations -- just as conservative, no doubt, in most matters -- allowed women to become pastors. Such is the paranoid attitude that typifies fundamentalists and totalitarians everywhere as they try frantically to keep control of people.

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