There are a few ads that have been running in southern Ontario lately that, to me, encapsulate a way that a certain kind of man thinks about women -- a creepy, retrograde way that was kept more or less hidden in mixed company, and in mainstream popular culture, until the advent of Maxim magazine a few years ago. The marketing strategy of the local phone company is to target single men. One spot features two young-ish guys in a park, planning to trick a couple of passing female rollerbladers into falling desperately in love with them. Having ascertained via cell phone that the rollerbladers are within view, one guy lies prone on the path, pretending to have fallen and hurt himself. When the ladies stop to help, the other guy swoops out from behind a tree and announces that he's a doctor. In a spot touting the same company's high-speed internet service, we learn that it's possible to surf and talk on the phone simultaneously, without a second phone line. Cutting back and forth between a beautiful and sophisticated woman, and the average-looking dude trying to woo her, we see how easy it is for the guy to deceive the woman into believing that he, too, shares her interest in fine wine and Italian films; he can just use an online search engine to look up a few salient tidbits of information on each topic even as he speaks to the woman. (This commentator was waiting for the campaign to end with the woman's discovery that her would-be paramour is a complete fraud and her consequent immediate rejection of him; it hasn't happened so far.) The message I get is that women are scary and elusive, yet all the more desirable for it. At the same time, a woman is choosy -- too choosy ever to voluntarily pledge her troth to an average guy who isn't interested in wine or Italian films; therefore, if your aim is to partner yourself with a woman -- and if partnering with a woman isn't your aim, you must be gay -- you will only be able to accomplish your goal through trickery and subterfuge. For these men, there is Maxim.

By contrast, beer companies -- which target married or partnered men -- teach us how shallow is the promise held out by the phone company. Sure, guys, it seems like a good idea to trap a woman into loving you, but once you have her, you will soon discover that it is she who "has" you! Then (as in a recent Coors Light ad), your male friends will have to remove you bodily from your girlfriend's clutches, take you to a bar, quiz you on sporting statistics, intentionally dirty your clothing, remark to one another in hushed tones that she's "gotten to" you, and finally rejoice when they've sufficiently deprogrammed you, and you can reach for the TV remote and change the channel of your own volition...and then head for the dance floor to jump up and down near other single women, presumably so that you can choose one and lie to her, convince her to love you, and then resent her when she tries to enslave you. And make no mistake, you will resent her. You will find yourself in a Bud Light ad, complaining to the camera that your wife doesn't "let" you go out with "the guys" until you've "spent some quality time with her." Bud Light's researchers will intercede by inventing an electronic "empathy mask" you can wear -- a papier-mâché face that will hang on the side of your head and use its computerized voicebox to ask your wife how her day was and whether she's wearing a new blouse. And when the mask sparks and sets your head on fire, you will not rue the wasted effort to devise a means by which to ignore your wife; no -- you will happily tell the camera that you got to watch the game with "the guys" in the hospital, and the Bud Light announcer will pronounce the damage to your head a "win-win" situation. The message I got was that women hate for men to have fun, and that a man's ultimate goal -- once he's hoodwinked a woman into sharing his bed and his life -- is to escape her company and spend as much time as possible with your male friends (but only in beer-intensive settings, the better to deflect any possible suspicion that you or any of them might be so adverse to the company of women that you'd prefer to share your life and your bed with one of "the guys"). For these men, there is GQ.

The last time I talked about GQ (and, yes, fine, the last time I talked about Esquire, too), I explained that the reason I find men's magazines so objectionable is that they posit themselves as being sort of a monthly version of Manhood for Dummies, teaching men about Vaseline and different kinds of liquor and, in a particularly gross column in the September 2001 issue, how to respond when confronted by a crying woman -- including special instructions on how to behave if you have made her cry. Leaving aside Mars and Venus and John Gray, I put it to this site's male readership: aren't you insulted that this asinine publication thinks that, due to the simple biological accident that you happened to be born with testicles instead of ovaries, you are constitutionally incapable of relating to other human beings or responding appropriately to their natural emotional displays? For god's sake, no one is or should be happy in the presence of a person who is crying, but if women are any better at comforting people when they cry, it sure as hell isn't because they read all about it in Glamour.

Please understand -- I know it must be boring for you to keep reading as I harp on men's magazines over and over again, and keep saying the same things in different ways because every issue of GQ and Esquire is pretty much identical to the last, except the cover subject. But I really just cannot comprehend how it is possible that GQ can exist and thrive when it takes its readership for such simpletons. Right there on the cover, we are promised that we will learn "What White Guys Must Know About Black Women." The TV column is all about the "new sexiness of late-night TV" as exemplified Blind Date and E!'s Wild On and those "Girls of [insert purportedly illicit location]" videos. There are, I admit, also several compelling features and columns in the September 2001 issue (many more than I've seen in any recent issue of Esquire), on subjects as disparate as HIV-positive activists who are now convinced that there is no such thing as AIDS; slavery reparations for African-Americans; and a first-person memoir of depression. I am not so single-minded in my hatred of light-beer-ad guys and the cottage industries that have sprung up to serve them that I can't allow that this issue of GQ is not, in fact, entirely worthless. It's just that I feel it does a disservice to the thoughtful articles to make them share space on the table of contents with smug, juvenile trash like "91 Things A Woman Can't Ask A Man To Give Up" (which is no sad, shameful humour column relegated to the back page of the magazine in the hopes that no one will notice it; oh, no, it's right there standing tall and defiantly sticking out its chin among the features, right before a memoir about alcoholism). It came as news to me that, were these actual points of contention between Glark and me, GQ would not allow me to ask Glark to give up "[t]hat stack of Traci Lords videos in the closet," his "right to quote sports stats to [me] -- and believe this qualifies as conversation," his use of the expression "poon hound," his "belief that [he] could still get it...from someone other than [me]...without paying...a lot," or his "belief that gay guys think [he is] cool" (because "gay guys" are not, in fact, regular people, but are rather an inscrutable race of mysterious sodomites about whom little is known, but much suspected -- not unlike the "Black Women" about whom "White Guys" are also schooled in this issue).

Considering that he's in such annoying company, cover boy Ben Stiller comes across rather well in a complimentary if brief profile by Adam Sachs. (My esteemed colleague The Man from F.U.N.K.L.E. has already expressed his affection for and admiration of Stiller -- which I share -- in Stiller's Fame Audit.) For some reason, Sachs is inordinately concerned about Stiller's box-office performance: Meet the Parents isn't critically acclaimed (as far as we know from this profile), but "hugely profitable"; while The Cable Guy was not exactly a blockbuster, Sachs assures us that "it ended up making real money"; and to hear Sachs tell it, Stiller couldn't give a shit whether critics or audiences enjoy the upcoming Zoolander as long as it "cleans up at the box office." We learn that Stiller is a perfectionist, has spent a lot of time personally editing Zoolander, and compares himself unfavorably with Wes Anderson (his director in The Royal Tenenbaums, coming in December) -- admitting that Anderson is "an artist" whereas Stiller is more concerned about "satisfy[ing] all of America," even as he knows he "will fail miserably" in his project.

Stiller is quite contemplative and serious about his job, and thus an exploration of his approach is pretty interesting -- despite short detours into hackneyed celebrity-profile crutches related to the minutiae of Stiller's irrelevant movements during the interview (Ben Stiller uses "fake sugar in his coffee"! Someone tell Ted Casablanca!). The impression I got was that Sachs probably tried to get Stiller to talk about his personal life but that Stiller headed him off (for instance, there's only a passing reference to Christine Taylor, Stiller's wife of just over a year), so that Sachs had to make it all about Stiller's work. It may well be that Stiller has his own list of 91 Things his wife can't ask him to give up, or that there are things he needs to learn about black women, or that he would like someone to tell him how to cope in the presence of a crying woman, and that it just didn't come up in the interview. Because I am fond of him, though, I choose to believe that he's better than the light-beer-ad guys who'll be reading all about him this month.