Reflecting on the things I learn on a monthly basis by reading GQ Magazine . . .(April 2009 Edition)
1. (cover) The guy who played the vampire guy on Twilight is the SAME guy who played Cedric Diggery in Harry Potter?!? No way! Hmmm . . . somehow Cedric Diggery just got a little bit hotter . . .
2. (page 44) "Because after all, it's a man's world." Really? And then you wonder why your girlfriends beat y'all over the head with feminist theory.
*see image*
3. (page 60) Apparently galoshes are back. With a vengeance. In bright traffic cone orange.
4. (page 79) I have to say it warms my heart a little when I see that a primarily "straight" man's magazine (although that can be debated . . . as I subscribe to it and I am sure I am not the only gay to do so) takes one for the team on tasteless gay humor. The blurb about Andy Samberg's Gay Humor is both funny and thoughtful and most importantly, accurate.
5. (page 90) Lenny Dykstra is a pompous asshole. He doesn't really do much for the current image of rich people in the bailout/AIG/wallstreet-induced-recession era.
Then just when I think that I've had all I can take as far as witty takes on exercising male privilege, GQ always manages to end their issues with well written and touching articles. Here are examples:
6. (pgs 99-101) Examples of men being (woefully sterotypical) men.
*interrupted by pgs 116-121 where I must ask myself yet again whether or not Neil Patrick Harris actually is cute or not. The jury is still out.
7. The article starting on page 126 by John Rico on John Walker Lindh is very interesting. On one hand, I don't really buy totally that he was just over in Afghanistan chillin' with the Taliban not really sure about what he had gotten himself into. The man made a video condemning America for Christ's sake. I mean, c'mon. However, on the other hand, the McBushyism witch hunt that followed 9/11, where anyone and everyone with any kind of unpatriotic zeal was deemed a traitor to the US, it isn't really that hard to believe that the Bush Administration both wanted to make an example out of him and feed him to the angry lions that was the American Public at the time. Do I think that he is totally innocent? Obviously not. I mean c'mon, it says on US passports that if you decide to engage in foreign military that you are forgoing your American rights and citizenship. This is a guy who was in pursuit of extensive education - he wasn't dumb. Yet at the same time, some of the comments printed in the article about how him and his family should be "butt fucked by the severed dick of a dead Muslim before being hanged and tossed into a sewer" doesn't really say much about the rational American public, both then and now.
Nor does it say much about racism and homophobia. But that, my friends, is an entirely different story.
All in all, it again just makes on think about the great PR machine that is the American Government and both the truths and the lies that get told to sell an image.
8. The other interesting (and heart breaking) story starts on page 154 by Wil S. Hylton entitled "The Unspeakable Choice." It follows the choice of a mother who must relinquish her mentally ill pre-teen son during the Nebraska Safe Haven outbreak because she has no other choices to turn to. Hers is just one example of injustice and inequality in a system that can forget about those who are unfortunate. And before you think I am being too soft on a mother who abandoned her child, I will leave you with the last paragraph of the essay:
"To save Skyler, she tried something new. To save him, she gave up more than custody; she gave up the most fundamental thing of all: her pride. Her pride as a mother, as a provider; her joy in those precious moments, however scarce, when the family was one, and it worked. Gone now, gone forever. And the irony is, if you wanted one signal of a parent's intentions, one clue of a mother whose commitment was total, it would be her willingness to sacrifice everything for her child - not only the child, but the essence of herself. It would be the mother willing to die for her children, to die inside. And Lavennia Coover is dying." (page 162)
From GQ Magazine, April 2009
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