“How verdant is the heather, how manly are my loins?”

The song rings down the glade as the Highlands meet the Lowlands.

The kilt is back with a vengeance, though it never truly went away.

Old by 19th Century standards when it was popularized by the Scots, the garments are becoming more visible than ever. The Scottish Military still requires them as a uniform. In Europe, rugby players and their roughneck fan base don them on and off the field. They’re even turning up on the runway. Now the kilt even has a fab subcultural acronym: the M.U.G., i.e. the Modern Unbifurcated Garment.

Why the resurgence at this time in history? Aesthetics for starters. The look is undeniably hot and surprisingly complimentary to nearly every type and age of man.

Legs characterized by granite thighs and vascular calves can often be a man’s best feature after all. The kilt accentuates the power of the waist, the breadth of the shoulders, the contours of the hips. (more…)

Gentlemen, your body is a follicular battlefield.

The male identity conundrum of the moment is body waxing. When to do it? How much is too much? Should we even be bothering at all? Is the aesthetic pressure placed for centuries upon the female form striking back at us like a livid rattlesnake clutched by the tail?

The full-throttle nether region wax — dubbed “the Boyzilian” in beauty industry vernacular — is not unlike the Gaza Strip: sacred ground for those male specimens stridently opposed to intimate grooming and an area destined for occupation by those keen on altering the lay of the land. The struggle for manly self-definition may at last be reaching a tipping point; more men are apparently opting for yea rather than nay.

David Beckham — he of the blissfully unthinking visage and Neoclassical physique — and his recent underwear-clad Armani fashion spread have only made the trend that much more discernible. The footballer’s silky bikini line has accrued as much scrutiny as his cod piece-worthy groin. With the heartthrob-of-the-moment and other depilitated notables caught in the flash bulb going flush below their equators, salons are reporting an influx of men from all walks of life following suit. Not just your uptown Patrick Batemanesque power brokers either. Construction workers and other hands-on types are reported to be the most surprising converts. (more…)

Well, it used to be a jockstrap.

But, of course, the jock couldn’t work miracles all by its lonely. It needed a nice heavy sack to make the ribbing expand — one’s own “meat and potatoes” as our dear, departed Anna Nicole once said in a rare lapse of taste.

Second best friend would be one of those Styrofoam cheaters that “shape and lift,” the Wonderbra of jockstraps.

Third in line — and the real subject of this entry — is a new invention, the Nuttybuddy.

The Nutty what?

It’s the stronger, tougher jock cup to protect — ah yes — “your boys.” Invented by ex-pitcher Mark Littell, the Nuttybuddy is twice the price ($20) of the usual athletic cup.

But Littell, 54, claims that nine seasons with the Kansas City Royals and St. Louis Cardinals gave him an inside track on both fast balls and ball fastenings.

To make his point, he gamely puts his own jewel box in danger in a — surely unintentionally hot — but hilarious, dick-centric clip that is burning up the bandwidth on YouTube today.

Let’s go the videotape, shall we sports fans? (more…)

Half-naked men!

It’s hard to top full-frontal nudity. But some half-dressed men — like the one at left — manage to do it with the sheer menace of their stare… the size of their arms! … the rip of their abs!

Why is it that certain stages of undress appear more naked than outright nudity?

The answer, I think, lies in the eye of the beholder.

Certainly we gay men look at half-naked men more aggressively than women do. The difference has little to do with homosexuality, a lot to do with the male sexual gaze.

“Men look at women,” gender scholar John Berger famously observed. “Women watch themselves being looked at.”

It’s a crucial difference. I think it is this eye-hunger, the frank aggressiveness of the male gaze, that explains why the half-nude seems more maddening to us than the Full Monty.

There is also the fetish power of clothing. Fetishes, for the most part, are about clothes — particularly those sexually charged costumes in which the body appears to be both naked and not naked at the same time: (more…)

Like we needed a new excuse to run even more photos of guys in underwear!

Still, thank you New York Times.

Last week the paper that boasts of being the national arbiter of “all the news that’s fit to print” discovered what has been fit — for two decades now — for gay guys to wear under their pants.

That is, when we deign to wear anything at all.

Our dear Gray Lady, flagship of America’s elite opinion-making newspapers, is now fainting with the news:

Men’s underwear has gone flamboyant.

Men’s underwear has gone positively sexy in the most glorious bun-huggy, dick-pushy way.

In a report on colored, patterned, basket-centric briefs, amusingly entitled But What if You Get Hit by a Taxi?, the New York Times made it official for the slow class, that is, the Metrosexuals. (more…)

Image, communications experts tell us, is all about what you look like and sound like, but has very little to do with what you are actually saying.

And the power of one’s image is the theme running through two recent columns from our favorite gal reporter, the Pulitzer Prize winning fashion writer Robin Givhan.

Givhan’s special gift is her ability to read the pop-cultural information in the way hair is combed or a suit is worn. Her columns, nominally about clothing, are more likely to be about the cultural impact of a pop celebrity or politician — she has written about Condi Rice (”Rice’s coat and boots speak of sex and power … a volatile combination … that in political circles rarely leads to anything but scandal”) as well as Dick Cheney (”The vice president was dressed in the kind of attire one typically wears to operate a snow blower.”)

Thus it was with relish that we read her column today which connected the powerful visual jujitsu of the Rutgers basketball girls with the Duke Lacrosse boys. Both teams were coming back from a barrage of racial slurs and both were the prime players in near simultaneous press conferences: (more…)

It lifts!
It cups!
It molds!

Yes, as the wise old strippers of Gypsy told the young Natalie Wood, you can pull all the stops out till they call the cops out, grind your behind till you’re dead. But you gotta get a gimmick, girl, if you wanna get ahead.

And who doesn’t need a gimmick today! A little extra, a little boost in these competitive, out-sourcing times?

The gals used to call them falsies — bra padding and flying- buttress wiring to augment their pretty little cupcakes — but we guys … well, the best we guys had was the Sling from International Male …

Ah the Sling! How it brings back those sweet, soft afternoons when we were hardened rent-boys on Santa Monica Boulevard, driving equally hard bargains as we “hitchhiked” under the beating L.A. sun, all bulges and pecs and short-shorts — courtesy of El Sling-o!

But that was yesterday! The old Sling would look positively quaint and flimsy against the latest in not-so-little white lies, the new and improved WONDERJOCK from Aussiebum. (more…)

Our favorite fathers of mindfuck, the Italian designers Dolce and Gabbana, are busy seducing farmboys again. This time they have cast their dusky, decadent magic over Canadian mega-model Andrew Stetson.

Stetson is the languid sleeping beauty in Calvin Klein’s new Euphoria cologne campaign (right). A blond, blue-eyed 28-year-old from Ontario who has but a simple dream: to earn enough money as a supermodel to one day purchase a hunk of land and use his carpentering skills to build his own home. Kind of brings a tear to your eye.

But that was before his recent tangle with the wild boys of Milan, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana. After his recent appearance in D&G’s summer menswear show, we are forced to ask (cue The Shangri-Las:) Can Andrew ever go home again?

The top photo documents an array of menacing mutations — signs that Andrew’s time in Milan has transformed his healthy outdoor tan into D&G’s trademark nightlife wan. A skin hue not unlike the blanched airbrush effect of a Pierre & Gilles photograph. (more…)