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? (read the full article)

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: (read the full article)

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. (read the full article)

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: (read the full article)

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. (read the full article)

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. (read the full article)

Nobody can screw up a room like a gay man on a mission.

All the mythology about the deft taste of gay men may be great to keep the rubes shelling out the big bucks to home decorators with fire in their eyes — but buyer beware. Lemmings are committed to a vision too.

One thing that gay men have in abundance is taste. Not necessarily good taste. Just tons and tons of vivid taste.

And this aesthetic imperative, this relentless ordering of the world into “pretty” (or “trendy” or “ugly beautiful”) boxes, smacks up against another gay imperative. The swinish male onrush to have sex everywhere and with everyone. (read the full article)

Remove your hair with this wax, that cream, our laser, electrolysis, snake oil, Auzzie Nads, Nair … choose your weapon now!

Is it that important that we wage war on our body hair? How long has this been going on? What sick mind set the wheels in motion that we should venerate the hairless and look down on those gifted with a nice chest of fuzz? Do a search on the web for “body hair” and I challenge you to find one site that doesn’t demand you join the fight against unsightly body hair.

You’ll find three things: body hair removal techniques, Rogaine ads, or pages about hair fetishes.

Bust out a porn magazine (not Bear or Honcho) and you will not find anything but shaved chests, bald ball sacks, and depilated ass cracks. Same goes for almost all porn movies presently. When did hair get so disgusting to us that we need to remove it from the places it was supposed to be? Was there a big memo about killer crab lice? (read the full article)