If it's a man's world ...

Dennis Hopper poses with John Huston, hawking Jim Beam bourbon. Robert DeNiro reps Remington's Hot Combs. Cricketeer offers a few choice opening lines to use while wearing its wool sports coats (example: "Would you like a massage?"). You can mail-order "dashing dashikis" from Eleganza, while the "latest" in fashionable menswear – a "100 millimetre collar" – can apparently be accessorized with an eye patch. And women simply love a man who wears A-1 slacks ...

Welcome to world of The Male Mystique, a stroll through the back pages of Madison Avenue's make-believe bachelor pad of the '60s and '70s. A compilation of print ads designed to sell machismo in magazines such as GQ, the Scene, and Playboy, the book offers up a composite of the "modern man" constructed from endless images of amber liquor, cologne, and haute couture. You can practically smell the musk wafting off the page.

"It's a neo-comic book ripe with a 'stream of macho,' " explains the tome's author, Jacques Boyreau, who assembled the gallery of consumer guydom from his own personal stash of vintage periodicals procured at thrift stores, used-book emporiums, and garage sales. Best known as a local filmmaker, occasional lecturer on "trash cinema" studies at San Francisco State University, and proprietor of the Werepad, Boyreau applied the same archival modus of his last book on exploitation-film posters – Trash – to the bygone era of Me Decade masculinity marketing. (Of course, the "message" wasn't just consigned to one medium, something Boyreau will be waxing rhapsodic about when he presents a rare screening of the classic '70s male-odrama Lifeguard at the PFA Theater April 14.) "Men had the potential to have a much deeper relationship with glamour during that period," he points out, adding to the preface's exaltation of yesteryear's "old-man playboys, pipe smokers, Marin County swingers, suburban cowboys and Superdudes."

What's just as interesting is the cultural flotsam rising to the surface in these gems, such as a tendency to add misogyny to its testosterone fantasy – included are such jaw-droppers as the product tag line "Statutory Serape" and one ad's claim that the "Libs" ' use of the term male chauvinist pigs actually translates to "rugged, masculine, virile." Like all good visual time capsules, Mystique's collection both reflects a historical point in time and refracts something back: in this case, how its imagery used insecurity to sell ideology. The bonus, of course, is that you also get to learn the virtues of a portable Travel Bar. And that clothes truly do make the man. (David Fear)

What women want

On April 7 the stars of Showtime's gay ghetto descend on the Castro Theatre for a "red carpet," invite-only screening of Queer as Folk's season premiere and The L Word's season finale. And while we're excited at the possibility of sharing oxygen and bartenders with L Word star Katherine Moennig and QAF's Gale Harold at the after-party, the prospect of the shows' creators convening for a no-holds-barred rap session is even more appealing.

If it were just us, if everyone else seemed to be enjoying themselves, we wouldn't complain, or at least not quite so stridently. But the Sunday-night L Word TV parties have an angry edge of late, and the weekly high of a full hour of dyke drama has faded. Lately we shout at the screen, not in fun like when Paris Hilton showed up as a Ph.D. candidate on The O.C., but like a pack of rabid villagers with pitchforks and torches. Too many scenes involving the show's one straight couple recently had us designing a drinking game called Jenny Gives Her Boyfriend/Fiancé/Ex Tim Another Blow Job. Because at base, when you get to the crux of the matter, the underlying problem with this show is sex.

We're not suggesting a moratorium on straight-on-straight or even used-to-be-straight-on-straight hookups, but it is called The L Word, not The S Word, not Blow Jobs, so why all the lesbian bed death and humiliatingly foiled dyke-on-dyke pickups? Even resident stud Shane (Moennig) gets shafted, so to speak, when her ladyfriend's husband unexpectedly comes home, necessitating the worst kind of coitus interruptus.

Meanwhile, as The L Word season one grinds to a halt (finale April 11), QAF returns, and though we feel disloyal saying so, frankly we're a little relieved. We realize The L Word was never meant to be the muff-diving equivalent of QAF, and the latter show's treatment of lesbians has sometimes felt like gay-on-gay violence, but its homage to blowing and fucking is beginning to seem like a model for L to sit up and take notes on.

QAF has done some growing up and slowing down over the break, if those two things mean less raunch and more attention given to ugly breakups, custody battles, the long-term consequences of getting the shit kicked out of you by homo-haters, and other facts of life – and death. But there's still the kind of hot sex that might, for example, cause one's reasonably well-adjusted straight male housemate to double-take. And that's what you want.

And maybe what we're really searching for and missing in The L Word, while emblematized by dyke action, is actually just relevance. This was always somewhat lacking, but we forgave much, so thrilled were we at the sight of a few women humping on TV. It's Los Angeles, we reasoned, and they do things differently there. But the thrill is gone, and The L Word just seems leery of scraping against anything that might cause discomfort or confusion. Even girl talk about where urine comes from and female ejaculation feels sanitized. We can read about that in Cosmo. That doesn't make it topical. By contrast, an early episode of QAF's fourth season references gay marriage, the Texas sodomy case, the bullshit factor of AIDS-med ads, and a benefit for a transgender homeless shelter. There's even a Pink Pistol-esque vigilante making the streets of Pittsburgh a scarier place for straight people.