• by Phyllis Fine , Staff Writer, March 10, 2006

In an age of dumbed-down men's magazines, GQ has managed not to lose a point of its IQ. While Hachette Filipacchi's new men's pub, Shock, seeks to do just that with pictures of car crashes and the like, Conde Nast's GQ takes the classy route, with sharp cultural and political coverage among its fashion/lifestyle pages.

What other men's book would feature a snarky quiz, "You Don't Know Dick," about odd little facts in our sharp-shooting vice president's life? Or give more space to a detailed portrait of presidential hopeful Senator Joe Biden, Jr. (complete with fly-on-the wall scenes of him interacting with President Bush), than to the requisite celeb cover interview (in this case, "Lost'''s Matthew Fox)?

GQ's features have enough broad appeal to make it a general interest book; in fact, over a quarter (27 percent) of the pub's readers are women, according to GQ's media kit.

Certainly Andy Selsberg's essay on premature ejaculation--"Already?"--serves GQ's female readership well, with a sophisticated, rueful analysis of the issue. Selsberg equates women's demands for longer-lasting erections with men's demands for the perfect female body, noting, "We can be united in thinking we all come up short."

The story's sidebar, "Does it Happen To All Guys?," asks whether premature ejaculation is a similar problem in gay male sex--er, no, for various (some graphic) reasons. This is the only piece to overtly address another important, if uncounted, GQ's demographic--that gay guy for whom fashion is a serious interest.

But anyone interested in literate, engaging writing is bound to enjoy the issue. The best piece, "Minor Threat," does what good journalism should: shine a clear, pure light on a complex subject--in this case, the white nationalist singing group Prussian Blue, made up of two 13-year-old twins, Lamb and Lynx Gaede. Writer Aaron Gell endures anti-Semitic jokes to retain access to his subjects, and it pays off. April, the girls' mother, is obviously the driving force behind their beliefs, and Gell gives her enough rope to hang herself with an ironic quote about Prussian Blue's receiving death threats: "It's unbelievable to me how intolerant these people are," she says. Then there's the white supremacist's take on the many misfits in the movement: "A lot of people get into racism for the wrong reasons." So what are the right reasons to become a racist?

The magazine isn't all serious, however. My second-favorite feature, "The Sucking Point," is all snarky fun, charting the arc from greatness to, yes, suckitude, of such icons as Paul McCartney, Ralph Nader and Steve Martin (which echoes a recent conversation I had about how the former "wild and crazy guy" had sold out to Hollywood with his crappy movies--don't you love it when you read something that crystallizes what you've already been thinking?).

The service pieces do a credible job, more detailed than typical women's fashion pieces, presumably because poor straight guys can be clueless when it comes to dressing themselves.

I really like Jim Nelson's editor's note, a funny liberal screed about the confirmation hearing of new Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito (Nelson compares Alito's wife's dramatic crying to a performance by Meryl Streep). The piece is so good, I almost forgive Nelson for his awkward segue from the Supreme Court back to GQ: "Now--because a great read is the only recourse during these surreal times--we'd like you to be the activist judge of our new issue."

That's one of the few false steps in the mag. Another, "The Great Fuel-Injected Leap Forward," is an ambitious piece that turns into something weird and self-indulgent. It seems to be positioned as a travelogue, with the writer driving a $400,000 Ferrari Scaglietti "all the way from Beijing to the Gobi Desert to find out" if China is "ready for the next stage of capitalism." But the piece itself shows us little about China, focusing instead on pointless anecdotes, like the one about being rushed to a Chinese hospital department labeled "gynecology."

That unfunny story--told as if the mere mention of an estrogen-rich word were enough to provoke hilarity--reminds me that, with GQ, I'm still a woman eavesdropping on what are essentially male conversations. Still, at least, it's smart talk for the most part--not the drunken frat parties of the laddie magazines.