Metrosexuality traces its roots to a single source: Looking Good: A Guide for Men by Charles Hix (1977). Do some checking around and you will find that the book is kind of a cult gay classic, despite being overtly ungay. You could make some sort of case, perhaps a convincing one, that a book on personal grooming for men written today could have few, if any, homosexualist overtones (it’s Russell Smith’s and Glenn O’Brien’s métier), but 1977 was an era in which not everything was as it seemed.

The first give­away is the book’s photo­graph­er: Bruce Weber (yes). The gig is pretty much up right there, isn’t it? But it’s too easy to laugh. I had long since stopped laugh­ing after having read “It All Started Here,” by the actually sometimes quite troubles­ome and obstruc­tion­ist David Kamp, in GQ, October 2007. Kamp docu­ments the history of Weber; his “sister” David Sterzin (my term, and a bit reductive); and Weber’s muse and Sterzin’s crush, a former water-polo player named Aquilon.

Twenty years in, I realize the Weber æsthetic is only that, an æsthetic. Photographs of naked men grooming, men in shorts weighing themselves at the gym, and, most curiously, men in jockstraps firing like a rocket straight up from a swimming pool may be suggestive or ridiculous, but I defy anyone to honestly call them sexual.

Now, this does not prevent Looking Good from falling prey to overripeness. If we grant that the photos are Weberian (almost undatably so – they could be from any generation), what does the writing tell us?

Well, it’s typeset in a nice loose Optima and is easy enough to read, assuming one overlooks the display type. Let’s talk about hair care. [continue with: ‘Looking Good: A Guide for Men’ →]

(Cf.)

It’s been 14 years. Can’t people learn how to link?

• Your blog post needs to link to what it’s talking about inside the post, not in a footer. The exemplar of this failed strategy is Gawker, consistently blowing it from its first post in 2002 through this morning. As Gawker’s entire strategy in totum has been cloned all over the place, it is no surprise that its failed link strategy has also been cloned: Tropolism, the most derivative and structurally dishonest Gawker clone, duplicated it three years ago (even their archives do it), while Spectator cloned it as recently as February.
• It could be worse: The footnoted link might simply say Read, giving you the site visitor the unsettling experience of wading through an entire blog post about another page that remains uncited and hidden.
• The headline of your post is, by convention, a permalink to that post – unless you’re the xBlog (sic), in which the headline links to the page the post discusses.
• It seems possible to work for Mozilla, thereby positioning oneself as a champion of the “open Web,” yet shamelessly funnel links through Digg.
• It seems, moreover, possible to work as a newspaper and magazine journo, and occasional journalism professor, yet be so clueless of the Web as to list every link as (link). Ryan Bigge, come on down! (Click here to go fuck yourself. You may be tall, strapping, and young, but you don’t belong in this century.) I gather this non-Web nonsense is permissible because Doctorow does it, but he has a lot of annoying habits.

In their own category remain links to non-HTML (or at least non-text) sources that don’t advertise themselves as such. Nobody likes hitting a PDF or, much worse, a YouTube link by mistake. It’s entirely avoidable, and if you cause your visitors to do it anyway, you suck. Simply adding “ (PDF)” or “ (YouTube)” inside the link text will suffice, though I go a few steps beyond that.

And here’s a prediction: Writers from every site I mentioned, especially Bigge’s, will be completely unable to learn the right way to link from this very post. They haven’t learned it from any other site they’ve ever used, so at least they’re consistently inept and user-hostile.

(Cf.)

(Cf.)

Those extraneous strokes aren’t charming, they’re intrusive. Nonetheless.