The good thing about Playboy Magazine was that even if you were a girl—and especially if you were a girl growing up in the third quarter of the 20th century—it became part of your cultural consciousness in a relatively nonthreatening way. Beyond any kind of postfeminist analysis, there was just something very… de-fanging about it. The bland well-scrubbed women with their round girlie handwriting, the just-racy-enough cartoons, the interviews and fiction that were almost always cool, and that great equalizer, the Playboy Advisor! By way of which we all learned that men were just as clueless on their end as we were on ours. All the nattering about stereo components and which wine to serve with spaghetti and what was a fun thing to do for someone’s bachelor party that didn’t involve hookers, it was just another form of insecurity. And if there are any universal denominators when it comes to the business of sex appeal, insecurity is pretty high on the list.

But now it’s 2009 and that insecurity has been tempered with irony and given a shiny veneer of cool, and instead of the Playboy Advisor we have Beef!, a sexy foodie advice magazine for men. True, it’s in German, but with content like this I imagine an English-language version can’t be far behind:

Beef! is like Esquire, but with meat instead of suits: clean design, good illustration and photography, four different kinds of paper (all thick and matte), original content ideas, and a lot of “what modern man simply has to know.” Which in this case means teaching 30-something advertising executives how to skin a rabbit, how to distinguish the different odors (and their meanings) of a wine gone bad, and that the world’s best whisky comes not from Scotland, but from Japan.

It even has a centerfold, in this case a five-row timeline with explicit, graphic instructions for cooking a four-course meal in five hours. That Harman Kardon stereo receiver is so 1973, but a Hereford rib-eye steak? Timeless.

(via Bookforum)