hackthis_archive | And to think I was trying to spare myself.

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wait -- i'm having a thought

And to think I was trying to spare myself.

ETA: Okay, I wrote it, posted it, decided I didn't need the blood pressure issues, got yelled at for closing it off (

antheia AND

copracat), and said, ah well, fuck it. Have at it.

Okay, I don't know what I love more about

defamer that they throw in the phrase "manager who lives in the TV set" in reference to Kevin Connolly -- Eric to the Entourage folk -- or that they do a complete dissection of Ari appearing on the cover of Los Angeles. Oh, hey, guess who was on last month's cover? George. Yeah, I tell no lies. You want something really wild? I wrote about Ari being on the cover last week as a lark, but didn't actually know he was going to be on it. Yeah, smoke that one.

In other news, after reading this article*

issaro asked, "Where are the naked men?" which is such a valid question, it's really is a bit like that advert, "Where's the beef?"

To which she,

serialkarma and I then had an exchange about how society views the male and female bodies, who sees what as erotic*, why Playgirl is just scary, and why everybody should just keep their clothes on. Unless your name is Tom Welling.

hackthis: //"Men just aren't viewed as sex objects in the same way that women are," Min says. // Um, on what planet is this? Naked men aren't hot? Uh, maybe not to her, but to me, hell yeah! The female form, you know, I have one, doesn't really interest me all that much as long as it doesn't break down, but the male form? Right on. Obviously this is why no one thinks I could ever be a lesbian.

serialkarma: You realize she meant in a societal sense, right? In which case, I think she totally has a point. Also about how we aren't trained to view the male body in an erotic way the way we are the female body--even straight women. Ever looked at a Playgirl? A friend of mine had a subscription in college, and we all used to look at and go "Huh. You know, I think they'd be sexier with clothes. The nude male just looks kind of funny.

issaro: It is a good point. But there's the flip side she doesn't discuss. Women also take off their clothes because it gives them power. The nude female form can be and is extremely powerful. Men just feel vulnerable when nude. Whether it's a good thing or bad that that's how women get power is being debated in the article but either way it's power and I don't think men have the same sense of empowerment when naked. If that makes any sense?

hackthis: You know I just don't see the female body as erotic. At all. I have one, so not interested. Playgirl, okay, that's just wrong because they're all waxed, Mystic tanned and photoshopped to within an inch of their lives. It's just weird. And wrong. I mean, do *you* feel empowered when you're naked? [I just tend to feel a bit cold]

So, now I bring the question to you lot: What do you find erotic? Why? Why not? Do you feel empowered when you're naked or would you rather have sex full clothed and through a sheet (hey, the religions may be on to something here)? Does this whole women are empowered through nudity sound like a crock of shit to you, too? Why can't we be empowered in our pyjamas? Why does Janet Jackson get publically flogged for life for flashing at the Super Bowl? Why are men who appear naked in films seen as "brave" when it's almost de rigeur for women? Who made up these rules and where can we find him (because you know it's a man) to do very vile and unseemly things to him in the name of 'empowerment'?

Plese note that this is to be a proper discussion. I trust you all know how to behave without resorting to name-calling, unless you're talking trash about Tom Ford or the chauvisnistic industry structure, then it's okay.

*I should point out that I have said Vanity Fair and my only thoughts upon seeing said article where a) Tom Ford has no place on that cover b) Both girls could stand to eat more and c) More importantly, why are they on this cover? Neither one of them could act their way out of a paper bag!

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I have never had a problem personally being naked - clothes meh.

That being said I thought that the Vanity Fair stuff was strange and gratuitous. I didn't find any of the pictures particular sexy or erotic, just sort of out of place and jarring - maybe that was the point, although I doubt it. I actually found the Tom Ford cover the least offensive - at least to my sense of aesthetics - it's the stuff inside that are essentially just random boobs popping every other page, in places where there really was no artistic point, that I saw.

As for what I find erotic - I have always been fond of the half dress man. The hint of overt sex as obscured by the everyday or ordinary work clothes.

I think men are thought of as "brave" when they do full-frontal nudity because, well, men run the world and almost all of them have issues with their dicks. For another man to be bold enough to just hang it all out there seems like quite an accomplishment to the rest of them, who don't want anyone knowing just how small it is. This also runs from the misconception that penises should all be porn-sized. I've met very few men who weren't insecure about the size of their dicks.

I think the difference is that we've decided that female nipples are genitalia but male nipples are not, and so somehow breasts because these sexualized objects instead of what they really are (bags of fat and sometimes milk). It's 'easier' for a woman to be naked because somehow topless counts.

I don't feel particularly empowered when I'm naked. I would rather be clothed, preferably in pajamas.

As for Janet Jackson, that's easy. It's the same reason Britney and Christina get flogged for acting like whores: because there's this double standard in which women's sexuality must be controlled and these particular women are not only out of control, they are also leading a generation of 11-year-old pop music junkies out of control. They're (haha) role models and the role society wants them to show to little girls is being "good" and "nice" and definitely not slutty. Whereas we WANTS our little boys to grow up to be whores because bagging as much pussy as possible makes them men, so if the Backstreet Boys want to fuck their way through the Mickey Mouse Club, more power to them.

Er. But that's just my gender studies 101 analysis.

Oh good. So you cover the sexism, I'll cover the racism.

*we shake hands*

I think that the comfort of being naked really has to do with the person you're with (assuming we're talking sex). For me, most of the time, I don't have any problems wearing my birthday suit, however, some men have made me feel like my body is just that, a body. And that's when I begin to feel uncomfortable.

As for sex...I think clothing is optional. If you're going to be have emotional, beautiful, loving sex - then naked is probably the way to go. But if you're in love with someone and just want that passionate, raw connection, partial clothing can be very hot (not literally).

As for the Vanity Fair photos, I think that they are beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.

George,

Apparently, you bleeds charisma like a maple tree bleeds sap (http://www.fametracker.com/fame_audit/clooney_george_2.shtml). This explains a lot about your powers.

-Ari

I think part of the issue here is the social norm of assuming that women and men have different sorts of sexualities. So that line of thinking goes: men want visual stimulation for sexual arousal and women want to think about sex (read or cuddle or some bullshit like that, guess where I'm going with this...) for sexual arousal.

Now, these people are apparently unaware that women are a huge market for hardcore gay porn. Yes, straight guys like to look at naked women and are not ashamed to say that ("flash your titties" and so on with the heart-felt sentiment), but I don't think for one second that straight women don't like to look at naked men. I think the active issue is that it's still not cool for women to say PORN RULES. That's for several reasons. One of them is our own internal repression since there is the whole mainstream, feminist argument that porn is bad and degrading to everyone all the time. Part of it is just that it's common for women to not really own their sexuality.

I was in the middle of responding, refreshed the page, and suddenly the entry didn't exist anymore. :P

I personally felt that the VF cover managed to make both Keira and Scarlett looks decidedly unattractive. I don't even want to start on the Sienna Miller and Joy Bryant photos, which made both of them seem really trashy (especially Sienna).

I don't have a problem with other people's nudity, but the VF shots were attempting to be erotic, and failed. I'd rather lounge around in jeans and a tee. Fuck, a nice ass in a good pair of jeans is ten times sexier than nudity any day. Stick a good bra on a woman and she looks better than if it's all hanging out. Part of me is a prude, yes, but when everything is there to see, I'm going to focus more on what's wrong with the body than what's sexy about it. OK, I lie (somewhat). I would not protest if Brad Pitt were laid up in my bed ass naked.

Hell, the sexiest thing I've seen recently was Dita von Teese in her Vivienne Westwood wedding dress.

what is this "could become a legend". when I'm done people will say, "Jimmy Stewart was the George Clooney of the forties."

I was in the middle of responding, refreshed the page, and suddenly the entry didn't exist anymore. :P

Yeah, yeah, I know, but you know, some days you just don't want to deal with the inevitable deluge of "You are so sexist and self-loathing, you totally hate women" thing that always comes up. Most of my friends are women. I'm one if the few women I know who can actually sit down, look at other women and see that they're beautiful for themselves -- it kills my male friends when I'm all' she's totally hot' when we go out together. But people don't see that, they see that I don't find something like Manet's Olympia erotic or visually stimulating in anyway and immediately I get called names. Why do discussions always revert to name-calling anyway?

A wise man once said, if you are smart, you can see what's smart about
the next person, but if you're secretly afraid you're a moron, then
okay, to you everyone is a moron. I think that applies in a lot of
areas, like aesthetics.

Fuck, a nice ass in a good pair of jeans is ten times sexier than nudity any day.

A-fucking-men.

That being said I thought that the Vanity Fair stuff was strange and gratuitous. I didn't find any of the pictures particular sexy or erotic, just sort of out of place and jarring - maybe that was the point, although I doubt it. I actually found the Tom Ford cover the least offensive - at least to my sense of aesthetics - it's the stuff inside that are essentially just random boobs popping every other page, in places where there really was no artistic point, that I saw.

See, I had heard so much about the cover before it came out that when I did finally see it, I was offended that a) Tom Ford thought he could replace Rachel McAdams, the only one of the three who I think has any taste b)that he was fully clothed with the girls weren't and c) it was so unattractive as to almost be repellant.

As for what I find erotic - I have always been fond of the half dress man. The hint of overt sex as obscured by the everyday or ordinary work clothes.

My favorite thing ever is a man in pair of well-worn jeans and a threadbare tee shirt.

I think men are thought of as "brave" when they do full-frontal nudity because, well, men run the world and almost all of them have issues with their dicks. For another man to be bold enough to just hang it all out there seems like quite an accomplishment to the rest of them, who don't want anyone knowing just how small it is. This also runs from the misconception that penises should all be porn-sized. I've met very few men who weren't insecure about the size of their dicks.

Word. Here, have a biscuit.

As for Janet Jackson, that's easy. It's the same reason Britney and Christina get flogged for acting like whores: because there's this double standard in which women's sexuality must be controlled and these particular women are not only out of control, they are also leading a generation of 11-year-old pop music junkies out of control. They're (haha) role models and the role society wants them to show to little girls is being "good" and "nice" and definitely not slutty. Whereas we WANTS our little boys to grow up to be whores because bagging as much pussy as possible makes them men, so if the Backstreet Boys want to fuck their way through the Mickey Mouse Club, more power to them.

Oh, hell, have the whole packet of biscuits. They're the good oaty Hob Nobs too.

I'm going go all historical on you in just a sec, but first as to what I find erotic, I know it's kind of cop-out, but I really think it's all about context. If I'm in a hospital room with a rape survivor, there is nothing erotic about the female body, but that same body in a different situation could be highly erotic. I've also been at events where lots of people walk around nude, so then nudity becomes just a fact of nature and not at all erotic. I think eroticism has a lot to do with temptation. If there's no temptation, it can't be erotic. I think. Maybe.

As for the whole tangled mess of sex, nudity, and power with women, I tend to blame everything on men's madonna/whore complexes. There's always been this dichotomy that men believe they can be saved by a woman's purity, but they also believe they are helpless before a woman's sexual wiles. So, yes women can have power over men by using their sexuality, but in doing so they are buying into the bullshit notion that men are rendered helpless and out of control by their sexual urges.

I guess it becomes a matter of women either choosing to play the bullshit game and play it to win even though it's a stupid game or women who refuse to play the game at all. And I think that metaphor only made sense in my head.

Why are men who appear naked in films seen as "brave" when it's almost de rigeur for women?

I think it's simply because women are supposed to be objectified, but for a man to be willing to become objectified, it's see as risky and daring.

This is not to say I think objectification is bad. You can objectify someone and respect them in morning, but that the playing field between men and women is not equal and it will never be equal until people are willing to acknowledge the inequalities.

I'm not sure how coherent that was or how much sense I made.

As for the Vanity Fair photos, I think that they are beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.

I don't see that when I look at the magazine. I see lots of naked women and lots of clothed men. Personally, I'd rather have seen the lot of them with bare feet, tee shirts, and some low-slung jeans.

Mmmm biscuits. I wish I could take a nap instead.

PORN RULES. Nuff said, George.

I don't think for one second that straight women don't like to look at naked men.

That's good, because I am all about the nekkid mens. Preferably when they answer to the initials TW. I keep hearing that the male form is funny looking, but I gotta tell you, I just don't see that at all. I look and think MAN! If I'm lucky, I look and think HOT MAN! But you know that doesn't tend to happen unless I'm watching BSG.

My favorite thing ever is a man in pair of well-worn jeans and a threadbare tee shirt.

That's because it's unbelievably sexy.

You can objectify someone and respect them in morning.

I want a t-shirt that says that. I spend most of my free-time objectifying as many people as possible, because people in general have very appreciatable figures.

Ok, I agree that that would have been darling. But I think that the shoot is trying to portray a whole different feel, obviously.

A couple of ideas:

As someone mentioned race above I just had to comment, could Kiera and Scarlett look any whiter? I'll get back around to race in a second, but really the excessive whitening - an effect of I suspect both lighting and makeup - heightens the women's object-ification in the most literal sense. To me, their skin literally looked less human and more object-like (stone, porcelain, paint). They were also quite clearly posed in interaction with the viewer alone - they don't even seem to notice Ford in all his muddled, half-clothed, desiring humanity. It seems to me very much in the tradition of Western painters depicting a harem with all the attendant fear/attraction toward white slavery and sex trafficking. It would be different if the women were interacting with each other or with Ford - if there was some sense of personal desire and agency expressed by Kiera and Scarlett. Instead they are powerless objects of exchange which Ford appears to own but more literally whose image he manipulated and which will be bought and sold by the public.

As for what I find sexy, I think I implied it above - intimacy. I like pictures that express emotion between two subjects - whether they be clothed or not (or even at times that express emotion between te subject and viewer, but I think that can be more difficult to convey). My feeling is that the porn industry as currently configured works through archetypes - the naughty nurse, the repairman, the cheerleader - wherein individual eccentricity and identity get in the way of the fantasy. I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with that, but personally I find detail and idiosyncrasy more satisfying. On a purely visual level, show me a scar or blemish, not an evenly powdered and concealer-laden canvas.

As for my body, I love it lots, but don't necessarily expect other people to share that opinion. And generally, I'd much rather be thought of in professional terms at this point of my life than in sexual terms, so I have a lot of sympathy for the argument that actresses shouldn't have to appear nude or even particularly sexual/sexually available to be taken seriously as practitioners of their craft.

There are so many things I want to say in response to your questions that they've all become clogged in the mad rush to articulate, and now I can't articulate anything at all.

Suffice to say that there are many things I find erotic and none of them can be found naked on the cover of a magazine. And as far as calling that empowerment, it sounds to me like a male PR employee trying to spin misogyny - or at the very least degradation - to look like feminism. In just the same way they've been trying to twist feminism into something that they can control since... well, since before it was called feminism.

In this way, they can say: "Cheap titillation is empowering, and feminism is misandry, so you should all be naked all the time so that you can prove you're powerful AND you don't hate men. See how you win, girls?"

And... now I'm ranting. Ah well!

*Dude*, that entire first paragraph about the cover? YES. That's it, thank you. The rest of the comment is really sharp also, but that bit is just perfectly what I was thinking and trying to figure out how to say.

What do you find erotic? Why? Why not?

Guys who aren't overdone. Bulging muscles, those huge six-pack don't really do it for me. If you're going to be flashing all that, keep your clothes on. You look better that way to me, probably because I can pretend you're not that big. It's just huge guys weird me out. However, skinny guys are kinda hot and I can handle those in the middle. Still, it's not the nakedness that I find really erotic. It's the eyes, man. The eyes! Wentworth Miller's stare puts me in heat. Tom Welling's makes me shiver. Alex Kapranos' eyes makes me feel all nervously excited to see all his secrets. Jason Mraz's makes me feel all goofy flirtateous. Hayden Christensen's makes me want to fuck him. Hard. Preferably with a ten inch dildo. Yeah, I know.

Do you feel empowered when you're naked or would you rather have sex full clothed and through a sheet (hey, the religions may be on to something here)? Does this whole women are empowered through nudity sound like a crock of shit to you, too?

It's a crock of shit to me too. I emphasize, to me. I don't feel empowered when I'm naked, I feel extremely exposed. I don't even wear shorts or extreme cleavage tops, so I really don't play. It's not some puritanical religious thing, I just feel all ridiculous and conspicious. However, getting naked does give you power, much in the same way having a lot of money givs you power. Everyone wants money! If you want to persuade someone to do something, money is a great way to go about it. Likewise with getting naked. They're also similar in that they're considered unethical ways of getting what you want. In my mind, part of women moving along is this world is that we've been given the tools and the opportunity to gain power without getting naked. To me, the fact that we're still getting naked to achieve power is basically solidifying a viewpoint that even when all the tools for success and attention are at our fingertips, we still pick the most basic, easiest, and least respectful way of achieving it.

Why are men who appear naked in films seen as "brave" when it's almost de rigeur for women? Who made up these rules and where can we find him (because you know it's a man) to do very vile and unseemly things to him in the name of 'empowerment'?

That really boggles me. Especially since whenever a guy is doing a frontal in a movie, all the women go crazy over it. I know I do. "What's that? Colin Farrell's penis is in what movie? Hell yeah!" Maybe I'm a pervert. I don't care.

In regards to the actual cover, I don't like it. In agreement, with a previous poster, neither Keira or Scarlett look particularly attractive. I think they look right ridiculous myself, but that's partly because they look too damned skinny. Especially Keira. Her stomach? Not attractive. At any rate, maybe I'll have to start liking Rachel McAdams now. Even if her acting does get on my last nerves.

More importantly, why are they on this cover? Neither one of them could act their way out of a paper bag! - Ahahahahaha yeah my first thought was 'Omg put your fucking selves away!' I detest them both.

*pets*

Rant away, baby girl, I've got race relations in one window and thinly-veiled misogyny in the other, my blood-pressure is just up there at this point. I want everyone to play along.

Excellent :) There's tons more going on their re: intersectons of race with gender and I haven't seen the inside of the mag, only the cover, but that was my gut reaction.

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And to think I was trying to spare myself.

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If you're not pissing someone off, you must be doing something wrong.

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