SI Swimsuit issue: Holy Cow!

Greg Nowell GN842 at CNSVAX.Albany.Edu
Wed Mar 17 14:19:43 PST 1999


Jay Leno said it but I didn't believe it: mass marketed supermodels with bikinis painted on. I have no idea how they do the crotch. This is not plain brown wrapper! This is legit capitalism! At a store near you! What if a 13 year old took it to skool? This raises all *kinds* of interesting questions.

1. The distinction between porn & soft porn. 2. The distinction between soft porn a la Playboy & this SI kind of soft porn. 3. The titillating fact that a woman wearing a bikini with partial show-through of the nipple is really *not much different* than a nude woman with a heavily painted nipple. 4. Is it sexist,

a. in the sense, argued by some, that *all* eroticized pictures of women are sexist

b. in the sense, argued by others, that there has to be "equal opportunity" possibilities for equality to be respected. Because 5. How would you paint a male stud's whanger, like whatshisname, Fazio, or something like that, to make it look like it was in a swimsuit? And would you strive to disguise it in the "at attention" or "at ease" mode? Or is it plainly the case that a whanger needs a hangar and should not be painted? 6. Is this at long last the way for women to "take their shirts off like men" at the beach and yet not violate local customs that require patch-covered bosoms? 7. Should we simply argue that clothes are a material covering the body (including synthetics and natural fibers of many kinds) and that paint=clothes because it is a material covering the body which happens not to be woven, but smeared on? 8. Does that mean you would be clothed if you wore chocolate pudding? 9. If a man's (presumably female, given how this art form is developing so far) lover wears a painted American flag over breasts and stomach and they make love does that mean he is indictable, under proposed flag-worship rules, for fucking the flag? What about her? Is she exonerated because she is not, in a sense, doing the fucking (of the flag)?

Reality is outpacing my feeble mind's ability to keep up.

-- Gregory P. Nowell Associate Professor Department of Political Science, Milne 100 State University of New York 135 Western Ave. Albany, New York 12222

Fax 518-442-5298



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