Mons Pubescent

“The apparel oft proclaims the man, “ advises Polonius to Laertes. And Thomas Carlyle would write a novel entitled Sartor Resartus, literally “tailor re-tailored.” But what about woman?  If we take the cover of the recent swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated, where the model Hannah Davis, flaunts her mons pubis can we conclude that neither clothes nor hair make the woman? The shot leaves little to the imagination, but there is little to imagine. What if Joanna Hiffernan the model for Courbet’s “The Origin of the World,” who also happened to be an inspiration to Whistler, had struck a similar pose. Hiffernan’s pulling her bikini bottom down would have been a far more far more sensational news event. The current epidemic of Brazilian waxing, of which Ms. Davis is apparently the latest public victim (Kim Kardashian’s  recent spread in Paper is another prominent example of a similar phenomenon) has reduced the female genitalia to a state of pre-pubescent nothingness. Pedophiles must be entralled. The Sports Illustrated issue has raised some eyebrows, but when you scour the newsstand to see what all the hullabaloo is about you almost need to be told that something provocative is going on. A risqué pose with a model in a state of undress is nothing new, but what’s disconcerting is to find a sheep in wolf’s clothing, a little girl in the guise of a woman. Unless of course you have a predilection for these kinds of things, you could pass the newsstands where the Sports Illustrated cover is brazenly displayed, thinking that the female genitalia had actually been whited out. It’s reminiscent of another parable, the Emperor’s New Clothes, but also of the experience of dining in one of those trendy new restaurants where you pay a lot for very little and a chorus of praise accompanies minuscule portions which are nearly impossible to see.

Pornosophy:Turning Away From the Sight of a Celebrity’s Breasts and Tushy

Uploading of nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton and other celebrities has resulted in cries of outrage across the Internet and elsewhere. It’s one thing for sites like 4Chan to post the usual run of the mill pornography, but another to invade someone’s private trove of pictures ("Nude Photos of Jennifer Lawrence Are Latest Front in Online Privacy Debate,” NYT, 8/2/14).Years ago a stolen video of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee cavorting on their honeymoon created an outcry, but the issue of hacking rather than simple thievery is more threatening due to its potential pervasiveness. And there are those who wonder why celebrities would be storing nude photos of themselves in the first place and those like Lena Dunham who defend them. “The ‘don’t take nude pics if you don’t want them online’ argument is the ’she was wearing short skirt’ of the web. Ugh,” Dunham Tweeted. But besides the stars who have suffered from the invasion of privacy, there is the plight of those morally minded sleaze bags who have had to figure out a way to prevent themselves from transgressing. One of the methods often employed to avoid this kind of immoral voyeurism is to say that the only difference between the illicit photo of Kate Upton on the internet and the one you saw in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue is that now you can see more of her breasts and her tushy. And so what? Breasts are just breasts and a tushy is simply a tushy. The problem is that this logic ruins the enjoyment of all pornography. If it makes no difference to see Kate Upton’s or Jennifer Lawrence’s breasts or tushy, why would one want to see any strangers breasts or tushy?

Kate Upton

"Beauty is Only Skin Deep" as The Temptations sing, but a billboard can stop traffic and a magazine cover on a newsstand can be perused so frequently that it begins to look prematurely aged. Kate Upton is gracing the Swim Suit issue of Sport Illustrated for the second year in a row. But what is it that is so eye catching about her? Beauty is a reflection of sensibility. Of course at the furthest extreme is the famous Twilight Zone episode, "Eye of the Beholder,” in which a desperately deformed woman is operated on. The shocker comes when we look up at the faces of the medical team who inform her that the operation has failed. Beauty is also ephemeral. Take a look at the autopsy shot of Marilyn Monroe. Great beauty caught in its prime is like a rose blossoming in spring. It’s ineffable and magnetic and yet when it dies, when the flower fades, one wonders if the beauty were simply an illusion. Was it, in fact, only skin deep, epidermis and morphology, or was there some inner spirit that shone from underneath, something incandescent? We welcome beauty, just as we shun ugliness, yet we know nothing about it. We don’t know Kate Upton from Adam, or Eve as it were and yet she is the welcome guest in our imaginations. Not in everyone’s imagination. If beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder,  aren’t we, in one sense, simply talking about the segment of the population that thumbs those worn covers of Sports Illustrated? On the other hand there is the kind of immortal beauty Keats was talking about in Ode on a Grecian Urn. Of course, his example was crockery.

Swimming Not to Cambodia

Kate Upton, this year’s Sport Illustrated Swim Suit issue cover girl is no Anna Magnani. To begin with she is blond rather than dark and she lacks the hair in her armpits that was one of the things that made Open City’s neorealism complete. But she's a giant step away away from the anorexic and pedophilic Brazilian waxed babes that fashion mags stuff down our throats as if we were goose livers being turned into fois gras (although the actual question of whether she is Brazilian waxed or not has not as yet been reported in the press). Yes like Arab spring a popular uprising has occurred due to social networking and this grass roots rebellion has produced Kate Upton. Listen to the Times’ Guy Trebay "waxing" about the phenomenon (“Model Struts Path to Stardom Not on Runway, but on You Tube,” NYT, 2/13/12), “it is increasingly difficult for the industry to ignore the world outside the Fashion Week tents, particularly the one that is virtual.”  Whatever fashionistas may think, deconstructionists should delight in Trebay’s locution which delivers the unmistakable connotation that the ideal will be replaced with the unreal. In his piece he describes how Ivan Bart of IMG Models, “the company behind the multimillion-dollar careers of woman like Gisele Bundchen” came to respond to a woman who came “from obscurity to No. 2 on a list of the world’s 99 ‘top’ women compiled by AskMen.com, an online magazine with 15 million readers.” “ ‘Kate is bigger than fashion,” Trebay quotes Bart as saying. "‘She’s the Jayne Mansfield of the Internet.’” Kate may have something in common with Barbie but she’s got her “Christian Louboutin stilettos” planted firmly in the air.