"This photo cements stereotypes, perpetuates an imbalance in the power dynamic, is reminiscent of centuries of colonialism (and indentured servitude)..."

"... and serves as a good example of both creating a centrality of whiteness and using 'exotic' people as fashion props."

The SI swimsuit issue is troubling people again.

Kathy Griffin joked that Bristol Palin is fat.

"She's the only contestant in the history of ['Dancing With The Stars'] to actually gain weight... She's like the white 'Precious.'"

Griffin, who just turned 50, was showing off her super-thin body in a bikini on stage. But check the rear view...



... always check the rear view, ladies.

"Her bodice looks like the outside of the rib. Over the shoulder looks like it does come from the shoulder."

How fitting!

"There are no expensive cuts here, no real steaks," he said. "The best you've got is the flank steak on top of her head."...

"It's the cheaper end cuts - not including her. You got about $100 of meat there," said Mark Cacioppo, 30, of Queens....

"It ain't refrigerated. It's probably stinking bad. She's in the lights: It's cooking," said Peter Cacioppo....

"What's next: the family cat made into a hat?" asked Ingrid Newkirk, head of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

PETA always uses that rhetorical move. Instead of that animal you don't care about, picture the family pet.

Anyway, Lady Gaga went on "The Ellen DeGeneres Show" — too bad YouTube hasn't yet perfected the internet equivalent of Smell-O-Vision — and explained herself...



... with delightful incoherence. She doesn't want to be "just another bitch in a dress." She claims it has to do with her opposition to Don't Ask Don't Tell, which flummoxes the poor vegan Ellen.

I love the part where she proclaims herself "The most judgment-free person on the face of the earth." Ha. When did "judgment" acquire a 100% negative meaning.

"I was in heels since 5 in the morning and then I was up 'til 3 and then I have scoliosis and..."

I'm really glad Kim Cosmopolitan is summing up last night's "American Idol." I had to force myself to watch it and felt like I was having no fun at all, but it seems highly amusing now, which just proves once again how much better writing is than TV.

God, I'm not sure I understand the point of AI's Group Night. I mean, there's obviously no competitive group-singing aspect of the show, so what is it? Is it to give Your people a chance to show how they triumph over the adversity of having 18 hours to arrange and perform a song with others? Is it so You can assess their star quality among others who may or may not possess star quality themselves? Is it for no other reason than to give Your people at home some drama to keep them on board throughout the interminable early weeks of pre-dialing for dollars American Idol? Why, God, why?...

Oh, and thank you, God, for a smidgeon of righteous justice. The payoff on this one was pretty good. But I guess You knew that when You gave her the big starring edit in her audition. You're very prescient that way. Anyway, thanks.

Kim also posted on the Tuesday night show. Best part:

I hope Lil Rounds had a great first audition, because I did not like her shouty I-ee-I-ee-I performance one little bit, and I'm actually a fan of the song. And I am in actual physical pain from restraining myself from mocking her name.

Li'l Rounds. I get it. Like some off-brand Ritz Cracker. (Or is it wrong to refer to a non-white person that way?) As to the singing, yeah, I thought it was horrible. To suddenly begin "I Will Always Love You" at the big, loud finale instant is an aesthetic crime. Yet the judges gave her a standing ovation. It was ghastly.

Fat...

... or skinny?

ADDED: Can a 57-year-old woman wear a bikini? Frankly, I'm amazed that anyone without a near-perfect body would choose a bikini, but I'm sort of impressed that Anjelica Huston blithely exposes herself. And as long as we are reading The Daily Mail, let's look at this piece delving into Jessica Simpson's weight gain. I think she looks fine in the tight leather pants, but oh, those horrible blue jeans. She's not that fat...



That's pretty mean... but then again, why is Jessica Simpson a star? If you are a star because of your great body, isn't getting fat like a singer singing off key? Or is Jessica really also a singer? Really? She seems to be singing in those pictures. It says she stopped singing to talk about her weight:

"Please remember, no matter what you go through in life, somebody else might have it harder. I feel like in our world today we focus on so many things that are completely pointless. Thank you for your support. Stay positive, and pray out loud."

Pray... for... ??? Her to lose weight? Or for everyone to get over the thinness fixation? Or for that somebody else who has it harder?

Underwear supermodel Karolina Kurkova has no belly button.

I read it at BBC.com, where I went to look for some serious news to enlighten you. You may think I post the lowest drivel, but I actively bypassed this story last night. I started a draft, titled "They called him the 'Screamer.' He was very noisy," but then, I though, no, I'm not going there.

Yet, here is a much nicer place, the blank mid-torso of a skinny pretty woman who's done nothing more evil than prancing about in a bra and underpants. It's an interesting mystery. It's not like we know Kurkova left her navel on some battlefield in Europe (or Albert Hall).

Some have no belly button as a result of the surgery needed to correct abdominal problems at birth, often either an umbilical hernia, or a condition known as gastroschisis - born with the stomach and intestines poking through a hole in the abdominal wall.

I know all about that, having watched the "Hottest Chick, Ugliest Scar" episode of the Howard Stern Show. (It's "Megan" at the link, which has photos of women in bikinis.)

Bonus religious question: Did Adam and Eve have navels?

Dressing with mad joie de vivre.

I loved this fashion slide show by Bill Cunningham, on its own pure merit but also as a contrast to the most recent episode of "Tim Gunn's Guide to Style."

Gunn presented us with a young woman whom the edit told us to loathe, and what had she done wrong? She had bought vivid clothes that inspired her and dared to think highly of herself and the creative way she mixed them together. You could see that that this woman had submitted herself to the show because she was a "former bikini model" who'd just had twins, but the show blindsided her with a different narrative. She was presened as deluded and obstinate, until finally she broke down and accepted Gunn's stern schooling.

Look at the older Italian woman featured in the Cunningham slide show and imagine how "Tim Gunn's Guide to Style" would treat her. They would crush her, and only when she finally accepted their "age-appropriate," somber styles would they hug her and praise her for coming to her senses. That is, they would try to crush her, and she'd probably tell them off and stomp out, and it would be unused footage from a show that never airs.

Everyone's talking about Ashley Dupre's tattoo that reads, in faux Latin: "tutela valui."

Dupre was Eliot Spitzer's favorite prostitute, so people want to understand the words. But like those ridiculous Chinese characters fools have permanently inked on their carcasses, Dupre's tattoo botches the language. The Daily News delves into scholarly interpretation of the whore's bikini line:

Tutela, which is related to tutor, has to do with a protector or guardian. Valui appears to be a past form of the word strong.

"So I guess you would say it means, 'I have a strong patron' or 'I have a strong keeper,'" said Doug Machle, assistant to the chairman in the classics department at the University of Washington.

"Or, actually, it's more like, 'My guardian was strong.'"...

Daniel Nodes, a classics professor at Ave Maria University in Florida, translated it as "I've been well and remain that way because I have protection."

Mark Buchan, a classics professor at Columbia, took a different tack, musing that it could mean "safe haven."

The Columbia professor gives Ashley credit — even as she tattoos herself with bad Latin — for seeing herself (or her body part) as the strong one and having a sense of humor about sex.

UPDATE: Jim Davila says the prostitute is getting a bum rap.

About all that hair.

We all know by now that Christopher Hitchens got a "back, sack and crack wax."

So let's move on to a general contemplation of humanity and its body hair:

It is hard in the West to recall that there was a brief moment when the ladygarden was left untended, and the female body celebrated and desired in its natural state. The actress Sienna Miller is now filming Hippy Hippy Shake, a movie about the Oz magazine trial, and photos have circulated of her naked, except for obligatory flowers in her hair. And yet for all the effortful re-creation of the Sixties, one glaring anachronism remains: the Hitler moustache of a Brazilian wax, which marks Miller out as a totally 21st-century girl. Perhaps Hair and Make-up couldn't manage a merkin.

Oh, yeah, I remember those hippies. Remember:

Give me down to there hair
Shoulder length or longer
Here baby, there mama
Everywhere daddy daddy

What was the "there" there, if not... "the ladygarden"? It says everywhere. Could it be any plainer?

Shining, gleaming,
Streaming, flaxen, waxen

"Waxen" didn't mean you should be waxing your hair off. It meant it was fine for it to be waxy.

Here's the video for the song. You know, I remember when they were filming "Hair" in Central Park, and the call went out for people with a lot of hair to come out and be extras. I considered going — I looked like this around that time — but I was too busy or too aloof or — oh, who knows what I was thinking about in the mid-70s.

Back to the main article:

But then around the mid-90s some mysterious memo went out to twentysomething women that it was no longer sufficient to tidy the “bikini line” so it didn't cascade down the inner thigh like a spider plant.

Oh, yeah, before the mid-90s, you could wear a bikini and reveal pubic hair growing all down your legs! [CORRECTION: Ha, ha. I misread that.]

Let's get the history straight. The bikini hair that caused a stir in the mid-90s was brimming over the top like this — on the cover of The Black Crowes album "Amorica." Even The Black Crowes didn't go for the down to there hair — and neither did anyone in the 70s. Not in a bathing suit anyway.

(Hmmm.... maybe you could in Britain.)

The gyms of Britain were suddenly full of women waxed into weeny welcome mats, with all the stubble, bruises, pimpled hair follicles and burst blood vessels that accompany this excruciating sexifying of the sex.

Like a trend for comedy-size breast implants, inflatable lips, hair extensions, extreme nails and high street daywear revealing more tittage than a ten-quid hooker, waxing filtered down from the porn industry. Here defuzzing makes the action, as it were, easier to follow. And for male performers depilation adds the illusion of an extra inch. Maybe Hitchens had that in mind.

Now, I'm thinking of this banned album cover. (More banned album covers here.)

And don't you love Wikipedia? Check out the luxuriantly detailed article "Merkin." President Merkin Muffley — the (bald) President of the United States in "Dr. Strangelove" — came easily to mind for me. But there's so much more:

The narrator, Humbert Humbert, in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955), recalls, "Although I told myself I was looking merely for a soothing presence, a glorified pot-au-feu, an animated merkin, what really attracted me to Valeria was the imitation she gave of a little girl."

Pynchon, in Gravity's Rainbow, says, "He wears a false cunt and merkin of sable both handcrafted...by the notorious Mme. Ophir."...

The 1969 film Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness? written by and starring Anthony Newley, is a veritable cornucopia of dirty-joke names. In addition to the two in the title, there's a character (played by Joan Collins), named Polyester Poontang.

Pearl Jam and Neil Young released a two-song companion to Mirror Ball called Merkin Ball....

In an episode of Family Guy, an advertising agent offers Joe Swanson a car, his pants and a merkin so that he will sign up for an advertising contract....

On the 1967 Chess LP The Baroques by the Milwaukee band of the same name, the word "merkin" is heard in the song "Bicycle." The lyric is "...I'll take back the merkin I gave you for Christmas, and you'll be sorry when the wind gets cold, 'cause it'll be hanging from the aerial of my bicycle...."

Lots more at the link.

"Bond is an imperialist and a misogynist who kills people and laughs about it, and drinks Martinis and cracks jokes."

Matt Damon on James Bond. He, of course, thinks Bourne is better, but he's right, isn't he? Bond is mired in the 60s.

I remember a teacher in 1964 who talked about James Bond. Right about when "Goldfinger" came out, that was the high point. I remember going to see "Thunderball" and how everyone felt disappointed and sure that the James Bond fad had ended. We had some fun seeing "Diamonds Are Forever" in 1971. Bond was totally retro. How strange that the Bond movies have come out consistently every few years for almost half a century!

"The Bourne franchise is not about wearing Prada suits and looking at women coming out of the sea with bikinis on. It's about essence and truth, not frippery and surface." So says "Bourne" director Paul Greengrass, incredibly hoity-toitily.

"I thought it was O.K. to be single. I thought it was O.K. to not have children..."

"And I thought you could still make good decisions on behalf of the country if you were single and didn’t have children," says Condoleezza Rice in an interview with the NYT.

During the hearing itself, Ms. Rice did not appear to take issue with Senator Boxer’s comments. During the interview, she addressed them only in response to a question. But the White House spokesman, Tony Snow, suggested earlier on Friday that Senator Boxer’s comments were antifeminist.

“I don’t know if she was intentionally tacky,” Mr. Snow said in an interview on Fox News. “It’s a great leap backward for feminism.”...

Senator Boxer’s comments and the claims and counterclaims about what she meant have captivated the blogs and received extensive coverage on Fox News and other cable channels. One blog, called Swampland, labeled it “Womb Wars.”

Conservative blogs and commentators were quick to seize on the issue. “One Great Leap (Backwards) for Womankind,” read one blog, Bikini Politics. “They will be known by their Fruits,” read another, Macsmind, which billed itself as “Conservative News, Commentary and Common Sense.” Rush Limbaugh also got into the act. “Here you have a rich white chick with a huge, big mouth, trying to lynch this, an African-American woman, right before Martin Luther King Day, hitting below the ovaries here,” Mr. Limbaugh said on his radio show.

As I said yesterday, I don't think it's good feminism to require greater sensitivity toward women than toward men when it comes to political arguments like the one Boxer made. The "Who pays the price?" argument is either a good one or a bad one, and calling attention to childlessness shouldn't be any worse for women than for men.

But let me make three new points:

1. Boxer served up a juicy nugget, and it should have been predictable that blogger types -- and Rush -- would gobble it up. I'm sure she regrets saying it and that this incident will tend to reduce these kinds of statements in the future. It's stupid to give your enemies this kind of raw material. Politicians need to become more savvy about what's bloggable. And the already-savvy Snow did a great job of flagging the bloggability.

2. Women in power should stand on the same level as men and not demand special outrage for insults, but we know that people will say some things about a woman precisely because they think it will hurt her more or because it will stir up prejudices about women. I don't think it's clear that in this case Boxer had that sort of nasty intent, but we can see in some of the reaction to Boxer's statement -- including that quote from Rice, above -- that people continue to think there is something tragic and unnatural about a woman who has not formed a family around herself.

3. Heightening sensitivity to implicit insults in statements made about women can serve the interests of the Democrats. They are the ones with an important female presidential candidate. Now that Republicans have had this little huff over Rice, Democrats will have more power to claim offenses to feminism whenever anyone says anything mean about Hillary Clinton.

"Two Borat-inspired British animal rights activists clad in lettuce bikinis braved the winter chill in the Kazakh commercial capital Almaty..."

The message: Stop eating horses!

"The Borat film is ridiculing Kazakhstan, but we come with a positive message: how to live a healthier, longer life" said Yvonne Taylor, one of the two Lettuce Ladies, her teeth chattering as they stood in Almaty's main square in freezing temperatures....

"This is disgrace," said 74-year-old Orazbek Ziyakhanov of the activists' outfits. "Don't we have enough of our own spoiled girls? This is not Europe, this is Asia."

As for becoming a vegetarian, Ziyakhanov said: "How can we stop eating meat? All the vitamins are in meat."

"Orphans of the Pacific, you really are orphans now. How will you get home now that all your ships are lost?"

For saying that on the radio in 1944, Iva Toguri D’Aquino -- Tokyo Rose -- was convicted of treason. She died on Tuesday, at the age of 90. Read the whole obituary, here.

And -- to digress -- read this long Q&A with the NYT obituary editor, Bill McDonald. It's quite fascinating. Excerpt:

Q. Goodness. The Obituary Editor. What do people say when they meet you and you tell them your job?...

A. A range of responses. Sometimes it's "Oh, that's, um (long pause) interesting," accompanied by an anxious expression, as if I were wearing a black hood and cape. Others — usually among our millions of devoted readers — will say, "Cool!"

Personally, I think the obituaries are cool. Life stories, told when the story is complete, with each day's selection determined by fate (and editorial judgment).

So, for example, today we see Tokyo Rose along with Edward Albert, the son of Eddie Albert, who played the blind guy in "Butterflies Are Free." And speaking of fate, I see he was exactly my age, which is the sort of thing you notice when you read the obituaries.

Also on the obit page today: "Itsy-Bitsy Bikini, Big Mistake." The Times confesses that it erroneously reported that the man who co-wrote "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" had died.

There's something so assorted about the assortment of things on the obituary page. Something that I like about it is also what I like about blogging.

Rob Schneider had fainting spell?

That was my first thought on reading Terry Teachout's list "Five things you won't read about here." That and, well, what about Superman's politics? And has he solved his sexual problem yet? And why does it seem so weird that Star Jones Reynolds got so thin? And speaking of Reynolds, I see Glenn Reynolds is going ahead and talking about the the sixtieth anniversary of the bikini. Did Teachout not notice it was blog sweeps week?

Two things I started to watch on HBO but didn't finish.

1. "Rome." (First episode of the series.)

2. "Real Time With Bill Maher." (First episode of the new season.)

"Rome" had a lot of people bustling about in costumes, amidst scenery, declaiming various things in English accents. Violence and nudity don't really stimulate my interest in a story, though I was mildly intrigued by the perfect bikini wax jobs the women had. But — who knows? —maybe all that historical research they were bragging about in the promos actually revealed that the women had their pubic hair plucked into narrow vertical rectangles.

Bill Maher drove me up the wall — and I watched every episode of the show last year, so I am not a Bill Maher hater. His comic style of speech conveys an extremely smug attitude and certainty that he's the smart one who's been right about everything all along. (Jon Stewart uses nearly the opposite tone and is much more watchable.) Among the guests on Maher's show was Chris Rock, who was coasting on a single comic idea: you can connect anything to the subject of the high cost of gasoline. Why am I just getting to the point where I find Maher's speech intolerable? Maybe I've gotten more thin-skinned or maybe it's just the state of the world these days and the way so many people are so eager to point at everything that doesn't go smoothly and to say see I told you all along it was a big mistake.

"We find a naked body every bit as beautiful as a clothed one. If they came only out of lust, we have to accept that. We stand for the truth."

A "prestigious" museum in Vienna gets the attention of the Washington Post with a nudity gimmick: They're letting you in free if you take off all your clothes (or wear a swimsuit). Do they lose money this way? I would think it's quite the opposite. Those let in free are putting on a display for the paying patrons. Unlike the regular artists, the nudies draw no pay. And then there's all that extra publicity.

Most of those who showed up in little or no attire Friday opted for swimsuits, but a few hardy souls dared to bare more. Among them was Bettina Huth of Stuttgart, Germany, who roamed the exhibition wearing only sandals and a black bikini bottom.

Although she used a program at one point to shield herself from a phalanx of TV cameras, Huth, 52, said she didn't understand what all the fuss was about.

"I go into the steam bath every week, so I'm used to being naked," she said. "I think there's a double morality, especially in America. We lived in California for two years, and I found it strange that my children had to cover themselves up at the beach when they were only 3 or 4 years old. That's ridiculous."

Oh, yeah, those terrible Americans. What hypocrites!

I'm amused by the way nudists flatter themselves, always claiming to be especially honest. But then they always say things that sound so disingenuous, that they are just being natural and why is everyone making such a fuss?