Of the many nicknames I’ve acquired over the years, there’s one I’m reminded of today. The name was given to me by a bully shortly after I entered the sixth grade. I had been a fat kid since elementary school, but as puberty began to kick in, parts of me started growing differently than expected. The doctors said I had gynecomastia. “Man boobs,” or “moobs” in the jeering parlance of our popular culture.

But my bully simply called them “tits.” And so this also became my name in the school hallways.

I was Tits.

He would pass me in the hall and catcall “Hey Tits!” and his buddies would laugh. Sometimes, if he was feeling extra bold, he might actually grab one of my breasts, and squeeze it in front of the other kids. Not everyone laughed. But many did.

As direct as this bullying was, growing up with gynecomastia was characterized by smaller insults. Most kids would just ask “Why don’t you wear a bra?” Even adults could be cruel. “Are you a boy or a girl?” I was often asked.

When wearing shirts, it was crucial that they be loose fitting. If a T-shirt had shrunk in the dryer, I would spend hours and days stretching it out, so that it didn’t cling to my body. You can see fat boys do this every day. Pulling at their shirts to hide the shape of their bodies, but particularly their breasts.

As a fat kid, and one who hated competition, I learned to loathe sports, and especially, physical education. The one form of exercise which I enjoyed from childhood was swimming. Unfortunately, as my breasts grew, so did my shame about removing my shirt. At summer camp, I never set foot in the swimming pool. I knew that taking off my shirt would bring ridicule, and that leaving it on while swimming would show that I felt ashamed of my body. So, I pretended that I was above swimming– that I was too cool for the pool.

By high school, I had developed remarkable powers of verbal self defense. I absorbed cruelty and learned how to mete it back out in sharp doses. There’s no doubt that this shaped the person I became, for better and for worse. In high school, I managed to carve out a social niche for myself. The bullying stopped. But the shirts stayed loose-fitting. I rarely went swimming.

The doctors thought that perhaps I suffered from low testosterone. I found this funny, since my sex drive had been in high gear since the time I was a sophomore. I assured them that this was not the case. Finally, the doctors said that my excess breast tissue was probably just a result of being fat. Lose the weight and the breasts will go away.

So I lost weight. I don’t remember how much. But by senior year, I was slender. Girls were starting to talk to me. I was more confident. And I still had breasts. After graduation, the doctors congratulated me on my thin body. Now it was time to get rid of my breasts.

In the first surgery, I was placed under general anesthesia. The doctor made a half moon incision under each nipple and cut out the excess breast tissue, finishing the job with some liposuction. Unfortunately the surgery wasn’t a complete success. My breasts were smaller, but lumpy, and my nipples were puckered. It took a second surgery to make everything look “normal.”

I was nineteen. On New Year’s Eve, I went to a party and got drunk for the first time in my life. There, I met a girl who took my virginity. She was too drunk to insist on taking my shirt off. This was a relief, because under my shirt was a sports bra, and under that layers of gauze. My chest was still healing from the second surgery. In many senses of the word, I was still becoming a man.

Keep it classy, Gawker

I’m reminded of this today, oddly enough, after reading one of those “humorous” snarky news stories that pop up in the right column of The Huffington Post. Perhaps you’ve seen the photo making the rounds. It’s of Barney Frank’s “moobs.” The photo inspired similar stories at gay culture site Queerty, Gawker and Slate, which used the incident as the pretense for a scientific column.

While all of these nominally liberal sites pay lip service to the dignity of gay and transgender people, they miss one thing that is very clear to me. Aside from the obvious fat shaming in these stories, the fixation on “man boobs” reveals our culture’s obsession with binary gender. As I noted on The Huffington Post’s comment thread, before a moderator whisked my comment away, “the only breasts The Huffington Post approves of are those of thin, white female celebrities.”

One of the many comments Huffpo didn’t delete.

Men are supposed to have flat chests, hairy bodies and big penises. Women are supposed to have large breasts, thin hairless bodies and tidy labias. (If a woman’s labia are too big, it just might remind us that, with a little testosterone, the same tissue would make a penis.)

We have all the evidence we need that biological sex and gender are not as rigid or fixed as we imagine. There are intersexed people. There are transgender people and genderqueer people. There are millions of men and boys like me, who also have large breasts, or gynecomastia, a medically harmless (though socially lethal) condition that your insurance just might pay to correct. The prevalence of gynecomastia in adolescent boys is estimated to be as low as 4% and as high as 69% . As one article notes: “These differences probably result from variations in what is perceived to be normal.” You think?

We’re so entrenched in that snips ‘n snails bullshit, that we can’t accept bodies which don’t fall on either extreme of the gender continuum. Transgender men and women encounter these attitudes in direct, and sometimes life-threatening ways. And, given the misogyny that pervades our society, these pressures are even harder for women and girls, whether they’re cisgender or transgender. Their bodies are hated and desired in equal measure. When my bully grabbed my breasts and called me “Tits,” he was taking what he wanted. He was also reminding me that I was no better than a girl. I was beneath him.

With the explosion of social media and the surveillance society, body policing has gotten much more intense. We live in an age of crowdsourced bullying. I cannot imagine what it would be like to grow up as a boy with breasts in 2011. I suppose I’d spend hours in Photoshop digitally sculpting my body, to remove fat from my face, belly and chest before uploading my profile photos. If I were a fat girl, I might become very skilled at using light and angles to disguise my less than ideal body, to avoid being dubbed a “SIF” or “secret internet fatty,” by my tech-savvy peers. I would probably become vigilant about removing tags from unflattering photos and obsess over remarks people made about me on comment threads.

PETA is a habitual offender

Twenty years have gone by, and I miss my breasts. As a chubby adult male, I still have a small set of breasts, but not the ones I was born with. The two surgeries also deprived my nipples of their sensitivity.

I’ve often joked that if I knew I was going to become a performance artist, I would have kept my breasts. The breasts I have now are smaller, but still capable of stoking the body police. I once scandalized a fancy pool party in Las Vegas simply by taking off my shirt. I realize that, as a man, it is my privilege to do so. In most parts of our society, it is either illegal or strongly frowned upon for a woman to go topless. (Female breasts are either for maternity or for male sexual pleasure, not for baring at polite parties.) Perhaps my breasts, which remind people of this prohibition, invite a similar kind of censure.

I’ve performed naked enough in my adult life to know that the body police can always find a new area to target. I was recently stunned to hear porn actress Dana DeArmond describe me during a podcast interview as a “fat lady” while her host Joe Rogan openly theorized that my small penis was somehow connected to my feminism. Rogan’s view of gender is so restrictive that he can only conceive of male feminism if it is in a feminized body. (This is probably also why men who support feminism are often dubbed “manginas” by misogynists.)

There might actually be tens of thousands of words devoted to describing my fat body and small penis on the internet. It’s almost a point of pride. Now, I don’t just use my sharp tongue for self defense. I also use my body itself, as an argument, and as a provocation.

I am Tits. Got a problem with that?

The Overland Journal asked me to write a piece about Occupy LA.
I welcomed the chance to get off my duff (well, to get off Twitter for a moment) and write something a little more substantial. I have mixed feelings about Occupy LA, but I hope there are some observations here which will be helpful to the movement as Occupy 2.0 takes shape. Thanks for reading.

While protesters in Oakland, Portland, Boston, New York and cities throughout the US faced riot police with tear gas canisters, their comrades in Los Angeles enjoyed a much cozier relationship with the City and its police. From the very beginning, organizers of Occupy LA made a decision to work closely with the city government and the police, using liaisons, in an effort to avoid the kinds of confrontations seen in other cities. As media team organizer Lisa Clapier put it in characteristically New-Agey prose, “[We] chose collectively to remain in our integrity and NOT break the law, unless doing so WAS in integrity.”

Though initially gathering in Pershing Square, a large public space near many financial institutions, organizers quickly opted to set up camp in the grassy park surrounding City Hall, just a stone’s throw from LAPD headquarters. The LAPD set up a command post inside City Hall, allowing for easy surveillance of the park and assigned twelve full time officers to the protest. The activists, for their part, toed the line, dutifully moving their tents to the surrounding sidewalk each night at 10:30, in keeping with park rules. It was, as one skeptic noted, an “occupation by permission.”

This chummy relationship with city officials initially paid off for the activists. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa dropped off ponchos for the activists to help them during a rainstorm. City Council President Eric Garcetti and Councilman Bill Rosendahl toured the encampment and met with the protesters. Garcetti told them to “stay as long as you need to.” LAPD officers were seen dropping off supplies for the campers, including snacks and sunscreen. As the LA Weekly opined, “This random outpouring of love and acceptance is, frankly, unnerving…[A]re protesters,” they wondered, “cuddling up to the enemy?”

The unusually cordial relationship extended to the demonstrations as well. During the marches in the Financial District, Occupy LA protesters kept to the sidewalks, obeyed police orders and eschewed civil disobedience. For the first several weeks, the only arrests at these demonstrations were of union members and anti-war activists, not occupiers, a fact carefully underscored by the Occupy LA media team. After a coalition demonstration, an Occupy LA blogger wrote:

“This protest was organized by an unknown group, most of whom appeared to be people who arrived for that march from elsewhere… No members of Occupy Los Angeles were arrested.”

Occupy LA’s desire to appear cooperative with police and to avoid even a whiff of confrontation caused it to distance itself from allies who chose to risk arrest.

These Occupy LA media reps also took pains to praise the police for their restraint, sometimes revealing an odd belief that the cops were actually on their side. “The police are a part of the 99%” was a popular refrain. Police were praised for “letting” the protesters demonstrate. Occupiers were encouraged to keep their eyes open for “agents provocateurs,” a class of villain so broadly defined, that anyone advocating unlawful civil disobedience was deemed suspect.

Those disagreeing with this rhetoric were often shouted down, as in this extraordinary clip of LAUSD teacher Ron Gochez being booed by protesters. Gochez noted with irony, “I had never seen cop-loving anarchists before. It was very strange.” Occupiers who were critical of the use of police liaisons formed a subcommittee against police brutality, and were subsequently smeared as agents provocateurs in flyers circulated at the camp. Mario Brito, acting city liaison for Occupy LA, participated in a radio debate defending the decision to work closely with LAPD, and distancing the group from police critics.

When it was announced that the City Council had passed a unanimous resolution endorsing Occupy LA, the protesters celebrated their victory as evidence of the wisdom of working within the system. The Atlantic hailed it, not as a protest, but as a lesson in civics. A closer look reveals that the vote was a cynical attempt by city politicians to co-opt the movement’s popularity. After hearing testimony from bankers, the City Council stripped the resolution of its only meaningful component, a responsible banking measure, which would have increased scrutiny on the city’s financial dealings. The Los Angeles City Council, the highest paid in the country, was thus given a chance to make a toothless “endorsement” of a popular grassroots political movement, without making any meaningful reforms of its own. The unanimity of the vote was also par for the course.  (A recent study on the influence of money in Los Angeles politics found that 99% of City Council votes are unanimous.)

With this neutered resolution passed, the City slowly began to cool toward its new friends. Protesters stopped moving their tents to the sidewalk at nights, becoming more entrenched in the park. City officials started to complain about the dying lawn. The LAPD absurdly claimed that the violent crime rate in the area had tripled as a result of the encampment. Bill Rosendahl, who three weeks earlier, had visited the protesters and introduced the City Council resolution endorsing Occupy LA, now said, “They’ve made their statement. I agree with their statement, but it’s time to move on…It’s time to go.”

As many from the downtown homeless population sought out food and shelter at Occupy LA, the encampment faced new challenges and the City began to make noises that the camp had become a blight. Occupy LA itself became a microcosm of Los Angeles, organized along class lines, with a well-heeled area of the encampment unofficially dubbed “Westwood” and a predominantly homeless section called “skid row.” Lacking a direct confrontation with the City and its police force, and divided over petty issues like the right to smoke pot, Occupy LA seemed in danger of eating itself from within.

Then something changed. Perhaps inspired by the successes of Occupy actions in other cities, Occupy LA seemed to find a new sense of purpose in mid-November. One afternoon, protesters briefly shut down traffic and later occupied Bank of America Plaza, owned by Brookfield Properties (the same company which owns Zuccotti Park,) leading to the first mass arrests of Occupy LA protesters. This time, at least, Occupy LA did not disown those who were arrested, and actively worked to bail out their comrades.

A few days later, the media reported that the city had naively offered Occupy LA 10,000 square feet of office space and some farmland if they would agree to decamp. The terms of the deal were murky, and while the protesters voted at their GA to reject it, the city was already withdrawing the offer.  The days of cooperating with City Hall were over.

There was one final echo of the old spirit of cooperation. On Thanksgiving Day, an LAPD commander donated two stuffed turkeys to the encampment. In a mixed message, the police also began placing signs throughout the park indicating that they would begin enforcing park hours. It was a darkly funny reminder of the First Thanksgiving– first we share this food together, then we drive you from the land.

Unfortunately for the LAPD, the tranquilizing tryptophan had already worn off by that Sunday, when they made their first attempt at an eviction. Police amassed with plans to give the protesters the boot, but were overwhelmed by large numbers of supporters who filled the streets in solidarity. The real eviction came two nights later, when an estimated 1400 police swarmed the encampment in less than three minutes, many of them pouring out of City Hall itself. This tactic was dubbed a “Trojan Horse,” an apt metaphor, given the fact that City Hall had been placating the protesters from day one.

Mayor Villaraigosa gushed with pride for the LAPD’s handling of the eviction, calling it “a shining example of constitutional policing.” While the media largely swallowed the hype, some disturbing stories emerged. Reports trickled in about the police beating and kettling protesters in the streets while the handpicked “pool media” were being distracted by the choreographed eviction. Photojournalist Tyson Heder was beaten on live TV. Patrick Meighan, a writer for The Family Guy wrote a harrowing account of his arrest during the raid, which immediately went viral. All told, 292 people had been arrested, many held in inhumane conditions, deprived of food and bathroom facilities, and saddled with punitive bail amounts of $5000 or more.

The LAPD subsequently admitted to placing a dozen undercover cops in the camp, citing the alleged presence of “domestic terrorists” from the fringe Black Riders Liberation Party and Sovereign Citizen movements. And, bizarrely invoking colonialist parallels, the LAPD also claimed that protesters were fashioning bamboo spears to defend the camp. The LAPD have produced no evidence to back up these claims, and the media has largely ignored evidence of police abuses in the wake of the eviction. Meanwhile, the LA City Attorney has suggested that he might seek a restraining order against 46 of the occupiers to keep them away from City Hall, shamelessly comparing the activists to husbands who beat their wives.

Despite all of these betrayals, Occupy LA has continued to work with the city on passing another feel good resolution — a unanimous rejection of corporate personhood. Occupy LA’s faith in the police seems to have survived intact too. As stories of police abuse from the raid began to flood the #OccupyLA hashtag on Twitter, one member of the organization’s media team warned against “engaging in a campaign against law enforcement… (we) can instead build bridges with LAPD and encourage them to lay down arms against us.” While Occupy LA seeks to build bridges, I suspect that the City is already hard at work building its next Trojan Horse.

 

 

 

Dear British Board of Film Classification,

Congratulations on your wise decision to ban The Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) from release or distribution in the United Kingdom. Please consider these further suggestions to protect the moral and aesthetic sensibilities of the British moviegoing public.

1. Please ban all Shrek movies, spinoffs, merchandise and promotional materials. Please take extra care to prevent the UK staging of Shrek: The Musical. Think of the children.

2. Please ban any adaptation of a Phillip K. Dick story or novel by people who have never read a Phillip K. Dick story or novel. Also, please ban any movies by people who have never read a book.

3. Please ban all movies in which Clint Eastwood plays a Christ figure and/or a bitter, racist old man.

4. Please ban any movie in which a serial killer teaches life lessons or moral principles to his victims.

5. Please ban any movie in which the protagonist is secretly schizophrenic, dreaming or embroiled in a “cutting edge psychological roleplay” which will all be explained in the final ten minutes.

6. Please ban any zombie movies, in which the zombies are capable of running quickly. This is just wrong and promotes anti-scientific beliefs.

7. Please ban Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life until he cuts or reshoots the silly beach scene at the end of the film. Also, please take out the CGI dinosaurs and the third brother.

8. Please ban uplifting movies about the Holocaust.

9. Please ban all rotoscope animation children’s movies– especially those by Robert Zemeckis– until the “uncanny valley” problem is solved. These movies are giving me nightmares and I suspect I am not alone.

10. Please ban any movie in which Owen Wilson or Kenneth Branagh plays “the Woody Allen character.” Also, please ban any movie in which a curmudgeonly senior citizen gets a “new lease on life” after falling in love with an attractive and shallow young woman.

11. Please ban for US distribution any British movie described by American critics as “enchanting.”

12. Please ban the release of any Judd Apatow “bromance” which does not feature explicit depictions of loving and mutually satisfying gay sex between Seth Rogen, Paul Rudd and Jason Segel.

13. Please ban any movie in which a magical African American character dispenses advice to the white protagonists and then dies or sacrifices himself to move the plot forward.

14. Please ban any film adaptation of a Tucker Max script. And please pass legislation to chemically castrate all parties involved in the production and distribution of I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell.

15. Please ban The Hangover 3 and please put Bradley Cooper on a no-fly list.

16. Please ban the release of the movie version of the TV show 24 unless it ends with hero Jack Bauer facing a war crimes trial in the Hague.

17. Please ban Zack Snyder.

Best Regards,

Matt

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“You can see the gun, you can see the expression on the man’s face as the bullet enters his head, and you see the soldier on the left who is wincing at the thing that has happened. With the still picture, you have time to consider all these factors.”

“The most offensive and gutsy joke in the movie is a Vietnam War visual reference that takes place over the closing credits.”

The Hangover 2 makes the underlying violence of the film’s anti-Asian racism explicit in its few final images. “Gutsy” is too polite a word for this.

*The above is screencapped from a cammed bootleg. If someone locates a clearer image, please pass it along, and I’ll update.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Not only did we get fully erect, our testicles descended. We’re back baby!”- Jon Stewart

“Jack Bauer” is trending on Twitter. Pretty much says it all.

Over this past weekend, there was yet another Facebook censorship controversy, this one centering on the apparently arbitrary removal of a photo depicting a gay kiss. Outraged Facebook users mobilized, launching virtual gay kiss-ins on the site. The incident drew media attention, and within three days, an embarrassed Facebook issued an apology, claiming that the photo had been removed in error.

The very next day, the Wall Street Journal reported on the company’s lobbying efforts in Washington and its plans to expand its service to China. How does Facebook intend to confront the problem of Chinese government interference with online political speech? Here’s a trial balloon:

“Maybe we will block content in some countries, but not others,” Adam Conner, a Facebook lobbyist, told the Journal. “We are occasionally held in uncomfortable positions because now we’re allowing too much, maybe, free speech in countries that haven’t experienced it before,” he said.

So far, Mark Zuckerberg, Time’s “Man of the Year” hasn’t weighed in on Conner’s controversial remarks. Admittedly, he had his hands full yesterday with an office visit from President Barack Obama, another leader with an ambivalent relationship to freedom of speech.

Before deciding on a deal with China, Zuckerberg might want to take a long hard look at these images from the streets of Egypt and Tunisia, where Facebook played a key role in coordinating demonstrations. The Jasmine Revolution sweeping through the Arab world has Chinese leaders so spooked that they’ve actually blocked the word “jasmine” on the country’s internet filters.

Meanwhile, Zuckerberg seems intent on cramming the entire world inside his walled garden. While monetizing our friendships and selling our private data, he plays the part of a political power broker, feting war criminals in Palo Alto, and cozying up to dictators in China. Given his track record, I think it’s unlikely he’ll commit to defending the free speech of his users, if there’s big money or political clout at stake.

I know that calls to quit Facebook typically fall on deaf ears. The site has become so central to many peoples’ lives, that they can barely imagine a life without it. This was certainly the case with me, up until I was banned last November.

You might say, so what? Don’t people choose to be on Facebook? If you don’t like it, go somewhere else. The problem with this argument is that, in certain contexts, not having a Facebook account is pretty close to not existing at all. Employers use Facebook to screen job candidates. In some cases, no profile (or a poorly managed one) likely means no job. In industries which demand networking, like Hollywood, not having a Facebook profile, is sort of like not having a business card in Japan. It’s tantamount to being a non-person. Good luck getting work without having a “web presence.” If you run any kind of business, it’s not even an option. You need to have a Facebook page to be competitive. What kind of meaningful choice do we have not to participate when such a monopoly exists?

And what if you want to use Facebook, but don’t play by their arbitrary rules? Just ask  Chinese dissident Zhao Jing who writes under the pen name Michael Anti. He was thrown off the site for violating Facebook’s “real name” policy. Anti wryly noted that even Zuckerberg’s dog has a Facebook fan page. The “real name” policy, as Aaron Bady writes in this brilliant essay, is rooted in a myopic and privileged notion of a singular transparent identity. Bady writes:

“Radical transparency,” as these people put it, means opening everyone up to everyone else’s surveillance, but that’s precisely the opposite of a democratizing move if the underlying power relations remain, as they certainly do.

I think this is the heart of it. Facebook may be a great meeting point for those fighting for democracy, but the company itself is not grounded in democratic values. Like Bahrain or Saudia Arabia, Facebook is more like a privately owned kingdom (if those countries had a population of 600 million people.) Like a kingdom, Facebook’s primary values are the accumulation of wealth and power among an elite group of people. And like a kingdom, it sometimes acts in arbitrary ways, censoring certain kinds of speech without explanation. It changes the rules of citizenship, silently in some cases. In others, with long-winded decrees about changes to its Terms Of Use.

Yes, Facebook is a powerful tool. But, so too is Mark Zuckerberg. And when he’s done giving our cyber selves an enhanced patdown, juiced the social graph for every last dime and brought a dumber, less free version of Facebook to China, we might be left asking why we agreed to play in his walled garden for so long. Sure, we can have our gay kiss-ins and our virtual protests, but the only real threat to this royal nonsense is to deactivate.

Join me?

“…if you choose to do art paid for by an institution, you have to play nice.”

This line, offered in support of MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch nicely summarizes why the MOCA’s new “landmark” exhibition of street art has a Nike-sponsored skate ramp, but no anti-war mural.

It also sums up a bit of received wisdom (call it “career advice”) that the LA Weekly seems all too comfortable regurgitating. If you want to read about Deitch’s street cred, his “handmade suits” and his famous friends, then, by all means, click through to the LA Weekly’s cover story on Art in the Streets.

But you won’t find any serious questions raised about Deitch’s censorship of Blu’s mural. Deitch still claims it was all about respecting the neighbors– in this case, a veteran’s building. (He famously compared the unfinished mural depicting coffins draped in dollar signs, to chain smoking in front of a person suffering from lung cancer.)

I know it seems like I’m picking on the Weekly lately, but the underlying tone of this article is more insulting to the spirit of street art, than anything Mr. Brainwash ever splashed onto a canvass.

The author allows Deitch to assert that Blu, by creating a piece of controversial political art was “undermining the whole project.” The artist, he claims was “not interested in the unspoken rules of participating in a group art exhibition.” Unspoken rules? Sounds like the beating heart of the street art movement!

Shorter Deitch: to have a successful art career, you must be a team player. Careerism trumps free expression. A good artist knows how to play ball.

Unfortunately, the LA Weekly was unable to find anyone critical of this stance. And sadly, Blu was unavailable for comment. Fortunately, we have this statement from his blog:

a very interesting debate is happening on internet
and, wonders of rhetoric, the word “censorship” magically disappears
now you can call it a “curatorial choice”
I almost totally agree with this interpretation
it is, in fact, a CURATORIAL CHOICE that involves the CENSORSHIP of a mural.

Does this mean I am boycotting Art in the Streets? Hell no. There’s a lot of work I want to see, and perhaps some stickering to be done. But I think the absence of Blu’s mural provides an important context for the show. Ironically, Deitch’s hasty act of censorship, and the careerist bromides he uses to justify it, reminds us why art that doesn’t play by “unspoken rules” can be so powerful, and so threatening. The ironies of this exhibition are certainly not lost on the LAPD.

 

 

UPDATED BELOW

Despite its claims to being an “alternative” publication, the LA Weekly traffics in some of the most conventional tropes of mainstream media. Rather than presenting a true alternative to the Hollywood image factory, with its endlessly objectified female bodies, and rigid beauty standards, the Weekly offers a hipper, edgier mirror image of that same value system.

An average issue of the LA Weekly typically features a cover design with an image of a sexy woman (often unrelated to the topic of the cover story), and a back page ad from American Apparel’s notoriously skeezy ad department. Inside, one finds dozens of ads for plastic surgery, liposuction and related services. Much of the ad revenue, judging from the paper’s back pages, also seems to come from the sex industry. In short, your average issue of the LA Weekly is a soft-core sandwich, with some local politics, arts and culture coverage tucked in between the surgically-modified (and ‘shopped) tits and ass.

Above: The front & back cover of the July 29, 2010 issue.

“Sex Sells”

This phenomenon is often justified with the axiom that “sex sells,” a statement that combines biological determinism with free market tautology. Even if you accept this explanation at face value, there’s another question: Yes, but whose sex gets sold? The answer is almost always women’s. Just as in mainstream media, men are rarely sexualized on the cover of the LA Weekly.

This doublestandard is not just confined to print media. It’s actually enforced and codified at every level of the entertainment industry. In my history of performing in Los Angeles, I have been explicitly told by bookers from two different “alternative” venues, that female nudity is welcome (encouraged even) onstage, while male nudity is forbidden. That’s right. Men aren’t allowed to get naked on their stages, even when audiences will pay to see it. So much for the free market.

We see this same hypocrisy in the way the MPAA doles out ratings for movies– full frontal female nudity can safely pass with an R, while a visible penis often means the NC-17 kiss of death. In fact, the MPAA now goes out of its way to warn parents about the special risk of exposing their children to “male nudity.” Many Americans like to mock Muslims for the prevalence of the hijab. One might ask why Hollywood is so demure when it comes to male nudity.

99 Essentialist Covers of the LA Weekly

Rather than generalize about this state of affairs, I decided to gather some actual data. So, I looked at the 99 most recent covers of the LA Weekly. You can too! They’re all archived here. These issues were published from April 23, 2009 to May 31, 2011. What follows are my findings and some subjective impressions.

Of the 99 covers, 12 do not depict people. In another 7, it is hard to determine the gender. 2 covers depict children. In total, 21 covers were exempted from this analysis.

That leaves 78 covers in which the gender of the adult subject or subjects is identifiable.

Who is sexy?

Of 78 covers, 30 depict a sexualized woman. Just 4 of those women are also the subject of the cover story.

Of 78 covers, 12 depict a non-sexualized woman, including one trans woman. 8 of those women are also the subject of the cover story.

From this, we can conclude that a woman is most likely to end up on the cover of the LA Weekly if she is (a) “sexy” and (b) not being written about inside the paper. Those rare women who both landed the cover and the cover story were most often musicians, though in two cases, they were prostitutes. This is the exceptional case, where a sexy woman on the cover is also the subject. 

Are men sexy?

Men are pictured on 48 covers, usually as the subject of the article, or related to the article in some way.

Out of all the covers, just 5 depict a sexualized man. 4 of them represent gay sexuality. (Straight men are now so oppressed that they can’t even be sex objects on the cover of a newsweekly!) Here they are:

The Boxer is shirtless, as boxers usually are. But I’ll give this round to the Weekly. Sexy boxer is sexy.

These gay men are generically sexy. Sorta.

These cartoon renderings of man on man action both depict female voyeurs. I think the woman’s presence acts as a beard, negating gay anxiety for the spectator. Not coincidentally, one of the articles is about slashfic. In any case, the message here is more funny ha-ha than sexy.

And now a missed opportunity…

You might think that the Weekly’s “Sex in this City” issue would be a good chance to depict a sexy dude. After all, more than half of LA’s population (and presumably the Weekly’s readers) are women. Wouldn’t they want to see a hunky guy grace the cover? Isn’t it their pocketbooks that those vaginoplasty ads are targeting? Regrettably, while this woman is seen stripping off her stockings, the man is disguised head to toe in a rabbit costume. A carrot for the furry demographic? Or is the bunny burqa enforcing a showbiz fatwa against depictions of male nudity?

What is sexy?

Damn near everything. The LA Weekly can sex up any story.

Murder is sexy! The subjects of these stories were men who killed and/or raped women, so surely we need sexy victims, to see the stories through the killer’s eyes.

Ibogaine– the experimental treatment for heroin addiction– is apparently sexy! This woman is not in the article, nor is there any description of naked people. Or, regrettably, monkeys.

Overpopulation is sexy! Why not?

The music site Buddyhead is sexy. That’s the site’s founder, Travis Keller with the spray can. But whose crack is he looking at?

Food is Sexy! Jonathan Gold’s restaurant reviews are very sensual. But you’ll never see this Pulitzer Prize winning hedonist on the cover.

Art is sexy. Hey, this buxom beauty with the come hither gaze is already in the canon!

Books are sexy. Yep.

And somehow related: Afros are sexy. Well, Afro wigs.

Sometimes, the Weekly finds a clever way to put a sexy woman on the cover. This article about a bogus child sex trafficking panic, which mistook adults for children, gives the paper all the justification it needs for a cleverly sexy cover.

The word “objectification” may not be precise enough. In many cases, it would be better to call women’s bodies a design element, as they frequently make a convenient spot for text. The Weekly has a particular fondness for slapping a headline along a woman’s exposed back, as in this bizarre toxic mold cover art from 2008, or on the chest as in this cover story about The Hills.

Judging from the Weekly’s track record, indeed anything can be sexy. I would not be surprised to see subjects like earthquake preparedness, school overcrowding, or the 99 essential food trucks sexed up on a future cover.

What About Diversity?

The imagery on the cover of the LA Weekly isn’t just female, it’s also heteronormative, white and reflects a set of rigid notions of beauty (this cover story on Beth Ditto is the rare exception.) The lack of diverse images  is especially disappointing when one considers the incredible diversity of Los Angeles. Nearly half of the City’s residents identify as Latino or Hispanic. More than 11% are black. There is a huge gay, lesbian and trans population. People from these demographic groups rarely find themselves represented on the cover of the Weekly, and when they do, it’s in very specific contexts.

Of 78 covers, 18 pictured at least one person of color. In 12 of these, this person is also the subject of the story. Of these, 9 are profiles of musicians. Only one is a woman.

This profile of funk legend Georgia Ann Muldrow is the sole instance out of all 99 covers, in which a woman of color appears on the cover and is also the subject of the story. Note that they found a convenient spot for the headline too– the recurring exotic Afro.

Though many African American, Latino and a few Asian men appear on these covers, none, with the previously noted exception of boxer/politician Manny Pacquiao is sexualized. Sexy women of color, however, appear often, though rarely with any direct connection to the subject.

This expose about the murder of a woman at a “south of the border style” speakeasy in Los Angeles is a good example. The sexy woman on the cover is not an artist’s rendition of the murder victim, nor a photo of anyone profiled in the piece. She’s just a sexy hook for a rather grim story of murder and underworld corruption.

Another victim. This story about corruption in Los Angeles high schools depicts model Charita Mertz reflected in the sunglasses of a predatory cop. The article itself is about a police officer who attempted to assault “an attractive blonde senior.” (As we learned in the case of Lara Logan, it’s always important to note when victims of sexual assault are attractive.)

Middle Eastern, South Asian and Arab women are not depicted on any of the covers. Yet, for this profile of Jillian Lauren, a white American author who wrote a memoir about her stint in the harem of the Sultan of Brunei, the LA Weekly appears to have darkened her skin and styled her in Orientalist drag.

So, what’s wrong with being sexy?

That’s the usual response to critiques like mine. Of course, nothing is wrong with being sexy, when the subject has something to do with sex. Some porn is lovely. Pornographic advertising, not so lovely. A sexy cover story about a sexy someone? Fine. A sexy cover story about toxic mold or serial murder? Just plain stupid. And why is it only women (and sometimes) gay men who are chosen to signify sexy?

I don’t claim to know how design decisions get made at the LA Weekly. I have noticed that ever since the Phoenix-based New Times media chain gobbled up the Weekly and numerous other regional papers, their covers have gotten considerably trashier. What’s the idea behind this? Here’s a clue.

On February 8th, the Seattle Weekly ran this cover to tout an article about their new medical marijuana column. Diane Sosne, a registered nurse and union leader wrote to the paper to complain about the “sexy nurse” imagery, which she said was disrespectful to her profession. Staff writer Curtis Cartier published the letter and then replied with a condescending rebuttal which began by paying lip service to his respect for nurses and then continued with this lame apologia:

“So with that same spirit of professional understanding, I’m hoping that you can respect us and others in our profession, who know that picking a good cover image is crucial in getting people to, well, read our publication.

As Mr. Elliott writes and you point out: ‘Seattle’s lively medical-marijuana scene can be quite entertaining.’ It can indeed. And Steve’s gripping prose and wealth of insight explains that point beautifully. But putting an image of a middle-aged white guy on the cover, or a generic pot-leaf graphic, or something else lame, runs the risk of failing to inspire anyone to actually pick up the paper and enjoy said prose and insight.

That’s not to mention that the whole sexy-nurse thing is a cat that was let out of the bag a long time ago. Sure, it’s mildly degrading to the nursing profession, but…”

I have a hunch Cartier’s rebuttal sums up the general attitude at these publications. His readers don’t want to see middle-aged white guys on the cover. His readers are middle aged white guys. And to get them to read his publication, instead of say Maxim or something, he’s gotta deliver the T&A. Sure, the covers might be degrading, stupid or even bizarre non-sequitirs. But he didn’t invent the sexy nurse stereotype and besides, didn’t you hear that print media is dying? What are you bugging him for?

This is, no doubt, the same calculus which informs Arianna Huffington’s decision to fill the right column of her political news site with sexist linkbait, while chastising critics for actually clicking on it.

Maybe they’re right. Perhaps their publications will go belly up without all this T&A. But somehow I doubt it. Instead, I think it suggests that these editors are worried that their content alone simply isn’t good enough to attract readers.

But beneath the economic anxiety and the creative laziness lies something deeper– an unwillingness to confront privilege. It’s so much easier to believe that women are meant to be sex objects, and that the routine use of sexualized images of women is driven by market forces or ancient biological drives and not by a patriarchal society, which extends even to the hallowed hipster hallways of our alternative press.

UPDATE: A reader notes that I should clarify that the LA Weekly & Seattle Weekly are actually owned by Village Voice Media. New Times merged with VVM in 2006. As this article notes: “The merged company, which will continue to use the name Village Voice Media, is effectively an acquisition by New Times, whose current shareholders will own 62 percent of the new company and hold five of nine board seats.”

I kinda love this riff on the Arab uprisings, which uses a mashup of the popular game Angry Birds and the classic Disney cartoon adaptation of “Three Little Pigs” to explain recent world events.

I love it, that is, up until the Mighty Eagle is called in. For those who have never played Angry Birds, the Mighty Eagle icon appears in the top left side of your iPhone screen after you have tried and failed to complete a level after a few tries. There he is, next to the pause button, giving me the eagle eye in the screenshot below.

This is annoying for a couple of reasons. First, the eagle icon occupies valuable space on the iPhone screen, making it difficult to play the game as you would normally. For instance, if you want to break a blue bird into three smaller birds, or press a yellow bird to make him go faster, the Mighty Eagle icon often rests directly over the spot you need to touch to make that happen successfully, and thus win the level without his help. Winning without the “help” of the Mighty Eagle is much more satisfying, and makes you a stronger player.

Of course, you can make the Mighty Eagle icon go away for a little while, but you have to stop the game, click on the eagle, and refuse his offer. If you’re still struggling, he’ll magically reappear on your screen, offering his “help” yet again. He’s very insistent on helping, this eagle.

The other reason I dislike the Mighty Eagle is that he charges money for his services. His help is not offered for free. It comes at a cost.

Like many on the left, I’m feeling deeply conflicted about the use of American military power in Libya. But I have pretty strong feelings about the Mighty Eagle.

The Mighty Eagle sucks.