Cindy Lange-Kubick: Not enough good nudity
There’s good naked and there’s bad naked.
Apparently, a number of people thought the naked we had in the paper last week — The Calendar Men of Magnet — was bad naked.
I respectfully disagree.
I loved the naked Men of Magnet, with their bony shoulders and bulging bellies and their droopy “man” breasts. They reminded me of seeing my dad mowing the lawn with his shirt off in the summer.
In fact, this is exactly the kind of naked people need to see more of.
It’s real naked. The kind you see in the mirror at home in the morning, instead of in the glossy pages of an airbrushed men’s magazine.
I know what you’re saying. And it’s true: Most of us look a lot better with our clothes on.
And it’s more practical navigating the world clothed. Think of all the bus seats you wouldn’t want to sit on, all the bending over it would be better to avoid in a Garden of Eden world. (As Jerry Seinfeld might say: Naked card playing, good. Naked coughing, bad.)
But the Magnet naked had the added bonus of being naked for a cause — to build a new community center for a tiny Nebraska town. (And the reality is the men wore swim trunks or boxer shorts, artfully Photoshopped out to give the illusion of nudity.)
The concept is nothing new.
Two years ago, the movie “Calendar Girls” came out, based on a group of women firmly in the sag bracket who made a nudie calendar of their own back in England.
The calendars are kitschy naked. A kind of non-threatening, non-sexual naked. Naked covered by the morning paper, or a flowerpot filled with daisies naked.
As far as I know, my newspaper has a commitment to not show what’s under the figurative fig leaf as well, unless the subject is 9 months or younger, and even then it’s bottom-side up only.
But I say seeing real bodies as they really are is a good thing, because that’s the way the real world looks.
Remember Jamie Lee Curtis and her daring before and after photo shoot for More magazine in 2002?
A huge media flap broke out over the flab she let the world see in the before shots.
No makeup, no tummy-tucking garments, no pushup bra, just a 43-year-old mother of two in the brutal light of her bedroom at home, back fat, saddlebags and all.
Then the magazine photographed the actress again — after 13 handlers spent three hours making her perfect.
An interviewer asked: Weren’t you afraid to let people see you in your un-retouched state?
Nope, Curtis answered.
What she was afraid of was the impact of promoting images that give the public “the fake sense of … what people are supposed to look like.”
What Curtis did was real, says Aaron Holz, an assistant professor of painting at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
And what the Men of Magnet did was “as real as it gets.”
And then there are events like the Academy Awards, the professor says, “where you have Dolly Parton who can’t even smile because there’s so much Botox in her.”
(Not to mention all the Barbie Doll bosoms.)
A friend told me it depresses her to think of a whole generation of boys who don’t know what a real breast looks like.
And it makes her sad to think of the rising number of young men with eating disorders who think they need an Usher body, too. (Not to mention the young women who can’t quite fit the Lindsay Lohan mold, no matter how much they exercise or how little they eat.)
One of the most astonishing photographs I ever saw was in The Sun magazine. It showed seven women, all shapes and sizes, naked from the waist up.
All of them had had mastectomies.
At first, it was hard to look at.
But it was real.
Like the Men of Magnet.
“What makes that calendar wonderful is it’s a perfect counterpoint to every other form of human representation that magazines put out there,” Holz says, “which is fake, airbrushed and photoshopped.”
In other words: Bad naked.
As opposed to bony shoulders and bulging bellies.
Good naked, all the way.
Reach Cindy Lange-Kubick at 473-7218 or clangekubick@journalstar.com.
Apparently, a number of people thought the naked we had in the paper last week — The Calendar Men of Magnet — was bad naked.
I respectfully disagree.
I loved the naked Men of Magnet, with their bony shoulders and bulging bellies and their droopy “man” breasts. They reminded me of seeing my dad mowing the lawn with his shirt off in the summer.
In fact, this is exactly the kind of naked people need to see more of.
It’s real naked. The kind you see in the mirror at home in the morning, instead of in the glossy pages of an airbrushed men’s magazine.
I know what you’re saying. And it’s true: Most of us look a lot better with our clothes on.
And it’s more practical navigating the world clothed. Think of all the bus seats you wouldn’t want to sit on, all the bending over it would be better to avoid in a Garden of Eden world. (As Jerry Seinfeld might say: Naked card playing, good. Naked coughing, bad.)
But the Magnet naked had the added bonus of being naked for a cause — to build a new community center for a tiny Nebraska town. (And the reality is the men wore swim trunks or boxer shorts, artfully Photoshopped out to give the illusion of nudity.)
The concept is nothing new.
Two years ago, the movie “Calendar Girls” came out, based on a group of women firmly in the sag bracket who made a nudie calendar of their own back in England.
The calendars are kitschy naked. A kind of non-threatening, non-sexual naked. Naked covered by the morning paper, or a flowerpot filled with daisies naked.
As far as I know, my newspaper has a commitment to not show what’s under the figurative fig leaf as well, unless the subject is 9 months or younger, and even then it’s bottom-side up only.
But I say seeing real bodies as they really are is a good thing, because that’s the way the real world looks.
Remember Jamie Lee Curtis and her daring before and after photo shoot for More magazine in 2002?
A huge media flap broke out over the flab she let the world see in the before shots.
No makeup, no tummy-tucking garments, no pushup bra, just a 43-year-old mother of two in the brutal light of her bedroom at home, back fat, saddlebags and all.
Then the magazine photographed the actress again — after 13 handlers spent three hours making her perfect.
An interviewer asked: Weren’t you afraid to let people see you in your un-retouched state?
Nope, Curtis answered.
What she was afraid of was the impact of promoting images that give the public “the fake sense of … what people are supposed to look like.”
What Curtis did was real, says Aaron Holz, an assistant professor of painting at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
And what the Men of Magnet did was “as real as it gets.”
And then there are events like the Academy Awards, the professor says, “where you have Dolly Parton who can’t even smile because there’s so much Botox in her.”
(Not to mention all the Barbie Doll bosoms.)
A friend told me it depresses her to think of a whole generation of boys who don’t know what a real breast looks like.
And it makes her sad to think of the rising number of young men with eating disorders who think they need an Usher body, too. (Not to mention the young women who can’t quite fit the Lindsay Lohan mold, no matter how much they exercise or how little they eat.)
One of the most astonishing photographs I ever saw was in The Sun magazine. It showed seven women, all shapes and sizes, naked from the waist up.
All of them had had mastectomies.
At first, it was hard to look at.
But it was real.
Like the Men of Magnet.
“What makes that calendar wonderful is it’s a perfect counterpoint to every other form of human representation that magazines put out there,” Holz says, “which is fake, airbrushed and photoshopped.”
In other words: Bad naked.
As opposed to bony shoulders and bulging bellies.
Good naked, all the way.
Reach Cindy Lange-Kubick at 473-7218 or clangekubick@journalstar.com.
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