Sex is FREE!

My daughter loves Hannah Montana and for once I agree with a 7 year old’s choice of music idol. Miley Cyrus is undeniably talented and as long as she continues releasing the kind of music she introduced us to on her “Introducing Miley Cyrus” album she will do well.

What really annoys me though is that the media is so tired of Lindsay, Britney and Paris that they are trying to make every little thing Miley does out to be slutty, whorish and bad.

Adults use younger and younger kids every year in order to make money and I find this page unacceptable (Best Week Ever My Lil’ Miley Facebook Application.)

When Annie Leibovitz took a picture of Sting muddy and naked on a dry lake I was all like “wow!” Did the media make a fuss about it, start writing articles about his privates or making comments about every detail of his body? No.

When Annie Leibovitz took a picture of Whoopi Goldberg in a bathub full of milk, did anybody make a fuss? No.

Then Annie Leibovitz took a picture of Miley Cyrus in a bed sheet. People started crying wolf, making a huge fuss enough to prompt Cyrus to tell the world she was “embarrassed”. This whole fiasco is mostly embarrassing to Annie Leibovitz who delivered a bland, very boring portrait of Cyrus proving that she consulted with Cyrus and her entourage during the shoot. It was not at all inappropriate or shocking! In 10 years, this portrait will have historical significance but for now it is just a boring portrait of a 15 year old girl in a bed sheet.

Annie Leibovitz is one of the most innovative and talented photographers of our era yet most people in America don’t know or understand her work.

Sometimes it seems that people in the media are just too young or ignorant to analyze a situation within it’s real context considering history in the process. They just yap like little dogs at everything that walks by hoping to stir controversy and fill airtime.

When I am not busy scarring my own child for life, I like to read about how other parents are scarring their own child for life.

Of course, I am tempted to give this award to Oklahoma representative Sally Kerns who rants against homosexuals while she thinks only her base is listening. She is a former schoolteacher who is married to a pastor and has two grown sons… errr, one son because she disowned the gay one and recently removed mention of both of them from her official page.

But today I wanted you to put yourself in the body of a 6 year old pageant contestant. She comes home from school one day to find her mom had her pageant photos professionally retouched to this:

from this:

But I have to admit this whole pageant crazyness is very inspiring and if I ever write a pageant related story it will be quite horrific and tragic. I don’t see how I could ever put a positive spin on it.

Source: queenbeanantiques on eBay

Years ago when I first logged onto Flickr I found this crazy shot of two British guys in a shower. No doubt the tag spamming had a lot to do with it. I found the whole photo stream to be very intriguing. They show a world of bored teenagers drinking and doing drugs. Everything about these drab and depressing pictures is foreign to me. The pictures are so amateur, that they look like a styled photo shoot. I like the unpolished. Real = Art.
This week I am not really featuring a fetishist per say but someone who takes amazing photos in the same style. However they professional photographers. The surreal world of Jake Dow Smith and Jonnie Craig of Hello Television in England who takes the strangest most surreal photos. Some of their work has been featured in Vice Magazine. Again, everything in his photos is different from the color, the poses, the objects. They all combine to create something original. When Wes Anderson put his retro-dressing characters in a house filled with the latest technology… from 1963 he is essentially trying to create the same illusion. Jake and Jonnie seem to spend everyday in that retro-futuristic world.

(I guess that includes me if I’m talking about it…)

I think that yesterday was the last day I will ever care to stop by PerezHilton. Perez posted a picture of Vanessa Hudgens with her mom and little sister with the headline “My sister is a whore”. Such postings are truly disrespectful to Vanessa and her family. She is a young actress who has chosen to act in family films for Disney and seems like an all around good person. She is certainly not doing anything to attract attention to herself. I had excused his inappropriate comments and annoying compulsion for drawing penises on celebrity photos to the fact that he is a sheltered Hollywood fag who doesn’t know any better but this last comment tells me he may lack a soul.

My daughter is a fan of Hudgens and will likely hear of the nudie pic scandal at some point. I do not mind explaining to her that when people take naked photos of themselves, they are usually embarrassed by it down the road. I am still thinking about what I will say to her actually because I have to try to see it the way she will (if she ever does.)

When I was 10 or 11 I found pictures of my mom naked and giving some dude a blowjob. I thought that was icky icky poo! It should have kept me from taking topless pictures of myself when I was a teen, at a Kmart photo booth no less. I have never cared to videotape myself having sex. I hope nobody else has but I fail to see how anybody would care to see that.

What Vanessa did seems to be common among today’s teens. Most have cell phones with cameras. I have never dolled up my daughter, I rarely take posed pictures of her and never keep a webcam on the computer… I tend to think that doing that will establish an expectation of privacy in my daughter. But habits change and the cell phone she will have in 5-6 years will inevitably transmit video. I do spend quite a bit of time thinking about how I can raise a confident girl who will not subscribe to the idea that her purpose in life is to be a Bratz doll.

Something doesn’t change however: Taking revealing pictures of one’s self invites people (i.e. boys mostly) to make dumb comments.

I read both the comments on PerezHilton and Vanessa’s MySpace on the day of the picture was confirmed as authentic. One comment that I saw a dozen times made me laugh. Why do teenage boys feel they must tell Vanessa to shave her pubes? When a guy brings to my attention the topic of going “bare down there” he is telling me that he is ignorant. He is telling me that he has seen so much porn that he thinks girls are genetically modified to never grow hair anywhere. He is telling me that he has only seen strippers naked in person. He is telling that maybe, if he is lucky enough, he has only ever ‘dated’ a sex worker. These are the women who do go bare down there because it is expected in their job. Women who aspire to work in the sex industry or become decorative people may have breast implants and often schedule a Brazilian wax every six weeks… The rest of us don’t really give a fuck what you think.

When I first saw Vanessa’s picture I voted on ‘No, it looks like someone else’ and I was glad that her team came forward and immediately set the record straight. The media is very harsh on actresses for every little things that they do, or don’t do… but rarely vilify actors who live a womanizing, drug and booze lifestyle. I have followed gossip about the lives of celebrities for 20 years and I am starting to think that Hollywood is Hell.

I was surprised to see a similar leg shot taken automatically by the Google Maps van in San Francisco. Wired is publishing an interesting list of photos found using the new Street View addition to Google Maps. Some are hilarious, some are creepy!! Be on your best behavior when you see the van passing by!