Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson Nude

James Joyner @ Gone Hollywood | Thursday, February 23, 2006

Pick up this month’s Hollywood issue of Vanity Fair and you’ll see two lovely young stars-of-the-moment, Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson, posing alluringly in the altogether. Open the foldout, and you’ll even see Johansson’s bare buttocks. What you won’t see is a third, equally lovely young actress, Rachel McAdams of “Wedding Crashers” fame. It seems McAdams arrived at the photo shoot and decided she didn’t want to take her clothes off.

[...]

Is it arty and fun, or does it say something about sexual politics in Hollywood? In 2006, four decades after the launch of the feminist movement, does a serious actress still need to take her clothes off to get attention?

And where, oh where, are the naked men?

The reason female stars disrobe is simple, says Janice Min, editor of the much-read celebrity magazine US Weekly. “It’s tried and true. You show some cleavage on an actress. You make her look sexy. You make her look hot.” She NEEDS to be hot — because in Hollywood, “you have to be sexy to be a successful actress. You just have to be.”

So where’s the nude photo of Brad Pitt? Or George Clooney, who appears later in the issue, dressed, amid a bevy of women in flesh-toned bras and panties? Let’s face it, Min says: Women do like to see sexy men â just not with all their clothes off. “Men just aren’t viewed as sex objects in the same way that women are,” Min says. “Women don’t think about men being naked in the same way that men think about women.” In fact, she says, at her magazine’s offices, when photos come in of a male star with no shirt on, “We say, ‘Gross! Put some clothes on!’” (Imagine that being uttered about an attractive female.)

Investigative journalism at its finest!

Photo Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansen nude Vanity Fair cover

Update: Andrew Sullivan notes that,

Of course, gay media outlets have plenty of male nudes, but that’s because they’re read by … men. Men and women are biologically wired to be attracted to different aspects of the people they lust after. Women, for some reason still opaque to me, are sexually attracted to a man’s soul, his character, his style. Men want to see titties, as Dave Chapelle would say. Gay men and straight men are no different in this. And so the single standard VF is using is a simple one: let’s sell as many magazines as we can. I fail to see how they can be criticized for doing their job.

Of course, gay men don’t actually want to see titties. But his point is well taken.

Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson Nude

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