Alongside news of California’s special election, a deadly tornado in Indiana and riots in Paris, the L.A. Times had plenty of space to feature Jacob Authier, a Chapman college junior who has made a habit of puttering around campus—gasp!—topless. Gee, a male student in college goes to class in sunny SoCal without a shirt. Alert the media. Wait. Someone did. And the media bit. AP picked up the story and it’s now all over the country.
Why, in my day, you’d have to walk around campus buck naked to draw anyone’s attention. Whatever happened to Berkeley student Andrew Martinez, a bona fide nudist with a smokin' body, who bared all on campus for several months in the early 1990s? Back then, we had “The Naked Guy.” Now, we have “The Fellow Without a Shirt.” What has the world come to?A few years ago, you couldn’t turn on the television without getting mooned by Dennis Franz. In a post-wardrobe-malfunction world, it won’t be long before TV networks have to pixilate the crotches of Olympic divers.
Just when I was lamenting the untimely death of public nudity, along came “Breasts Not Bombs” to the rescue. Today, in Sacramento, the anti-war group pulled a publicity stunt on the steps of the California capitol, stripping off their tops to show their disdain for Governor Schwarzenegger’s ballot initiatives. They were women, which meant, of course, that the California Highway Patrol had to arrest them for indecent exposure and disorderly conduct.
A CHP officer explained that they were told to arrest the protesters if there was—I think I heard this right—any exposure of “nipples and areola.”
I just don’t get why the nipple and areola are considered so darn offensive. I saw a show on breast augmentation surgery on Discovery Health. The bleeding incision was shown in all its gore, but someone felt the need to blur out the poor, maligned areola.
A nubby protrusion with a colored circle around it. No big deal, is it? I’ve got pretty much the same equipment and no one has ever forced me to wear a pastie in public.
Where are they going to draw the line? What if a protester’s gender was not obvious? Did the CHP ask the women for biological evidence that they were indeed women? What about all those men who have boobs? Shouldn’t they be arrested too?
Jacob Authier, your daring act of self-expression has earned you 15 minutes of fame. Enjoy it—and use a good sunscreen.
2 comments:
Oh and by the way, look at that photo again. White guys with afros. Now that's the guy who needs a good friend to pull him aside and tell him to get a grip.
So unfortunately I'm a student at Chapman U, and am well acquainted with the shirtless guy. Because of the painful absurdity of the situation, I wrote to the Times, and this is the response they gave me. Talk about a cop-out:
Your e-mail was forwarded to the office of the readers' representative. Thank you for writing. I'm sorry that believe as a result of that story that the L.A. Times has no integrity, and I'll pass that point of view on to editors.
For what it's worth, the Nov. 7 L.A. Times had 136 news articles, of which this was just one. Any newspaper on any given day is going to reflect a vast variety of topics, and among stories of war, natural disaster, politics and other serious subjects, this was a look at a lighter aspect of life. However, as I say, I'll let editors know how disappointed you were in their choosing to publish this piece.
Jamie Gold
Readers' Representative
Post a Comment