Amanda Hess of Washington City Paper has written an excellent, insightful article on Huffington Post, critiquing the popular news site’s opportunistic blurring of the line between progressivism and fetishism:
Only a religious conservative would bother to make a stink out of a body part which most men, women, and children have in sets of two. It’s almost enough to make fetishizing nipples on your Web site sound like a liberal position. If it pisses off the religious conservatives, that means it’s a good thing, right? After all, this is just “entertainment,” anyway—who cares if it’s progressive or not when we’re all just staring at nipples and having a good time? As Harry Shearer points out on HuffPo, everybody’s doing it!
The problem is that people really do care about nipples. They care so much about nipples that the Huffington Post devotes pages and pages of photographs to them when women accidentally (or, you know, against their will) reveal them to the public. In that way, there’s no difference between the religious conservative who is scandalized by a bare breast popping up in the middle of his football game and a liberal Web site which devotes its resources to naked chicks. A woman’s body part is a priority. Real women’s issues, not so much.
Not only is Hess’s piece thought-provoking and very well-written, but it’s a much needed tonic for anyone who’s ever been turned off by Huffington Post’s “everything and the kitchen sink” approach to news.
