Random Anger

Anger, along with exhaustion, has been quite the theme lately, in my own life and my pals’ blogs. As Spill said last night when we finally got to talk for all of a minute and a half, maybe it’s just the news–so much horrifying shit’s been happening (or coming to light) lately, you kind of can’t help but want to scream at everyone you see.

Still, there’s something extra-special about this. I mean, realistically, naked starlets=zzzzzzz. I’ve got better things to get ornery about. I can even get over the “Three girls in a bed is a bed full of girls. Two girls in a bed are lesbians” comment; I assume the subtext there is “So blatant a straight-male fantasy would be vulgar for Vanity Fair,” not “Lesbians! The horror!” (Then again, the message they decided to go with was, “Hey guys, if you’re vewy, vewy quiet, you can just slide right on up to a coupla naked ladies and feel free to inhale, and they won’t even notice you’re there! Go ahead! Try it!” So, uh, maybe I’m wrong.) Two things, however, have piqued my damn pique:

1) The news relayed by Broadsheet that, in addition to what you see there, the inside has a shot of George Clooney in “director” garb, surrounded by scantily clad women, and Tom Ford has publicly described this as “every woman’s fantasy.” Mmmkay. For starters, I’ve been fantasizing about George Clooney since the Facts of Life days, and frankly, those daydreams have never involved a gaggle of other women and him dressed for work. (“Mmm, baby, you just keep rocking that career! I’ll be over here in my undies getting prepped for a catfight over who gets to fuck you when your terribly important life slows down!” Every woman’s fantasy, indeed.) Second, why are we consulting Tom Ford on women’s fantasies? Kinda reminds me of my sister coming home from a mandatory pre-cana class–when she was 32 years old and living with her fiance–and calling to tell me, “Well, I learned tonight that I might not enjoy sex the ‘first few times.’ Thank god for these classes–I really wouldn’t feel comfortable getting married without advice from a priest on the female orgasm.”

Hey, maybe when we get Blonde up and running, we can publish a photo of every gay designer’s secret fantasy! Something like George Clooney going down on an unwaxed, size-12 woman his own age, while Brad Pitt and Matt Damon look after her kids.

2) What have they done to Keira Knightley’s tummy in that photo? I admit I’m not overly familiar with well-defined abs, but I’m pretty sure they don’t look like that when you sit like that. Furthermore, I’m pretty sure Keira Knightley isn’t overly familiar with well-defined abs, either. The girl is skinny, not buff–how exactly do you suppose she got a stomach like that without achieving similar muscle tone anywhere else on her body? I’m not even going to get into the fact that, unless she’s the next “exhausted and dehydrated” ingenue we’ll have to worry about, there is no way in hell her right thigh didn’t droop behind Scarlett Johansson–just a little–in the original photo. No, I’m totally focused on the weird, mannish squares they drew on her gut. The woman is, I’m sure, absolutely lovely and absolutely tiny all on her own–but that wasn’t enough, apparently. It’s never enough.

While I’m at it, what the fuck is going on with Virginia Madsen’s face on the cover of the current Chicago magazine? You can only sort-of see it in the little picture there, but every time I see it on the newsstand, I want to cry. She’s easily on my shortlist of most beautiful women in Hollywood, if not the world, but the retouching has made her look like Jocelyn Wildenstein. Only more plastic. Do we really think that’s prettier than a handful of wrinkles on a fortysomething woman? I mean, even if they’d only airbrushed most of them out… she just doesn’t even look human.

I guess that’s the point.