In Case You Wondered

Some of you out there may have been inspired by that last post to remember the popular medical book Why Do Men Have Nippples? One answer, of course, is that male and female anatomy is pretty darn similar. The next question out of your mouth might very well be: just how similar are the penis and the clitoris?

The answer: creepily similar. Enjoy this enlightening series of instructional videos and slides.

Nipples

I wasn't at my job very long when an account manager came up to me and said, "I need a page, blog, and article on cosmetic nipple surgery, as soon as possible," or words to that effect. A page is easy, you just talk about the procedures. The blog is also easy, you just talk about the page. The article's a little harder. It's longer and you can't just focus on the procedures, so I decided I would write about what makes for an attractive nipple. I quickly found there wasn't much good information out there in terms of detailed considerations of nipple aesthetics, so I happily found myself with the freedom of uncharted territory. I made something up that drew from erotic sources but abstracted them sufficiently that it had an authoritative ring. That article is out there somewhere, possibly under my name, most likely not.

But my post today was inspired by the Marisa Miller topless pics I saw a while back:
(The source of this image is a blog called Dirty Rotten Whore. Beware, it's considerably more off-color than my blog, but it does have a whole photo series, including a sequence where she's sort of playing basketball topless. Those of you who think making women's basketball topless will generate more interest should take note: shooting a basketball does freaky things to a woman's body.)

I immediately thought, "wow, her nipples look great!" A really visceral reaction that stuck with me for several days. We'd talked about Marisa Miller as part of our conversation on a poll about the best celebrity breasts, when people complained of not being able to judge breasts unless they're freed. Well, judge away.

To my mind, they have several good points: nice color (aided by the tan line, which adds contrast), good size (not all gross and distended like a Penthouse model), good shape (nipples erect, even though the areola is not contracted), and nice, perky placement.

Now that I've said that, though, I want to say that there are a lot of ways for nipples to look good. All colors are nice, from pink to dark brown, and for extra color fun there are nipple rouges. Henna apparently also gives some great color and is sometimes mixed with essential oils for fragrance. My only real sticking point is if the nipples are stretched out they do look kinda gross. Often this is a product of breast implants that are too large and stretch the skin all out of shape, and I imagine a lot of the Penthouse Pets that grossed me out in the 80s probably had implants that were poorly done.

Nipples also look great poking their way through clothes. Like, say, Kelly Brook frolicking in the cold surf:
Yeah, that's nice. In these cases, imagining the nipples is half the fun.

Of course, women know we do this, and use things like those fake nipples to jerk us around. Not that I mind. Not at all.

Superheroines

You'd probably never heard of Malin Akerman before Watchmen. And with pretty good reason. Before this what'd she done? 27 Dresses. An uncredited turn in The Invasion. And the reason she'd never done anything big is that she sucks as an actress. After the movie came out, though, there was a big storm of talk about how sexy she played the Silk Spectre, probably an obligatory media hype deal. In my opinion, the Silk Spectre was much sexier in the comic than in the movie.

(The comparison image I found on a design blog called Eithin, which had some interesting analysis that might explain why I like the comic better.)

Of course, this is not Akerman's fault: superheroines are always sexier in print than on the screen. I'll grant a couple of exceptions, then prove the rule.

Mystique:

Played by Rebecca Romijin-Stamos, she's a lot sexier than comic-book and animated versions.




Wonder Woman:

Played by Lynda Carter is comparably sexy to her modern comic-book alter-ego, and certainly sexier than the original newsprint version.


Invisible Girl/Woman:

I haven't yet gotten up the stomach to watch the Fantastic Four movies, but I'm willing to grant that Jessica Alba can do a sexier portrayal of the housewifely Sue Storm.







But most of the time it goes the other way:

Rogue:

Why change this sexy Cajun into an awkward, accentless adolescent? What you lose: great big tits, tons of superpowers she gained by draining other mutants, confidence to stand beside other X-Men as an equal, and a facade of independence developed to cope with her inability to ever get physically close to another human being. In particular, the tension between her confidence in her power and her emotional vulnerability when anyone threatens to actually get close makes her character interesting and complex. What you gain: teenage angst, a lame Iceman love triangle, and an equally lame mentor relationship with Wolverine.

Storm:

Storm, like many of the X-Men has undergone some drastic changes over her 40+ years of existence in the Marvel universe. In changing her to real life, not only did Storm lose one of her enduring features (great tits), but she became a much flatter character. We know Halle Berry can act (see Monster's Ball and a surprisingly good job in Swordfish), but we also know she will let herself totally phone it in and go through the motions to collect a paycheck (Catwoman). Over the course of the X-Men movies, she became less and less of the former and more and more of the latter.

Jean Grey:

The first incarnation where I met Jean Grey, the old X-Men cartoons, taught me that redheads could be sexy. The cliche is that they're unstable, in my personal experience, they were simply bookish, and most live-action portrayals showed them as comic. Even Ginger, from Gilligan's Island, should have been sexy but wasn't. She paled beside Mary Ann. Despite her rockin' bod, she was ditzy and bland as a character.

All this to say, Jean Grey was sexy in the cartoon. Smart, strong, independent but emotionally vulnerable, and with great tits she was a joy to watch, despite the limited quality of the animation. And then she became the Phoenix. Throw me into that fire.

Famke Janssen seems like a good choice to play her. She's got a good bod, some acting experience, and she understands the role, as shown by the quote on her Chickipedia page: "We've always been ready for female superheros. Because women want to be them and men want to do them." Perfect. But she does a moderate turn at best as Jean Grey. Costuming is partly to blame, again, when instead of using her awesome Phoenix alter-ego, they just put her in a trench coat much of the time.

And I could mention others like Electra, Batgirl, Batman she-villains Catwoman and Poison Ivy, even Aeon Flux.

Do I have an argument here? Yes, and here it is: superheroines are always sexier in comics because:

3) Their clothes are unreal--what fabric can cling like that & still not bunch, bulge, or tear?

2) They're unreal--we know you can't have those tits & that body, but a man can dream, can't he?

1) They're deeper--comics don't spend a lot of time developing character, but you throw a crumb out here and there over the course of decades & it adds up to something. Actresses rarely inhabit the roles, they just go through the motions, and nothing is less sexy than just going through the motions, which is Malin Akerman's chief sin.

Breasts: How Big Is Too Big?

I remember one of my first discussions on the topic of female anatomy, probably around 4th grade or so, was on the subject of breasts and how big is best. Funny that now, more than a quarter of a century later, I'm not only still talking about it--it's a major part of my job.

In 4th grade, I was generally of the opinion that bigger was pretty much better, but the opinion that ruled the day was more than a handful doesn't matter because what're you going to do with the rest of the breast? Never mind that since then I've learned there's a lot more things you can do with breasts than just touch them--this remains a legitimate, defensible opinion . . . that I don't happen to share.

Now, we can all agree that Sheyla Hershey, with her record-breaking 38 KKK is pretty gross and disproportionate, but that doesn't really matter, because her goal is not to look good. Instead, she's locked in an existential battle with the universe, her own personal quest for breasts. It's like that racer in "The Distance," you know? All the rest of us are just shadows, a phantom audience whose participation in her show is neither necessary nor important--she just goes on to the exclusion of all else, sacrificing health, personal relationships, even beauty to attain her insane goal. I can dig it, and even admire it the way I admire those idiots who died trying to scale Everest's icy heights, or even that symbolic leopard frozen atop mount Kilimanjaro (yeah, squirm, Hemmingway, squirm!)

Anyway, I got distracted there. My point is, how big should a woman's breasts be, ideally? This particular phase of my consideration was brought on by Page 3 Girl, Nicola McLean.

Page 3 Girls, for those who don't know, are women who appear topless on the 3rd page of the British tabloid, The Sun. Nicola McLean was--and continues to be--one of the most popular Page 3 Girls ever, with her perky 34B breasts, which I have to say look pretty good to me.

But then she decided she wanted bigger breasts, so she quit being a Page 3 Girl (where they stand for no such nonsense), and embarked on an abortive acting/modeling/general celebritying career, which eventually hit its high point as being a WAG (Wives and Girlfriends, normally refers to footballers' significant others) and with the reality show I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here. It was in this role that she became the focus of a survey on breast size conducted at British plastic surgery clinics, where women were asked, simply, are her breasts too big? Look at her picture from a stunt in the TV show (with idiotic product placement) and decide for yourself.

The overwhelming opinion: Yes, they are too big. The majority of women agreed that a C-cup is the ideal size for a woman's breasts, not McLean's ludicrous GG. Now, consider a similarly proportioned WAG with greater market penetration in the US: Gemma Atkinson.

Dr. C's Science Corner: Men Proven to Objectify Women

If you had any doubts, here's a pretty definitive statement that men really do objectify women. 'Strue.

Researchers at Princeton did an experiment where they showed college-aged men inside an MRI pictures of women in bikinis and noted that the areas of the men's brains associated with "handling tools" lit up. And when men were shown images of fully clad women, this didn't happen. Ostensibly, this is evidence of something known as "benevolent sexism," but it's really much simpler than that. Put a college-age hetero male alone in a confined place with pictures of women in bikinis and of course the first thing he's going to think about is "handling a tool."

In a related study, men were shown to associate bikini-clad women (as above) with first-person verb forms like [I] "push," "handle," and "grab." Whereas fully clothed women (as below) were more often associated with 3rd person verb forms like [she] "pushes," "handles," and "grabs." Go figure.

Movie Review: Ginger Snaps

While my friends over at The Larryville Chronicles are considering feminine werewolf fiction, it seems appropriate that I should talk about Ginger Snaps, a movie that centers on a young woman who becomes a lycanthrope, and slowly, methodically, "wolfs out."Ginger Snaps is no Werewolf Woman, nor is it a Howling II. Sex is at (or near) the center of the movie, but it is not an exploitation flick. Our heroine Ginger is played by the sexy Katharine Isabelle, whom you probably know from . . . well, you probably don't know her from anything else. She's in a few things, but it seems like she was pretty much made for this role. And she's in all the sequels, which tells you her career went nowhere after this. Anyway, Ginger and her Brigitte (excellently played to mousey Mokey perfection by Emily Perkins) are a couple of isolated Goth chicks who are also late bloomers biologically, meaning they haven't started their periods yet, even though Ginger is 16 and Brigitte 15.

The movie really starts moving when Ginger gets her period, gets attacked by a werewolf, and suddenly gets really sexy hot and therefore popular with the guys, which results in strain between the sisters. Brigitte and Ginger who used to share everything suddenly have nothing in common because Ginger is into boys now, and is, well, becoming a werewolf. The developing tension between the two sisters is probably the best part of the movie from a non-genre standpoint, the place where the movie best delves into the core of human relationships by exposing how the simple process of moving on in time alienates us from those who used to know us well.

The movie tries very hard to bring lycanthropy into the mundane world. Part of this is accomplished by its blending of the supernatural with the natural: the linking of werewolfism and menstruation as monthly curses, the transformation into the werewolf compared to puberty ("hair where there wasn't hair before"). This part works metaphorically, but I was unimpressed by the movie's attempt to turn lycanthropy into a disease that can be cured with homeopathic medicine, although Ginger's passing it on like an STD leads to some humorous moments. The movie is engaging and funny, and Isabelle is super-sexy, even (or especially?) with a tail.

But in the end I don't think the movie quite comes together. One thing that's missing is the visceral, painful transformation of the body that makes werewolf movies like The Howling and An American Werewolf in London so successful. This is not just special effects, it's the visual evidence of the body being wrested out of one's control, the instant when the animal within takes over and a man becomes a monster before his very eyes, which is why werewolves are more often men. This is something all men have experienced, especially under the influence of desire, but also under anger, something that makes us hang our head in guilt or embrace with false bravado the shameful acts we have perpetrated in those moments.

In place of this transformation, Ginger Snaps substitutes a gradual transformation. Kudos for the attempt, but Ginger's frustration over razors filled with lupine hair is just not the same thing. And since Ginger's final transformation occurs off screen (probably due to a lack of special effects budget for this Canadian flick) the final sequences are detached from her character, and the conclusion, I felt, was very flat. The movie is certainly worth watching: it's interesting, and it's better than a piece of crap like Cursed.

Warning: Adult Content Below


I have long known about Ginger Snaps, but have avoided watching it partly because I blame it for the disappearance of a porn site I used to love with the same name. It focused on redheads, of course, but its series were different because the girls weren't necessarily pretty in the standard sense of models, they were cute/sexy and had faces with personality. They were also better at "selling" the moment--they genuinely looked like they were really engaged in the moment, a feature that is all-too-often lacking in porn. Here's a sample of one of my favorite series so you can see what I mean.

Review: Stripperella

Stripperella was recommended to me by the Netflix system, probably for my combination of interests in Cosi Fan Tutti and Batman: The Animated Series. It was one of those Netflix surprises, when something that was 128 in your queue suddenly became number 1 when you weren't looking. So, I watched it.

How was it? you may ask. Sometimes it was better than expected, from both a prurient and political standpoint.

It was certainly more titillating than I expected. I knew it was produced by and shown on Spike, the so-called first TV station for men, but actually the home of almost 24-hour ST:TNG reruns. Plus, it's basic cable, so what I'm expecting is risque jokes and skimpy outfits. Stripping in the background, and that consists of taking off coats, scarves, parkas, maybe a shirt, but no actual nudity. Surprise: not only is stripping a centepiece of several episodes, but there are a lot of breasts on display. Animated breasts, of course, but very well drawn and capturing many of the qualities of great breasts. Dynamic, balanced, and well-shaped, these breasts are much better than your average anime fare. And Stripperella looks great, especially when she goes undercover as a nun (Sister Mary Hadalamb) in the episode where she faces off against a crazed plastic surgeon (episode seen below, but no pics of the nun costume).

Stripping sequences are well-rendered and imaginative--at least as entertaining as watching real-life strippers, partly because the sequences are shorter and it's easier to maintain interest over these shorter spans. And partly because these are fantasy women and the "floating eye" of the camera can put your eye just where you want it to be. There is one sequence, performed by Stripperella's alter ego, Erotica Jones, that is especially long and lovingly illustrated which pushes the limit but works overall because it is working at an internal barrier set by the series: you never actually see Stripperella topless (perhaps a condition of Pamela Anderson's work on the series?)

Sociopolitically, I guess the main question is whether Stripperella is degrading to women, a question I might not be fit to answer, but I'll take a stab at. Stripperella as a character is not, I don't think, a degrading portrayal of women. Sure, she's supersexy in a Barbie-perfect way (happy 50th, BTW), a sexualized figure of femininity, but this is not her only characteristic or even her defining characteristic. Nor is she more unrealistic than most super-heroines, and her explicit characterization as a sexual being seems partly to be a call-out to comic book sexiness.

And she may be a ditzy blonde, but her universe is one in which everyone is idiotic, so she comes off as being remarkably grounded and even smart.

Overall, she comes off as a moral character, deeply concerned about social causes and prepared to stick her neck (and tits) out for a friend in trouble.

As a series, Stripperella suffers from a number of problems. First, the episodes quickly fall into a routine of small set-pieces from which they do not vary, making the episodes quite boring after a little while. Then, the series underwent a change of producer, leading to a change in the animation style, characters, plots, and themes. While early Stripperella episodes had an animation style similar to Batman: The Animated Series, this changes mid-series into something more like The Flintstones. Stripperella's character, whose early version had an angry edge (especially when stripping) that implied a (slightly) greater depth, becomes merely her surface, a dumb blonde. The plots become dumber, the gags cheaper, characters blander. Even stripping, the only thing the early episodes took really seriously, something with real stakes-- an artistic avenue of expression with genuine rewards for success and consequences for failure--gets played as a joke.

I'd watch early episodes of Stripperella again with a bunch of guys and a bunch of beers, if somebody else wanted to, but I wouldn't go out of my way.