Rhode Frog: Part II: The Naked and the Fake

Female comic characters have always had exaggerated figures. That's nothing new. The exaggeration of photographs is new, and it's not pretty. In fact, it's ruining good old fashioned naked pictures.You look at an old Playboy, and it's so cute, it really is. First there’s the expression – either old-school-Marilyn or oops-am-I-naked faux innocence. These women didn’t embarrass themselves with what we now call sexy-face.
Then there are the bodies. Look at the bellies, the imperfections, the realness. Their bodies were not uniformly tan or painted lighter. They were not perfectly smoothed, rounded or flattened in the same places, their proportions were humanly possibly, and they were even allowed to be different sizes and colors.
The second wave feminists of the 60s decried the objectification. If they only knew what the future looked like.
Back then it was simpler – a woman took off her clothes and someone took a picture. Now it’s a picture of a woman who lives on an absurd diet, has a trainer, has spent thousands of dollars on implants and tucking and lifting, the lighting is more complex, and hours of make-up. Then there’s the Photoshopping: erasing, highlighting, enhancing, making this bigger and that smaller, contorting the image until it’s less realistic than any big-busted superheroine.
At least in comics, the girl gets to kick-ass.

Bits & Pieces

Senator Al Franken has proposed a "Pay for War" resolution that would require Congress to raise taxes and/or cut spending before authorizing new acts of war, so that American foreign adventures can't contribute to the national debt.

In "The Long Road Home," historian Ben Shephard tells the neglected story of the refugee crisis the Allies faced when, at war's end, millions of displaced persons -- among them prisoners of war, slave laborers and survivors of concentration camps -- had to be repatriated to their homelands or resettled somewhere else.

For most of the last century, talk of secession, nullification and the rest of the extreme states-rights lexicon were relegated to the fringiest parts of the political fringe. But since Barack Obama entered the White House in January 2009, mainstream Republican rhetoric and proposed legislation at the state level have both warmed to the hoary idea that state governments can take their relationship with the federal government on what amounts to an a la carte basis or perhaps abandon it altogether.

Is the tantalizing dream of a universal library dead? Some scholars and librarians across the country fear it may be, now that a federal judge in New York has derailed Google’s bold plan to build the world’s largest digital library and bookstore.

...the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office... finds that a large part of the supposed savings from spending cuts would go, not to reduce the deficit, but to pay for tax cuts. In fact, the budget office finds that over the next decade the plan would lead to bigger deficits and more debt than current law.

...Republicans in Mississippi are divided over a wholly different wedlock issue: interracial marriage.

Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz writes in this month's Vanity Fair about the corrosive, self-reinforcing wealth concentration that has hijacked American politics, in which the America's future is sacrificed to give ever more money to an ever-smaller group of oligarchs.

Part II: The Naked and the Fake

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