These days, it seems like Salon has got a thing for porn.
Understand, the kind of porn Salon wants is not just any kind.
Because when it comes to Salon and porn, Salon wants the nastiest,
ugliest, most extreme porn around.
"What kind of porn is that?" you might ask. (They are, after all, Salon.)
The kind of porn Salon wants has busty babes Photoshopped over
a phallic police badge, still wearing their "Feather
Selection"-generated halos. (Let me guess, four pixels.) It has some
kind of diaphanous lens or possibly CD (opacity looks to be about 28
percent) obscuring everything of one of the women except her
thong-bedecked buttocks.
At least that's what Susannah Breslin might have written if,
instead of penning a wild romp through the LAPD's recent attack on porn,
she'd composed an equally hard-hitting look at the front-page graphic
that accompanied the piece.
A look at this graphic would also include the observation that,
although the article is about male "porn legend" Seymore
Butts, there is no frontal male nudity shown or, in fact, any male
nudity. On the other hand, none of the women is sans pasties or
G-string. Thank goodness they showed some restraint — people read
this stuff at work!
"You're being sarcastic," I can hear Salon's defenders say. "Why
shouldn't artwork for an article about the porn industry reflect the
story's contents?"
Well, this piece apparently deals with police
efforts to contain the menace of "bukkake," a category of porn involving
"one woman, 100 or so men and lots of semen." Why isn't
this ratio accurately represented in the graphic, which shows four
women, no men and no semen?
I say "apparently" about the article's content because, as a Salon
Premium non-subscriber, I'm not authorized to go beyond the first
couple paragraphs. That's right, the butts and boobs are free, but
you have to pay to read reporting on the free-speech issues involved.
Salon has it backwards. Premium subscribers already get an ad-free
Salon — why not give them some additional visual stimuli to
replace the (almost invariably in-house) banners?
For example, Saturday's story about Dennis Hastert would get this
Premium-exclusive graphic:
House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., at a Capitol
Hill
"news conference" on Thursday.
Or Camille Paglia's columns could be decorated with art that goes
way beyond the wickedly astringent caricature that usually accompanies
them:
That way, Premium subscribers would get an exclusive inside look
into the final death throes of this once-thriving publication, and the
rest of us could try to enjoy the articles that aren't week-old
Garrison Keillor columns or entreaties to subcribe to Premium.
Death throes? Isn't that a little premature? After all, as
recently as last week, editor David Talbot told
The New York Times, "We're not dead yet." If that doesn't prove
robust health, what does?
Talbot also recently cast Salon as community college to Slate's
Harvard. Now, I don't know about you, but my local community college
has never resorted to sending out brochures with associate's degree
holders' nipples. (Of course, Harvard doesn't spend at least
three-quarters of its resources summarizing the research of other universities, so
the analogy seems to fail on all counts.)
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But now you're probably wondering, sure there's tits and ass on
Salon if I show up on the right day, but can I expect to be shown hot
pixxx if I visit the site on a regular basis? The answer, you'll be
pleased to hear, is yes. The LAPD graphic is not the first time last
week that readers were treated to bountiful boobies. Monday's "Nancy
Chan: Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl" installment features a pensive prostitute clutching
a white sheet to her full bosom.
And if Salon doesn't have new T & A, you can count on them to leave
the old stuff up for extended appreciation. A plaintive plea to
become a Premium subscriber, couched in the tough, streetwise rhetoric
of Nancy Chan, is linked to by a thumbnail of the same hooker-boobs
artwork. And three days after Breslin's article about the LAPD was
published, it was still up as an "editor's pick." The thumbnail
graphic was of the infamous thonged booty.
But the crop of the image was offset slightly to the left for
artistic effect. If it had been centered, it might have looked like
cheap soft-core porn or something.
— Julia Lipman (julia@flakmag.com)
A front-page graphic in Salon