Oh yeah, how you shine like a miracle girl.

What's the deal with all the booty being flashed around?

Seriously, I'm not kidding. Seems like almost every woman who's in a major magazine peels off the duds. Now, I am not talking about the airbrushed models in the "male interest" magazines but rather the cover and center shoots of well-known ones.

I'm not entirely sure as to what the females in the photos get out of it. Yes, I know I like to glam it up and flaunt what I've got at times. But this is somewhat different because I've never done the full monty and all were just because I wanted to, not for some male gaze.

The female musicians and actors in Rolling Stone, Spin, and Blender almost always are in some stage of undress. If you're a bigger woman or have unusual looks, you're usually reduced to a paragraph or two and almost never with a photo (unless, of course, you're Jennifer Hudson, who photoshopped her cover shot to look more like a size 0 than the 16 she probably is). Bust magazine, which supposedly is the zine for the "new girl order," featured some actresses and spoken word artists in their skivvies at most. Even Fierce, a multicultural/multimedia magazine I followed for a while featured a "stagewear" section that was little more than a glorified Sports Illustrated swimsuit centerfold (kinda disappointing for a grl who is into fashion and stagewear). Then, an engineering magazine at my own college, Technograph, featured a "technocutie" each month. Yeah boys, as if women have no place in the engineering world except in booty shorts and heels in the pages of your stinkin' magazine. (And if any of those engineers ever met one of those technocuties, they probably wouldn't even warrent a second glance.)

I don't see a male equivalent of it. Sure, there's Cosmo's "Guy Without His Shirt" column, which features a shirtless guy from the waist up. And I don't like adult mags, so I'm not going to comment there. But I certainly haven't seen female-oriented magazines with guys flashing their, um, goodies around. Can you imagine a guy in a speedo gracing a page in Bitch or Ms.? Probably not. In Advocates' Monthly (you advocates and prevention educators ought to know what that is...), could you picture an advocutie that's a guy? (Hey, it's a female-dominated field..like engineering is a male-dominated one.) And could you visualize a guy in the now-defunct Rockrgrl (may its memory be eternal!) using a guitar as a fig leaf? Sound ridiculous? It does--just as much as objectifying a female is.

So what is it that the women get out of this? Is is an act of self-liberation? Is it brainwashing into societally determined roles as a sex object and nothing more? Do they even have a viewpoint on it? I'm not expecting them to channel the ghost of Mother Teresa every time they do a photo shoot, but I wouldn't mind seeing a little more imagination and creativity and a little less softcore porn.