The latest Vanity Fair — our annual favourite, The Hollywood Issue — has caused quite the brouhaha thanks to its guest editor, retired fashionista Tom Ford. The issue’s centrepiece is, as always, its portfolio of celebrities, which this year has a theme of “naked.” Keeping within the spirit of the festivities, you’ll find Ford on the cover — that is him, not Jeremy Piven — as the clothed meat in a nude sandwich of Scarlett Johannson and Oscar nominee Keira Knightley. (The talented Rachel McAdams was also scheduled to be included, but nobody told her she would be naked, so she walked out, then fired her publicist. Awesome!)
It turns out the controversy extends further, however, than the nipple-to-pec ratio. We dropped by a downtown newsstand on Tuesday to find the issue astonishingly wrapped in plastic, with a black box over the already covered ta-tas of the seated Knightley and the artfully displayed (bottom-up) ScarJo. Then we found out that this is not just a Halifax thing — Vanity Fairs continent-wide are all bagged up. While we’re not a fan of the approach — naked starlets selling magazines, how novel, and what are the damn stories in this issue, exactly? — we do think that censoring something that isn’t offensive to start with is stupid, lame and gutless.
But if that’s the way it’s going to be, we’d like to suggest to retailers and publishers alike that you start covering up every issue of Maxim, FHM, Razor, Blender, Rolling Stone and any other magazine that regularly puts mostly naked ladies on its cover every single issue. All or nothing, people, all or nothing.
Conserve your rage
We know y’all are intrepid, moral people and so we invite you to tell us what’s wrong with this sentence: Departing Nova Scotia premier John Hamm penned his last column in the Chronicle-Herald this week.
Two questions: John Hamm was a Herald columnist? Will Rodney MacDonald replace him? Oh wait, three: WTF?
Send your plastic wrapped objects of rage to: Anablog c/o The Coast, 5435 Portland Place, Halifax, B3K 6R7
This article appears in Feb 16-22, 2006.