What if tabloids snarked on men’s bodies–like Quentin Tarantino, Gerard Depardieu, Rob Kardashian and Gerard Butler, featured here–the way they constantly snark on women? Instead of mag covers deriding “stars without makeup” or telling us who has the best and worst “beach bodies,” we might see covers on the most egregious beer bellies in Hollywood or features on celebs with encroaching male pattern baldness. That day will likely never come, which, okay, fine. I’m not saying I’d prefer magazines to rip men’s bodies apart — I’d just like to show you how absolutely inured we are to a culture that dissects women’s bodies like they’re a bunch of frogs on a lab table. Think about how weird it is that these magazines are targeted at women, and women are more or less the sole objects of these magazine’s bodily criticism and speculation. Now that’s what I call a vicious cycle.
This faux magazine cover will likely make you laugh, because men’s forms just aren’t talked about this way, but women are regularly reduced to their body parts in the abstract. But hopefully it’ll also give you pause the next time you see a cover deriding Tori Spelling’s cellulite. (Click here to see larger image.)
