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Okay... I don't generally veer away from sculpture-related topics, but today I am. I just have to. And I feel a real potty-mouthed rant coming on, so stop reading now if you're averse to a little old-fashioned profanity. It is tangentially related because it has to do with nudity, or more specifically, a manufactured controversy about nudity, but without any actual nudity.

Please tell me we're not this fucking stupid.

Seriously. Does anyone in this country NOT realize that this is a manufactured controversy. This is nothing more than a brilliant but truly skeevy, form of marketing, folks. Let's take a look at it:

Some fifteen year old actress who heads a wildly popular cash-cow of a media franchise has her picture taken by Annie Leibovitz. Annie took a picture that shows *gasp* said teen's bare back. The picture comes out in Vanity Fair magazine, a magazine pretty much defined by its regular use of nude-but-not-really-nude images of celebrities. The day it comes out, the fifteen year old actress issues a statement of regret through her agent, painting herself as a helpless ingenue taken advantage of by the wily and edgy photographer. Disney issues a similar statement claiming that one of their most valuable assets, err.. I mean stars was taken advantage of by an unethical magazine in the name of increased sales.

Okay, step back. Annie Leibovitz, right? Getting your picture taken by her is a big fucking deal. It means you've arrived: you're somebody. Ordinary schmoes do not get to step in front of Annie's cameras. And Annie Leibovitz isn't fucking edgy. She's never gone near the edge of anything photographically speaking. She's a competent photographer, even a good one in many people's opinion, but edgy? Hell, no. She's as mainstream as fucking possible. Robert Mapplethorpe was edgy. Andres Serrano was edgy. Annie Leibovitz shoots for goddamned magazines you buy at Barnes and fucking Noble and put on your coffee table but never read.

Now, our poor little ingenue... our poor little multi-millionaire ingenue with her handlers, PR people, agents, and (I would hope) parents had no problem with the shoot at the time. Nobody advised her not to proceed. Nobody, apparently, was the least concerned at the time. And why should they have been? Annie photographed the girls' fucking bare back! Big fucking deal. You can see more teenage flesh at the public beach in the summertime. It doesn't count as "topless" just because we can tell she's not wearing a top. That's topless in the same way that I'm naked right now - because I'm naked underneath my clothes, see, you just can't see anything, but I would be naked, y'now, except for the clothes. See how that works?

And Disney... c'mon, Disney. This is about as transparent a move as fucking possible. They issued a statement to appease their bible-belt constituency knowing full well that by doing so, they were causing every god damned straight male in the country to go google for "hannah montanna nude". In one fell swoop, they've taken the moral high road and, at the same time, with a wink and a nudge, got their starlet's name every-fucking-where and raised her profile a hundred fold. Hell, I didn't even know who Hanna Fucking Montanna was when I woke up this morning. Seriously. I know that's probably hard to believe, since she's apparently crazy popular, but I don't watch television and despise manufactured pop music. My kids don't watch television either - we don't have cable or satellite and get exactly one fuzzy channel on our archaic seventeen inch television that we use primarily for watching DVDs on "movie night" once a week. But now I know who the fuck Hanna Montanna is. Coincidence? I hardly fucking think so. Now, had there been real Brooke Shields style underage nudity, then I'd be inclined to believe that Disney was completely taken off guard by what happened and would completely understand why they issued a statement condemning what happened. As things are, I'd honestly be surprised if they didn't arrange the god damned shoot to begin with. I have trouble believing that they wouldn't play some part in the affair; this girl makes too much money for them not to be involved.

And another thing. Even though she's not actually, in any meaningful way, topless, it really shouldn't matter if she was. In my state (New York) a woman of any age can take her top off at the beach or in most other public outdoor places legally. You can't stop her; it's her right. It doesn't happen much, and a lot of people are unaware of it, but that's how it is. That's how it is in much of the world. Breasts, as wonderful as they are, are simply not sex organs and shouldn't be causing such a god damned panic. They are not intrinsically sexual: by making them moderately taboo, our society has sexualized them. But nobody is going to be harmed by seeing a pair of breasts or by having their own breasts seen by others. Certainly nobody is going to be harmed by having their breasts not seen as is the case here.

You're being manipulated people. This is a silly distraction that shouldn't have ever made the news. There's no controversy. Let me save you the trip to Google: These pictures aren't edgy, or controversial and there's no nudity. These aren't the pictures you're looking for, move along... move along.