The Remote Island by Bryan Christian The burning question of the day: Life on Mars or Eleventh Hour? Plus: Britney goes on the record, USA may not renew Monk, and our Grey's Anatomy recap.
Minutes earlier, Hooksexup's offices had been silent, save the clicking of our keyboards and the occasional sneeze. Now the loft was lively with voices, as everyone editorial, ad sales, design, technical and the interns crowded around our patient designer's computer screen, staring and pointing. It was the crisis of each print magazine cycle: we were choosing a cover.
For four years I've selected the photographs that appear on Hooksexup's website, searching for beauty, as well as imperfection, asymmetry, strangeness, ampleness, slightness, boyishness, bearishness and so on. Because our photo of the day gives us a constantly rotating cover girl or boy, it can appeal, alternately, to most every predilection. But when we started our print magazine, we were faced with a radical new set of constraints. After all, the cover of a magazine is the magazine and has to sell it as well. One frozen image simultaneously serves as an icon representing everything we value; everything we want readers to know about what to expect inside; and our press kit. For Hooksexup, that means it's got to look unusual but not self-consciously alternative; beautiful but not fake; and capable of surviving on the newsstand without getting lumped among the porn magazines. All of the above, in addition to competing, like a contestant in a beauty pageant, for sparkle-points.
So it was with great anticipation that I opened the box of "cover tries" submitted by Christina Kruse for our latest issue. The images were shipped from Paris, the home of the photographer who was also, in this case, the model that morning, and I was immediately taken with their beauty, the coolness of their French aesthetic. The best in the series, and my first pick for the cover, depicted Kruse's torso slithering out of a skirt before an audience of one fully dressed male. The cool blue natural light reminded me of Paris and the moody Eric Rohmer movies I'd been dragged to as a kid. I loved the way Christina seemed to be at once painfully shy and exhibitionistic, wearing a long brown wig over her trademark platinum bob. Perhaps it was because the photographer herself had described to me the motivation behind the images to act out a fantasy in which she is paid to undress for a man that I didn't think to question its semiotics.
But Kruse's motivations were beside the point, said Debbie, Hooksexup's assistant photo editor. She stood cross-armed, glaring at the cover that had been mocked up and now showed on the designer's screen. "It's not apparent to anyone walking by the newsstand that this is her fantasy," she said with frustration. "It looks like another Maxim, except worse because the male gaze is literally represented. I would never show my feminist friends this cover."
I blushed, defensive. Was I losing my sense of perspective? Why didn't I find the image offensive? I'd certainly ranted enough times about the difference between Hooksexup photography and pornography explained to enough journalists that when Hooksexup depicts a naked woman, the picture is about her sexuality, not the viewer's. Yet here was this image of a gorgeous young woman giving a man a show, as if on demand . . . And he looked, to Debbie's eyes, cold, judgmental. Or at least detached.
Others in the office drifted over, curious about the debate.
"But couples play-act sometimes," said one of our impeccably dressed interns. "Isn't it okay to fantasize about being a stripper or a call girl or whatever?" Her voice trailed off.
"I'm not wild about her back," mused Emily, the managing editor, switching gears. "I can see the bones so clearly, it distracts me and makes me think about body image stuff instead of sex. I want to make a case once again for a full-bodied cover model we have shots like that available."
"Let's be realistic," said Rufus, our co-publisher. "She's hot! She's what most men and women want to see. Magazine photos are aspirational for the same reason department store mirrors make you look thinner. We can't grow Hooksexup to a half-million circ by appealing only to niche tastes."
"Hey, I'd hardly call it a niche thing to appreciate women over a hundred pounds," responded Emily. "But I understand your point."
Our new office manager, thus far silent, cleared his throat. "I think she's hot. It's just hot, I can't take my eyes off it. It's much more direct than the other one, the one with the short hair."
He was talking about the other option for the cover: the same model, wearing a Lulu-black bob, her face dipped low over the belly of a man, making direct eye-contact with the viewer. The model's hips were raised so high up that the ribbed waistline on her panties appeared to be some kind of halo. For convenience, we were all calling this one "the blowjob shot."
"That one would kill us with advertisers," worried one of the business staff.
"Wait a second: the less body-revealing shot is going to be more problematic than one that shows her breasts and the cleavage of her ass?" said an editor. "At least in this one, she looks in control and you can see her face, she's not a headless torso."
"A headless torso! That's so unfair. She's stunning."
"She's a mannequin. Anyway, in the other shot, she's not necessarily giving a blowjob . . . She could be moving up instead of down."
"That's her waistband? This shot is going to be totally confusing to newsstand readers."
"What's with that guy watching her in the striptease picture? He looks like some kind of arrogant Wall Street guy . . . "
"That's what being turned on looks like; he's completely into her . . . Who doesn't want to be looked at?"
"Oh, c'mon, the blowjob shot is much more Hooksexup-y. The other one looks like a woman's magazine cover."
"No woman's magazine would have a shot like that neither would Maxim . . . "
"We need to speak clearly to people. The striptease shot is so much more eye-catching, immediately."
"For women . . ."
"For men . . ."
"For straight people . . ."
"For gay men . . ."
"For lesbians . . ."
"The blowjob shot is hotter!"
"The striptease shot is hotter!"
"Is not."
"Is too."
Okay, it didn't get quite that juvenile actually, people were engaged, articulate. They gestured and pointed, analyzing the smallest elements of the pictures, things I would never have thought about at first glance. But glancing through the staff, one thing was apparent. This was getting personal as it had to. People were prickling and bristling, politely so, because discussing taste means, inevitably, more than just picking column A or column B. It means exposing ourselves, coming clean about our values and our fantasies. Haltingly explaining why one picture worked and the other didn't, each one of us felt ourself turn from a staff member into a weird perverse little individual: A Straight Girl with Stripper Fantasies, A Gay Man Who Only Likes Blonds, A Person Who Cringes at Butt-Cleavage in Any Context. For me, as photo editor, confronting that tension meant feeling our differences snap, pleasantly but firmly. We were each the stripper revealing herself, and each the person sitting in the chair making a silent judgment call. Vulnerability, in other words, is the very nature of expressing one's taste. After all, no one wants to feel, in the eyes of one's colleagues, like a sell-out with a plastic fantasy or a judgmental prude.
In the end, the decision was made with the usual quirky happenstance of magazines. The "blowjob shot" turned out not to be crisp enough to fill a page; the "stripper" won new fans when it was amped up in size, pushing the boyfriend further off-stage and gaining a puckishly placed "e" over the nipple. And me personally? I love how it came out. I have the same impression I did in the beginning: Eric Rohmer, awkward/exhibitionistic, a fantasy of blue-lit beauty.
But of course, I know that these are my eyes alone. I can pretend we know the difference between what's sexy and what's sleazy, what's a sell-out and what's good for "sell-through." And I do know what I like. But deciding what represents Hooksexup inevitably means confronting that simple fact: there's no way to cover everyone.
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
