Not your goodies
MANILA, Philippines - Last week, Kim Kardashian and Paper magazine tried to intentionally “break the Internet” by plastering Kim’s well-oiled butt on the cover. Despite the valiant effort of trying to break the intangible, the worst the cover probably did to technology was to make your Photoshop application hang momentarily while you made your own meme out of it. There isn’t an opinion that hasn’t been written about that cover since it’s made the rounds, so I probably have very little original thought to offer thereafter. I have, however, trolled the comments section of a majority of these articles and would like to address the most common responses people have made. So let me propose a toast, preferably with the glass of champagne precariously perched on Kim’s a-word, to the editors of YStyle and the Philippine STAR for letting me treat their broadsheet like an online message board for the mental teenager that I am.
“OMG, but she’s a mom. What will North think of her when she’s older?!”
If women who become mothers are no longer meant to be sexually viable after childbirth then we wouldn’t have the problem of overpopulation. There would be no such thing as “siblings” and the world would be an extremely boring place. There are things we do while our children are less sentient beings. When they grow up, that is when they question our previous actions, and that is when we apologize. For some people, they have their mom’s ugly ‘80s haircut, the ill-fitting mom jeans, and the occasional and questionable glamour shot to look back on, and they’ll playfully ask “What were you thinking?!” For baby Nori, she will have a lot of images of her mom naked. But living in a household with parents like Kim and Kanye, she will hopefully grow up knowing that the naked body is neither embarrassing nor shameful.
“OMG, I hate this bitch. Vacuous ho. Only famous for her sex tape.”
Today, I learned that Ray-J is the only participant in the sex tape who received payment and continuously receives royalties from the sale of the “leak.” With the release of the Paper cover, Kim K made Ray-J another $50K from renewed interest in all this “only famous from sex tape” dialogue. In the name of the good in the unholy, I commend Kim Kardashian for achieving one of the greatest “winning in breakups” ever by taking her a-hole ex’s betrayal and turning it into a multimillion-dollar empire. Even if she had her glorious momager’s help, that’s still a pretty genius move to me. If Kim Kardashian is only famous because of her appearance in a sex tape, where is Ray-J? Maybe it is we who are at fault for being sexist and not catapulting Ray-J to a similar level of fame.
“OMG, THIS IS SO PHOTOSHOPPED!” relating to “OMG, this gives girls an unrealistic standard of beauty to conform to!”
Times like these, I wish our broadsheets were technologically advanced or magical enough to be Harry Potter-style, so I could have a small moving photo of myself on here recklessly throwing stuff around my room and pulling out my hair, yelling “Of course, this is Photoshopped!” We all know Kim has a butt, and with some inspired posing, could’ve pulled off balancing a glass of champagne sans digital manipulation. But in the event that she had a little help from technology, why shouldn’t she? All the photos in magazines are Photoshopped. It is a fact of life as undeniable as air. Even the smoke on a bowl of soup is Photoshopped. I mean, how can you get a bottle of bubbly to explode like that, a perfect arc into a glass without knocking it down without Photoshop? Sh*t has more plot holes than Interstellar.
“OMG, Jean Paul Goude is a white man with self-proclaimed jungle fever and made Kim take part in this latently racist photo shoot.”
I’m not here to discount that there may be something inherently racist with Jean Paul Goude’s art and that he may be a very weird white guy that shot to fame in the highly politically incorrect ‘70s who doesn’t like dating white people. In 1979, Goude released a book entitled Jungle Fever with questionable, yet artsy photos of ethnic women, including his then-girlfriend Grace Jones. Kim’s cover is a recreation of a photo that appeared in that book and many are arguing that the photo is a glaring example of promoting the fetishization of the black woman’s body among women who aren’t black. This is a whole ‘nother can of worms altogether. There is always a disconnect whenever camp, high art, nudity, race, gender politics and the masses meet. But I find that there is an undeniable level of effectiveness in delivering any message when the product of one concept creates discourse in others — so in this sense, the Paper cover already has some merit. The implications of the cover and racial politics are valid, and at the very least, this cover brings those issues to the forefront of mass media.
In the week since its release, we’ve all had some level of fun with Kim’s magazine cover. We’ve reposted some funny Vines of coffee coming out of her butt and Photoshopped our faces in place of hers. Realistically, a majority of us didn’t buy the magazine and lost nothing but a few minutes by looking at it. We will soon forget about this cover after it makes its rounds on end-of-the-year recap listicles, but after that we can all return to our normal lives pre-Paper cover. Stories and photos about Kim Kardashian will be online everywhere as long as they can be, but they are very much the farts of a colleague you sit next to. You can either sit there and choose to sniff it, or leave and come back only when it’s gone.
