Whereas women are affected more adversely by same-sex images, men weren't bothered by the pics of strapping beefcakes they were shown. Rather, "the cultural expectation for men is not that they have to be as attractive as their peers, but that they need to be attractive enough to be sexually appealing to women." Hence, the men who were given magazines full of pictures of "idealized" women who were "out of their league" unsurprisingly ended up feeling less than great about their own bodies by the end of the study.

As Professor Jennifer Aubrey notes, "the exposure to objectified females increased self-consciousness because men are reminded that in order to be sexually or romantically involved with a woman of similar attractiveness, they need to conform to strict appearance standards." We're guessing men aren't devoting a lot of conscious thought to this, which already makes the phenomenon somewhat less severe. But even so, it does beg a question: Models make women feel bad. They make men feel bad. So who exactly are they supposed to be appealing to?

Surprisingly, Female Models Have Negative Effect On Men [PhysOrg]

Baynes explores how the media create a Missing White Women brand, "an echo effect across a variety of media platforms that actually sell these women’s tragic stories." (Interestingly, he cites People magazine as the "jump off" point between tabloid and "legitimate" news, because it is owned by Time Warner, which also owns CNN.) He links the phenomenon back to the Perils of Pauline, a serialized silent film with weekly cliffhangers in which its white heroine hung off actual cliffs. Baynes says that "the anxiety over white women resonates in our culture," perhaps because white women are put on a pedestal while women of color have historically been "exoticized and exploited." Baynes quotes Catherine McKinnon on "the white women stereotype":

The creature is not poor, not battered, not raped (not really), not molested as a child, not pregnant as a teenager, not prostituted, not coerced into pornography, not a welfare mother and not economically exploited. She doesn’t work. [...] she manipulates white men’s very real power with the lifting of her very manicured little finger…She flings her hair, feels beautiful all the time...can’t do anything, doesn’t do anything, doesn’t know anything…

Baynes argues that American culture feels the need to protect (or pretend to protect) such artificially pristine women, especially from "the threats of men of color." And this desire for protection equals ratings! Baynes cites speculations that the "soap opera" of the missing white woman allows us to escape from scary real news, like the war in Iraq. There's little question that focusing on Natalee Holloway rather than Abu Ghraib makes us dumber (unless of course we're her family, or the cops investigating her case). It probably also makes us more racist. So is the solution a return of the Fairness Doctrine? Do we need the FCC to step in and enforce important news? How will they decide what's important? And, raised on a diet of Missing White Girl Scout cookies, will we even watch it?

Leonard M. Baynes, “White Women In Peril On Broadcast And Cable Television News” [Feminist Law Professors]
White Women In Peril On Broadcast And Cable Television News [Full Paper]

The Argentinan journalists committed to 10 principles when reporting on gender violence, including a protection of the identity of the victim (something most U.S. news outlet do unless the victim agrees otherwise); an agreement not to use pictures identifying the victim; identifying the aggressor; and actively refusing to refer to the incident as a "crime of passion" or list the so-called mitigating circumstances that are likely to be employed by the defense at trial. Many times — both here and in Argentina (and elsewhere) — the circumstances surrounding the crime are laid out and couched in terms of jealousy or supposedly mitigated by drug or alcohol abuse. The thing is that there is nothing romantic about jealousy, particularly if it ends in violence, and nothing tragic for the abuser in the loss of his liberty or relationship due to his violent tendencies. Those are legitimate consequences for his abhorrent actions and the media needs to do a good job in de-romanticizing and delegitimizing the actions of abusers.

That said, Feministe's Cara thinks that the media should additional refrain from referring to "rape" as "sex" and from using the passive voice ("she was raped" instead of "This sick fucking asshole 'allegedly' raped her") to describe acts of sexual violence. I'm totally on board with that. Where can we go to get local reporters to sign this thing?

Argentinian Journalists Develop Plan For Non-Sexist Reporting [Feministe]

In the June issue of Glamour, under the heading “5 things to say no to,” item 1 is: “Any threesome in which you’re committed to one of the other two.” If you’re not committed to one of the other two, presumably, Glamour would say: “You go, girl!” Admittedly, this advice is mostly directed at single women, so they do have some respect for marriage, especially when in item 4 the magazine turns suddenly and mysteriously prudish by telling its readers to avoid “Married men. Seriously.”

Still, one has to wonder. At National Review we are often told that opinion journals contain so few ads because advertisers don’t want to be associated with anything controversial. Now, Glamour certainly has no trouble selling ads; its issues are as fat as its models are thin. Evidently, then, the idea that it’s perfectly acceptable for a woman to have sex with two people at once, as long as they’re both strangers, is now considered entirely mainstream.

Not so! Chimes in Lisa Schiffren, who asserts that the Glamour editors just got that idea from an early episode of Sex & The City, which perpetuated the notion that threesomes were common because it was written by gays.

So…funny how the male conservative is:
1. the only one who will cop to reading Glamour
2. the only one who asserts that threesomes are, like, totally normal.

Which is to say: just like a gay/guy! Anyway I'll leave it to you guys to educate the nation's publishers as to how mainstream threesomes really are, because I'm personally neither really "mainstream" nor a veteran of such an act — I'd honestly rather be waterboarded, call me sentimental — and also maybe to Photoshop Maggie, Fred, and Lisa onto the cover of the new W.

Rules For Threesomes [National Review]

Public put-downs, of course, are not just directed at celebrities: Today's Wall Street Journal reports on "body snarking" and the way in which Generation Y uses Facebook and other social networks to critique frenemies' appearances. Lilly Jay, a D.C. 16-year-old, tells the Journal: "When people look weird or bad in pictures, they are often tagged with 'Hahaha'...the unflattering photos can't just be tucked away somewhere. They become the basis for publicly displayed ridicule."

It seems like it's the public part that's most damaging. Look: we've all privately snarked on others' appearances from the privacy of our own homes and our own minds, and I certainly cop to feeling secret glee when someone I hated from high school packed on the pounds in her post-college years. But these are private, shameful thoughts, and the public airing of such trash is possibly keeping women from breaking the glass ceiling — as the Journal points out, Hillary's appearance has been fair game from day one of her Presidential candidacy. Think of it this way: when we attack other women in the public sphere, we're ultimately only hurting ourselves.

Does This Picture Make You Angry? [BBC]
The Rise Of Bodysnarking [WSJ]
Misogyny I Won't Miss [Washington Post]

Earlier: This Year, Let's Call It Quits On The Nasty Nit-Picking

MOE: So I just had a thought. A strategist on Fox News used the word "fulcrum" and it completely tripped up the blonde, who was like, "I'm still fascinated by that word you used Rich, fulcrum." And then the other guy was like, "Yeah, fulcrum what the heck does that mean?" And the strategist laughed
MOE: And said, "It's physics, Bob, it has to do with the Law of Conservation of Angular Momentum."
MOE: Which is not a law I particularly remember but it gave me this theory: I think that smart people become Republicans to feel smarter than all their friends.
MEGAN: Whoa, he even quoted that? I think today is a Big Word day because David Axelrod just used the word "potentate" on MSNBC talking about leaders in the Middle East and OPEC.

MEGAN: Okay, and now Joe Scarborough just called Tim Daly the Grand Poobah of the Creative Coalition.
MOE: What does that even mean?

MEGAN: Not that it's a definitive source, but Wiki says

Grand Poobah is a term derived from the name of the haughty character Pooh-Bah in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. In this comic opera, Pooh-Bah holds numerous exalted offices, including Lord Chief Justice, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Master of the Buckhounds, Lord High Auditor, Groom of the Back Stairs, and Lord High Everything Else. The name has come to be used as a mocking title for someone self-important or high-ranking and who either exhibits an inflated self-regard, who acts in several capacities at once, or who has limited authority while taking impressive titles.

MOE: Hahaha so it's a more appropriate name for an MC than I knew when I began immediately associating it with this awesome party jam...
MEGAN: Dude, that guy on the TV sorta looks like Kid from Kid N Play...
MOE: Oh dude speaking of amazing segues, apparently Grand Puba holds Nation Of Islam beliefs. Which brings me to Michelle Obama, of whom we now know the same thing thanks to the Grand Puba of paranoid indiscriminate hateration. We should totally form a Hitchens-inspired hip-hop collective. I know some rappers who would dig it. We would get on Stuffwhitepeoplelike IMMEDIATELY.

MEGAN: Oh, Christ, Hitchens takes so fucking long to get to the point, which is him calling Barack, basically, pussy-whipped. Which, obviously, any man that doesn't indiscriminately cheat on his long-suffering wife the way Hitchens does obviously is.
MEGAN: Did I ever mention that I once watched Hitchens leave a party with a really pretty 18 year old? She might've been 20. She had some crazy hero-worship in her eyes, but I'll bet he sweatily fucked that out of her with his stale cigarette smell and tiny British ween.
MOE: Man I was checking TheRoot for some response to the Hitch and the lead story is on "Why The Summer Of '88 Was My Generation's Greatest." The late eighties were so rad in a lot of ways, I'm just remembering. The End of History and the like. But it was also, like, one of the bleakest eras for American cities, which I kind of think represent the future of American pluralism, which apparently Michelle Obama didn't believe in in 1985, which is why we are now wondering if she isn't a radical bitterfascist.

MOE: And that is a very good read on the situation. I was honestly disgusted he chose to go after her fucking college thesis which is basically about how alienated and inferior she felt on account of all the elitist assholes at Princeton.
MOE: And he writes:

To describe it as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be "read" at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn't written in any known language.

MOE: Which is true of most academic papers.
MEGAN: Man, I sort of wish I could've written about that for my college thesis. I had to write about the role of ideology in determining women's status in the labor market in Germany before and after reunification.
MOE: But not even of hers.
MOE: I dropped out, yay. I don't think I wrote a decent paper ever in my life after my treatise on the collapse of the Weimar Republic in tenth grade. After that it was all an alcohol haze. I wrote some good stories for the Journal that were better researched than any of my papers, however.
MEGAN: I picked a graduate school based on where I didn't have to write another thesis, which is why I ended up chucking my completed SAIS application in the garbage rather than sending it.

MOE: : This was Christian's take on Hitchens which sort of nicely unpeels the layers of disingenuousness:

What he's really saying is, I, the Hitch, know that people must necessarily allow contradictions into their lives, especially politicians, who typically do so cynically, but I am cynical enough myself to pretend that I don't know that, and so I can write a column that honestly admits that Obama really has nothing in common with his Reverend (did I mention that I, the Hitch, hate all churchees—I know politicians are only pandering to them, but it's fun to pretend they're not) but that his wife is a menace.
7:14 PM asserts that his wife is a menace anyway.

MEGAN: Also, I am not going to click that again because it is more than I can handle imagining Hitch having his taint waxed AND NOW I HAVE IMAGINED IT AGAIN and I think I might hate you a little, give me a second to wash the taste of bile out of my mouth and then let's change the subject.
MEGAN: Here, let's talk about Clinton saying that OPEC can no long be allowed to exist so she's going to file a WTO complaint even though, like, she's not so keen on free trade policies or something and I'm pretty sure there's no way it would succeed.
MOE: Ah, yeah so there is a bill to amend the Sherman Act to make oil-producing and exporting cartels illegal.
MOE: God, remember the fucking Sherman Act?

MEGAN: Which means, what? That we won't buy oil from OPEC anymore? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
MOE: Well, if the Heritage Foundation and major trade unions can agree on something...

Indeed, the only serious challenge to the organization came in 1978 when a U.S. non-profit labor association, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), sued OPEC under the Sherman Antitrust Act, in IAM v. OPEC. But the case was rejected in 1981 by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. OPEC, the court affirmed, could not be prosecuted under the Sherman Act due to the foreign sovereign immunity protection it claimed for its member states. That decision was wrong. Government-owned companies that engage in purely business activities do not warrant sovereign immunity protection according to prevailing legal doctrines

MOE: Apparently the effort was led by William "Wimpy" Wimpsinger. I like that he took that "wimp thing" and sort of owned it. Do you think Hitchens cynically wants the Clintons back because it makes his job easier?

I have the distinct feeling that the Obama campaign can't go on much longer without an answer to the question: "Are we getting two for one?" And don't be giving me any grief about asking this. Black Americans used to think that the Clinton twosome was their best friend, too. This time we should find out before it's too late to ask.

MEGAN: Wait, so white man Christopher Hitchens would like Black America to know that the Obamas will... what exactly? Betray them like the Clintons? I think this is why I only read stuff he writes about him waxing his back, sack and crack.
MOE: Oh man hip-hop reference segue time #2 of the morning. Let's give a shout-out to Khia. Dude, the Hitchens inspired DJ collective is a total gold idea. I know these dudes Plastic Little who could get into it. They're biracial like Obama. But I think we've gotta address the notion of Burma, and how this cyclone hit just as Hollywood celebs were getting in on the action.
MEGAN: So, am I right that the appropriately white guilty thing to do is not talk about the oppressive government for a bit?
MOE: Here's the latest "That's So Jane's!" on the matter, God I love this graphic...Apparently you likened Burma to Katie Holmes.
MEGAN: Oppression shows its face in all kinds of dark ways.
MOE:

It's an Orwellian nightmare that makes China look like a liberal paradise by comparison. For twenty years there has been nothing on this scale and when protests have been staged they have been in the order of hundreds and have been easily dealt with. The monks posed a huge dilemma for the military since they initially felt that they could not simply resort to smashing skulls and opening fire indiscriminately. Buddhists believe that what you do in this life will determine how you come back next time. So massacring a few monks is more likely to see you come back as a cockroach than achieving nirvana.

MEGAN: Well, but they'll be born in China or India more often than not, so it's like they get reborn into a less oppressive regime?
MOE: Okay here's another thing. The last sentence of that Times story.

If you talk to Vaclav Havel, he'll say that Lou Reed's support for human rights in Czechoslovakia was very important to the cause."

MEGAN: Um, I guess the cool factor is really important?

MEGAN: But neither Ellen Page or Jim Carrey is Lou Reed.
MOE: Okay so there's a primary tonight and I'm sick of primary nights but I suppose we ought to address it. Hillary Clinton will win in Indiana because she's "not going to put my lot in with economists." Obama will win North Carolina because Petey Pablo is from there. Oh man, hip-hop foray part III. Do you remember when Petey Pablo did that remix of "North Carolina" on the USA after 9/11? I'm sure you won't, but some commenter might. I think he also went to Afghanistan. Okay. Any predictions?
MOE: Terry McAuliffe is on Fox right now. His prediction is that "people will be saying she did better in both states than they thought she would." Jesus Christ.
MEGAN: I predict me and a lovely bottle of Petite Sirah will be blogging it tonight for Glamocracy. And that I hate being wrong so I don't make predictions but it does seem like the polls are saying that Hillary will take Indiana and Obama will take NC.
MEGAN: Whoa, talk about managing expectations there, Terry Boy. I didn't think the polls in Indiana were that close, plus she's been standing in pickup trucks! Pickup trucks are like electoral gold in Indiana.
MOE: I'm going to leave us with a passage from David Brooks, because I found it calming, sort of like certain candidates.

This wasn't just shameless spin, it was shamelessness with a purpose. Clinton signaled that she wasn't going to concede even an inch to the vast elitist conspiracy. She wasn't going to feel guilty about ignoring the evidence. She was going to stomp on it, flay it and leave it a twisted mass of jelly quivering on the ground. She was going to perform the primordial duty of an alpha dog leader — helping one's own....But, as Sunday's contrast made clear, Obama still seems like a human being. He still seems to return each night to some zone of normalcy where personal reflection lives.He wasn't fully candid when answering questions about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but there are some inner guardrails that prevent the spin from drifting too far from the truth. Thoughtful and conversational, he doesn't seem to possess the trait that Clinton has: automatically assuming that critics are always wrong. Obama still possesses his talent for homeostasis, the ability to return to emotional balance and calm, even amid hysteria.

CPM stands for "cost per thousand impressions." So, for example, having an ad appear 500,000 times on Jezebel at a CPM rate of $4 would cost $2,000 (500,000 impressions x $4/1000).

Text Links. You can buy a text link immediately by visiting Adbrite.

Payment. Our minimum purchase of $2,000 is payable by check or wire transfer prior to running your advertisement. Contact advertising@gawker.com to arrange.

Sort of like US Weekly is a cultural reference point, if not an entire worldview,, TMZ is quite simply the most important media force of our time. After all, when media giants like CNN and Time Magazine reflect on the year that was 2007, they will surely reflect mainly on the most important Media Event of the year 2007, the exposure of the contents of Anna Nicole's Refrigerator, and the scrappy Time Warner owned news organization that brought it to us, TMZ. TMZ is saving the art of gumshoe reporting from the homebound hermits of the blogosphere, it is tapping into a cultural zeitgeist, it is instilling in its employees twentysomethings slavish devotion and work ethic, and it is, um, apparently even profitable, according to Time Warner. Little wonder, then, that the media has begun to take not of its new rival — and soon, owner? — first (or perhaps tenth?) with a David Carr column and now with this delicious piece from Brandweek.

"It's sort of like when Google came along," said general manager Alan Citron.

We are so breathless we are hyperventilating, but after the jump Brandweek's Todd Wasserman will walk us through the implications of TMZ's towering significance, dizzying piece by dizzying piece.

Dirty Laundry Dot Com [Brandweek]

TMZ achieved greatness despite a shitty name.

The name stands for "Thirty-Mile Zone," a Hollywood industry term referring to the Los Angeles area.

TMZ is like Google, only without 380 million unique users per month.

"It's sort of like when Google came along," said general manager Alan Citron, drawing an analogy to describe TMZ's rise. "Everyone said, 'We don't need another search engine.' " TMZ isn't Google but, point taken. Its ascension has been astonishingly quick, even by Web standards. In about a year it's gone from having no traffic to clocking 7.5 million unique visitors in December.

TMZ is saving journalism.

TMZ accomplished all this with something many think is obsolete in the Web 2.0 age: Good journalism.

TMZ's crotchety practically geriatric CEO Harvey Levin is not your typical Web 2.0 cyberchief: in fact, his plugged-in youthful reporters still make fun of the time he botched the name of the hip show That's So Raven!

Levin also benefits by having a staff of young, hungry reporters. The staff meets every morning at 7:30 and they're often still there in the middle of the night. Most of his muckrakers have yet to see a 30th birthday, which helps to give the 56-year-old Levin a Steve Jobs-ish charisma, though the age gap sometimes is evident. A source recalls Levin running out of his office with a scoop about the show That's So Raisin. Staffers quickly informed Levin the show is called That's So Raven. Levin still gets chided for the gaffe.

Sources are important.

Top-notch execution and high standards (at least for sources) can propel a new brand to the top of a very crowded category.

The combination of Levin's sources (he seems to have a snitch or two in the Malibu Police Dept.) and that esprit de corps led to TMZ's biggest scoop so far: Mel Gibson's singularly theatrical drunk driving arrest this past August.

Todd Wasserman does not actually know what a "source" is.

On a recent day, the site sported exactly four ads—three from Verizon Wireless and one for Southwest Airlines. Of course, it's anyone's guess what TMZ is charging for those slots.

Ingeniously, TMZ allows readers to "email to a friend" the videos on the site, which enables them to capitalize on a nationwide longing for "social currency," meaning terms like "firecrotch"

After Mel, though, traffic kept improving, largely because readers were rewarded for visiting the site a few times a day, acquiring social currency by passing the latest scandal video on to friends.

You married a child-molester who ran off with your best friend, and then your dog got run over and you lost a leg in a tragic chainsaw-related accident, and all your family got cancer, but then you found the face of Jesus in a tub of cream cheese. Oh, and you weigh 600lbs. And of course, you want to sell your story so that you can be a little bit famous for just a moment, because somehow that will make it all better.

We know how you can. Find out, after the jump.

Just head on over to The Front Page Agency. Don't believe that YOU can make loads of cash selling your misfortune to the world? Think again.

Here's Amanda. She got her menopause at age 11!

"Dear all, I would just like to thank Front Page for all the publicity they have given me by printing my story in the Daily Mirror earlier this month. Less than a week later I appeared on the Lorraine Kelly show on GMTV, I have also been asked to appear on Anglia Television next month."

Good for you Amanda! Sure hope that makes up for your loss of reproductive ability!

And how about Jillian?

"I would like to thank you for your time and patience and for selling my story. I was feeling pretty low when my daughter came up with the idea to submit my story. It is the best thing I have ever done. I was ashamed that my marriage had broke up, now people know it wasn't my fault and instead of feeling low I now feel great and I am no longer ashamed but my ex husband is."

Haha. Silly old husband. This is better than therapy!

Hush. Here's Amanda number two. Poor love:

"The Front Page News Agency has done tremendous work in selling my story about my cyst the size of three footballs, to top magazines."

Holy cow! That's one hell of a cyst. It'll be a shame if you die, but hell, you'll die a minor celebrity. To everyone in your trailer park.

[hot off the press]