In a continued attempt to avoid discussing politics (am I alone in wishing that the Democratic nomination would just get settled already?), I bring you this: a column by the Village Voice's Michael Musto about Lindsay Lohan's Marilyn Monroe photo shoot. In addition to a snarky essay that asserts that stars like Lohan and Britney Spears like to "make the world their gynocologist (OK, snarky but true), he responds to Lohan's photo shoot by staging his own.
Titled "Michael Musto as Lindsay Lohan as Marilyn Monroe," the slide show is great. Musto outfitted in a blond wig, a piece of diaphanous pink fabric clutched in his teeth as he leans forward provocatively toward the camera. Musto lying coquettishly on a mattress, his hairy arms in stark contrast to his naked, smooth bottom. Musto with his head under a piece of lace, bearing canteloupes. Musto using white roses to camouflage his nipples. I could go on.
There's something refreshingly un-p.c. about Musto's treatment of the "tartlets" -- stars like Britney and Lindsay whom he describes as using their "fertile crescents as cash machines." But he doesn't say so completely condescendingly -- rather, he almost praises them for being "wily about their guilelessness and clever about their clotheslessness." (Let's hope this particular form of cleverness is not going to lead these young women down the same path as Monroe.)
My favorite part of Musto's slide show, though, is that it makes fun of something that is inherently silly: that we as a society should care so much about Lindsay Lohan stripping down and doing a copycat photo shoot of a dead sex symbol. Before I leave you to consider whether to pay further attention to Lohan's shoot by looking at these pictures, I will leave you with the words of Musto, referring to Lohan's own statement about her motivations for the pictures: "I prepared for [the shoot] by not shaving or waxing a thing, just letting it all hang in the wind as both a nod to history and a means of reclaiming control ... This time I was seizing the power back by saying: 'My bits are only mine to give. Now here they are, world. Take it all!'"
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