It wasn’t because I feared I’d be accused of committing a sex crime that I didn’t peek at the naked pictures of a woman whose recent films have earned nearly $1 billion.
My reasons were more artistic.
I didn’t want to risk clicking on illegally leaked naked pictures of Jennifer Lawrence and see someone had photoshopped pictures of a giant penis over parts of Lawrence.
I made that mistake once and, I swear, it was the last time I’ll ever click on links to sites promising sexy Betty White shots.
I like Lawrence and find her attractive. She’s always sharp, cool and funny in her interviews and I’ve enjoyed her film roles, especially “Silver Linings Playbook” and “American Hustle.”
Of course, those are filmed roles she wants us to pay to see.
She is devastated that personal nude pictures she had taken of herself have flooded the net. She said so in a Vanity Fair magazine article that featured what appears to be a naked picture of her on the cover.
She said anyone who looked at the leaked pictures is guilty of “perpetuating a sexual crime” and “should cower in shame.”
I think the actress is overreacting and forgetting the common sense rules of anyone with membership in the “Look-At-Me!” club.
The “Look-At-Me!” club is populated by people who on the way up do outlandish stunts so the Hollywood media will pay attention to them and they’ll become famous. Think Angelina Jolie.
Then when they get sufficiently famous they immediately align themselves with the “Stop-Looking-At-Me!” club and abhor the media that made them famous: Think Angelina Jolie.
Then as their popularity declines they renew their membership in the “Look-At-Me!” club and resume doing outlandish things in hopes fame will return. Think Demi Moore.
I don’t put Lawrence in that camp. She’s a genuine talent and, really, who among us would ever want naked pictures of ourselves splashed all over the web?
And that’s precisely why we don’t pose for them!
Her overreaction is turning an oops! moment into something that now has real legs, a molehills-into-mountains situation.
And, remember, I haven’t seen the pictures so that reference to legs, mountains and molehills is mere conjecture.
Coincidentally, this was going on during a weekend which I spent two days with a group of women who were eager to share with the whole world naked pictures of themselves.
They weren’t whores or pornographers. In fact, a bunch of them were grandmothers.
They are the Greensburg-area “Calendar Girls” and they’re raising money to fight a cancer one of their dear friends is battling. As in the plot of the 2003 movie of the same name, all but one of the calendar girls is older than 60 and all of them pose nude, albeit with tasteful concealments over what Austin Powers calls the “naughty bits.”
These vivacious women are uniformly proud of the result and this weekend sold a lot of calendars at Second Chapter Books where we were both signing this during Fort Ligonier Days festivities.
“It’s $5 to look and $20 to keep,” was one of their puckish pitches to passing men.
So here we have 24-year-old Jennifer Lawrence upset that seductive nude photos of herself are being gazed upon by adoring men, even as she’ll want those same adoring men to buy tickets to movies she’ll make in the next few years in which she’ll likely appear seductively nude.
And then you have the Calendar Girls, a dozen mature women appearing exuberantly nude to raise money for a dear friend and others battling cancer.
“Some of the girls were nervous about posing,” said Traci, the project’s inspiration — and mention “Calendar Girl Traci” in your prayers tonight. “But after they saw how much fun we had and how beautiful it turned out all our friends want to be in the next one.”
These are confusing times. We are exposed to nudity in so many once-innocent venues and we don’t know how we’re supposed to react.
One beautiful woman says we’re sexual predators for looking at nude pictures of her, while another group of beautiful women want us to hang their nude pictures on our refrigerators where we’ll see them every time we feel a hankering for things like V8.
What are we to do?
I do not know.
All I really know is I’m emphatically relieved that no one’s ever told my 81-year-old mother what fun she’d have being a calendar girl.
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