Get 'em Out, Missus

Another month, another Vanity Fair cover at which to look askance. This month, multiple Oscar-winning, serious thespian Nicole Kidman shows us her bra, accompanied by the titilating caption "Nicole Kidman Bares All".

Why??? Seriously. I asked the same thing last year, when the cover of VF's Hollywood issue featured a nude Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightley, accompanied by a fully-clothed Tom Ford. While images such as these hardly cause a ripple nowadays, it's good to know that I'm not the only person who looks at this stuff and scratches her head. In the Guardian today, Kira Cochrane notes precisely why these images are problematic:

I think what I find so incredibly discomfiting about these pictures is their suggestion that, no matter how talented a woman is, how many plaudits she has received, how intelligent her reputation, how garlanded she has been for depicting one of the most talented writers of the last century while sporting a huge prosthetic conk on her noggin, at the end of the day, if she wants to stay in the public eye, if she wants the magazine covers and the leading roles, she has to be willing to reduce herself to tits and arse.

Extremely well put. And before you go rolling your eyes and dismissing this kind of thing as boring feminist twaddle, ask yourself: when was the last time you saw a respected, Oscar-winning male actor get naked in the pages of a magazine, to promote his latest film?