Beautiful Women: Quantity Over Quality

You've probably never heard of Leigh Nicole Ward.

She's an actress from Boston who has appeared in commercials and small films.  She's also one of many obscure, small-time actresses that that I included on my beautiful-women picture blog.

And that's the problem.

After I posted pictures of beautiful lead actresses virtually everyone has heard of and gone through enough beautiful supporting actresses maybe a few people have heard of, it was inevitable that I would start posting pictures of beautiful actresses that no one had ever heard of.   Who would be interested in Leigh Nicole Ward, except Ms. Ward herself and her relatives (and, admittedly, myself)?  Well, maybe her friends.  But I posted pictures of her in 2013 for one simple reason - I needed to fill space and keep my blog going.

And then there was the conundrum of posting pictures of actresses many people had heard of whose work I'd never seen . . . like "Gray's Anatomy" star Ellen Pompeo.

I've never watched "Gray's Anatomy" (which is still on after twenty-one seasons, a longer run than "Gunsmoke").  I don't like hospital dramas.  I have no idea how well Ellen Pompeo plays her character Meredith Grey . . . and by the way, she's leaving the show after this season.    But I featured her on my blog in 2014 because . . . I needed to fill space and keep my blog going. 

Here's the issue.  When you publish a blog, you have to keep posting regularly to ensure that your followers will come back. When you have a pictorial blog dedicated to one theme, posting fresh content can be difficult.  When your theme is beautiful women, it's damn near impossible.

Inevitably, most of the women that appear on such a blog will be actresses and models, because for actresses, beauty, though not required, is still an asset; for models, it's a necessity.  But while models are known primarily from still photos, actresses are known for playing roles in media involving action and motion.  In other words, the best way to appreciate an actress is to see her work.  As I've already indicated, I've never seen Ellen Pompeo in "Gray's Anatomy" or anything else.  And the only way I could see Leigh Nicole Ward in anything is if I see local theater or watch local TV commercials in the Boston area.  (I became aware of her though her modeling work for a local business in Boston, but I can't remember how I learned her name.)   But I did make this prediction for her back in 2013 - "It's not a question of whether she makes the big time, but rather, when."

And what did I base that (erroneous) prediction on?  Her talent . . . or her beauty?  Am I celebrating her talent . . . or objectifying her looks?

So, I didn't post pictures of the number of actresses that I did because they could act well.  I posted their pictures because I thought they were beautiful.  And even though feminine beauty has been my blog's raison d'être, what message am I conveying when I post actresses whose work I have never seen? Yes, they're beautiful, but shouldn't I also include them on my blog because I think they can act?

In truth, many of the actresses I have featured - particularly younger ones - are women I'd never heard of until twenty minutes before, in TV shows or movies I'd only heard of in less than that time.  In describing their credentials as actresses, I did little more than list their credits, with no personal experience of their work.

How could I justify that?  Well, since I didn't really have any personal experience with their work, and since I didn't have any particular interest in them, I figured that some young man, some kid who followed a particular woman in a particular TV series or movie franchise, would see it and like it.  Someone out there would want to see a picture of some actress he'd liked in a TV show on the CW "network" or on basic cable that he enjoyed watching, even if I myself had only heard of the show ten minutes before I wrote up the post.  That's when a blog stops being a personal form of expression and starts being hackwork.  I think I'm posting a picture of an actress I've never heard of before and only found out about through random searches to please people in my audience who have heard of her, but what I'm really doing is trying to post pictures of as many women as possible, even if I've hardly even heard of them, to create more content and get people to keep looking at my blog.

In other words, quantity over quality.

And even though dancer Eva Burton of the Oregon Ballet Theatre is certainly a beautiful woman . . .

. . . what right do I have to celebrate her and her beauty when I've never seen an Oregon Ballet Theatre performance?  Heck, I've never even been to Oregon!  See, there's another example; I posted on my blog headshots of so many dancers - finding beautiful women in dance is like shooting fish in a barrel - but I can't say they're great dancers because I've never seen them dance.  I just wanted their pictures to fill out my blog.

A blog, it seems, is no online medium for a subject like beautiful women if all I'm doing is posting pictures of women for the sake of itself without any firsthand experience of their talents in whatever profession made them famous.  If I want to celebrate feminine beauty, I have to limit myself to only a few actresses or models - women I have firsthand knowledge of - and present examples of their images on a Web site, which doesn't have to be updated once every three to four days.

And that's another reason why I had to end my blog.

And maybe Leigh Nicole Ward will make it . . . but not because I said so.

No Longer "Beautiful"

While March may be going out like a lamb, I'm here to announce that my blog "Pictures of Beautiful Women" will be going out like a light on Saturday, May 31.

"What?" you're asking.  How could I, a self-described aficionado of feminine beauty, suddenly want to give up on this blog after nearly nineteen years?  Well, when I started the blog in 2006, it was a different world.  Popular culture was much less political then, posting pictures of women known for their beauty - actresses, models, dancers - was a more harmless diversion, and appreciating feminine beauty wasn't necessarily misogynistic and problematic.  That is no longer true, for reasons I will explain farther along in this post.  But there's more to it than that, and what triggered my decision to end this blog came from an unlikely source.

A few days ago, I got an e-mail from a fellow who runs a YouTube channel featuring nostalgia videos of old TV commercials, each video hosted by a young actress playing a character.  I featured a few of these actresses out of character on my blog, and the gentleman who runs the channel requested that I remove these posts within five business days for reasons that boil down to intellectual-property concerns.  Because I'm a nice guy, I removed them not within five business days but within five minutes.  I never realized that someone might object to such seemingly harmless posts, as I have a disclaimer on my beautiful-women picture blog, saying: "Unless specifically stated otherwise, none of these pictures were taken by me. These are merely pictures I like, of women I like, that I want to share with others. They are either from various Internet sources or scanned from periodicals." 

Not good enough.

The truth is, we're living in different times now, and Donald Trump has made it impossible for men to appreciate feminine beauty in even the most innocent and most tasteful context.  Because Trump has repeatedly crossed the line between merely appreciating beautiful women and harassing and abusing them, it's become toxic to even acknowledge a woman's beauty unless you're her boyfriend or husband.  You're expected to, when in the presence or at the sight of a beautiful woman, look at her and not acknowledge her looks.  Maybe that's an appropriate posture to take for TV news personalities with movie-star looks like Abby Phillip and Cecilia Vega, but you're expected to do the same for actual movie stars.  The days when you could appreciate American actresses like Jean Harlow, Marilyn Monroe, and Elizabeth Taylor and European actresses like Catherine Deneuve or Sophia Loren for their looks as well as for their acting ability are gone forever . . . over a long time ago. 

But there are other reasons.  One is that for every timeless icon I have featured on my blog - Catherine Deneuve, for example - there are at least a dozen women who were famous for two weeks, only to see their TV show get canceled or see their latest movie flop.  Though mostly the former, and, thanks to their failures of their sitcoms, the fan clubs of Jennifer Finnigan and Dreama Walker, for example, no longer need any full-time employees.  Ditto for many former female on-camera meteorologists on the Weather Channel (I still miss Vivian Brown).

Another reason is that it became obvious that filling in my blog with media personalities was not a good idea.  I featured several TV anchorwomen and reporters from national and local news broadcasts and thought I was honoring their profession rather than objectifying them simply because, hey, I was leaving out Fox News and Fox Broadcasting-affiliated newswomen.  Uh, yeah . . .  how can I justify featuring a TV newswoman from South Bend, Indiana or Boise, Idaho - two places I've never been to - when I've obviously never seen their work on TV?  I can't.  I'm reducing them to eye candy.  I personally wouldn't be offended if some woman started a handsome-men picture blog and showed some local-news anchormen with chiseled features, but that's still reducing on-air journalists to eye candy when so many of them are trying to be taken seriously.  And Kristen Welker - the most popular subject on my blog - has, as the moderator of NBC's "Meet the Press," has relinquished any claim to being taken seriously.  I'll address that in a later post.

Another reason is the Grim Reaper.  I have nearly two thousand different women on my blog, and in hundred years they - and I - will all be dead.  I only post living women on my blog, but death will catch up to all of us one day, and in some cases, it already has caught up to many women I've featured.  I don't post any more pictures of them going forward, but the fact they were alive when I first featured them doesn't change the fact that they're no longer alive now.  Leaving the old posts online suddenly doesn't make sense anymore.  

But the biggest reason is this:  Some of the women I have featured turned out to be contemptible, horrible people.  For example, I had happily featured pictures of Sheila Johnson, a leading black model from the 1980s, for much of my blog's lifetime. I became friends with her on Facebook and I had a happy association with her . . . until April 2023, when I found old catalog pictures from her portfolio online - a couple dozen of them - and I posted them to her Facebook timeline as well as to a Facebook group I'd started in her honor. She showed her gratitude toward my magnanimous gesture by unfriending me because she thought I was a pest and invading her privacy . . . when all I wanted to do was share pictures from her own modeling work with her - pictures she hadn't likely seen in 35 years (which she deleted!). In a fit of rage, I shut down my Facebook group for Sheila, blocked her Facebook account, and stopped adding pictures of her on my blog.  My earlier posts of Sheila remained . . . but why would I even want to keep those up?  Despite the fact that my first post showing pictures of her is my second most popular post?  She was one of my biggest model crushes in the 1980s; now I feel a great pang of regret every time her name is mentioned.

I'm sorry to say that I have too many examples of women I regretted featuring on my blog to list in full here, though they include former CBS reporter Lara Logan, who turned out to be a right-wing South African jerk, and Maye Musk, who gave birth to one (and defends him).  And you already know about Joy Reid, whom I removed from my blog for her pert attitude in questioning a Florida politician's manhood and denying the fact that she had done so.  But the top prize for Worst Person On My Blog (a tip of the hat to Keith Olbermann) is MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski, whom I featured in 2008.  For over a decade she and her husband Joe Scarborough, the co-hosts of MSNBC's morning program " Morning Joe," had been bashing Trump and his far-right views on political power, and Brzezinski carved out a niche for herself  for promoting women's issues and women in business, with a segment on "Morning Joe" about female empowerment called "Know Your Value."

As I now like to say, she doesn't know her own.  On November 15, 2024, she and Scarborough went to Mar-a-Lago for a fence-mending session with Trump after his election victory ten days earlier.  Having kissed Donald's posterior, the couple revealed the visit to Trump's mansion on their next show following the genuflection.  

"It’s time to do something different, and that starts with not only talking about Donald Trump, but talking with him," Brzezinski said.  She also said, "For those asking why we would speak to the president-elect during such fraught times, I would ask back: Why wouldn’t we?"

Because you and Joe had repeatedly compared Trump to Adolf Hitler, Mika?

While Maye Musk, Mika Brzezinski, and any other women I have featured who either endorsed or capitulated to MAGA don't even have enough awfulness put together to equal the awfulness of Eva Braun - not even when you add the awfulness of women I have disavowed for reasons having nothing to do with MAGA - I believe that, for me, it's time to do something different, and that starts with pulling the plug on my blog.  It also means I'll be setting up fan group pages for some of the women I have featured on my blog on Facebook, which is more enjoyable and far less consequential.  But after having made some dubious choices for my beautiful-women picture blog, mainly due to filling a self-imposed quota of a hundred new subjects a year, I have had enough of celebrating feminine beauty in that medium.  It just doesn't satisfy me anymore.  And it's not fun anymore.

Sorry.    

We'll Always Have Paris

And so we leave the little town of Paris, France.  The Olympics end today, and everyone now looks forward to the 2028 Games in Los Angeles.  Of course, if you want the Games of the XXXIVth Olympiad to be a joyous occasion, you will vote for Kamala Harris, who, as President in 2028 will get to officiate at the opening of the LA Olympics.  If Donald Trump gets back into power, he'll turn the 2028 Olympics into a celebration of the "great" America he's resurrected.  Do the words "Berlin 1936" mean anything to you?

In the meantime, I'd like to think the athletes who made a lot of wonderful memories for me and inspired what little I wrote about the Olympics in this go-around - Katie Ledecky, Bobby Finke, Leon Marchand, Daniel Wiffen, Simone Biles, la muy calor Jasmine Camacho Quinn, Gabby Thomas, Rai Benjamin, Masai Russell, and numerous others I don't know from Adam and Eve.

Thanks to Kevin Hart and Kenan Thompson for finding humor in these Games even when I couldn't.  No thanks to NBC for getting Calvin "Snoop Dogg" Broadus for the travelogue features.  Also . . . come on, NBC, you're the urbane and hip American network - and none of the celebrities you showed us in the stands at the Paris Olympics were French?  You couldn't even find Isabelle Adjani at the gymnastics competition? 

A special thanks to Second Gentleman Douglas Emhoff for sacrificing his personal time to lead an official American delegation to the Olympics.  To think - his wife got to go all over America to campaign for the Presidency this past week, and he had to go to Paris. What a tough job.

I don't feel sorry, though, for Princess Catherine if she has to represent a British delegation to Los Angeles four years hence, because I have a feeling she might actually like LA.  Hah - like it?  She's going to love it!

Finally, I'd like to dedicate what little Olympic commentary I wrote this year to my friend, French 1980s fashion model Anne Bezamat, whose father, Roland Bezamat, won a bronze medal for France in men's team road race cycling at the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki.

That's it for now.  And to the U.S. men's 4x100m track relay team, which goofed again for the sixth straight time in the Olympic final . . . C'est la vie.