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 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.