Pictures of a Beautiful Autopsy

Model Rachel Williams was the last original subject, barring an unidentified model whose picture I found in an old Sears catalog published online, that I featured on my beautiful-women picture blog. 

Except for one thing.  I forgot that I had posted a decade earlier a picture of Rachel Williams with three other models from Revlon's "Most Unforgettable Women" ad campaign.

This is one of several reasons why my blog had to end.  It had gotten to the point where I couldn't keep track of or remember whom I had featured on my blog and whom I'd never featured before.

My blog is now dead.  I deleted it this past Saturday as I promised I would, and when Blogger.com gave me the option to permanently delete it, rather than keep it on file for up to three months should I change my mind, I couldn't press "PERMANENTLY DELETE" fast enough.  My mind was made up.  The blog had gotten problematic with too many women from professions where good looks mattered either little or not at all, and I thought I was actually doing womanhood a favor by including Lisa Masterson, a black female doctor who only became a household name because she was a co-host of a daytime TV medical talk show.  Right.  Because if you go to a lady doctor for care, her looks should be just as important as her medical expertise.  For TV, of course, Dr. Masterson's looks were important.  In the real world that Dr. Masterson otherwise participates in, however, her looks shouldn't matter.  Dr. Masterson, meanwhile, became culturally irrelevant when "The Doctors" (yes, that's what the show was called) was canceled and her fifteen minutes of fame were up.

When did the rot in my blog begin to set in?  Certainly not with actresses I featured early on, because these actresses were actresses whose movies I knew like song lyrics.  Certainly not with models or dancers I featured in the beginning, nor even with on-camera meteorologists for The Weather Channel, as the ladies on that cable channel have and had fan clubs started by smitten males (I belonged to a Vivian Brown fan club on Yahoo).   The rot might have set in when I featured for the first time a hard-news reporter - NBC's Rehema Ellis, whom I probably featured because I was going through a round of new subjects from A to Z and I needed a surname that began with the letter E.  Or maybe it was when I did my first series on beautiful athletes and featured tennis player Jennifer Capriati, who is a gorgeous woman but is still a tennis player, and I myself am not a tennis fan.  But it certainly started eating away at the foundation of my blog when I started featuring television actresses who were either unknown to me until twenty minutes before I featured them, disappeared after their sitcoms got canceled with their fifteen minutes of fame up, or both.  It was my reliance on fly-by-night starlets and TV newswomen (*cough cough*, Kristen Welker, *cough cough*) that ultimately doomed my blog, culminating with the dustup with the fellow who runs the RETROCirq channel on YouTube.

Oh, and also adding Katy Perry to my blog.  I never should have included Katy Perry.  Tyler Perry in drag would have made more sense.   

I also have a confession to make.  While I had a page of written rules and criteria for who could be featured on my blog, I had a couple of unwritten, secret rules.  One was, no Scientologists.  I consider myself pretty tolerant when it comes to religion, accepting Muslims as part of the American fabric (but not progressives who delight in bashing Catholicism but rush to defend Islam despite Islam being similar to the Church in its cultural conservatism), and even accepting Mormons as Christians, but Scientology is not a religion.  It's a cult.  And its celebrity members are annoyingly bad missionaries for their "faith."  So if you followed my beautiful-women picture blog and wondered why I never included Anne Archer or, when she was alive, Kirstie Alley, that's why.

Another rule was not to include lesbians.  I have nothing personally against lesbians, and I joke that I could be friends with any lesbian because we have one thing in common - we both like women.   But I didn't want to take the chance of featuring, say, Portia de Rossi and having homophobes leaving nasty comments on my blog.  So I didn't post pictures of Portia de Rossi.

But I did post a picture of Canadian actress Ellen Page, who was a lesbian - I posted it without being aware of her sexual orientation.  Once I found out she was a lesbian, I did not remove the post - I preferred to let it be.  Surprisingly, though, no one left any nasty comments on my Ellen Page post.  Then, out of nowhere, Ellen Page symbolically died and was reborn as Elliot Page.  Faced with the reality of having featured on my blog a woman who was now a man, I confronted the issue head-on.  In a new post, I defended Page's gender transition, saying that she - now he - had every right to become a male and that I was certain he was happy in his new identity and his new life, and I wished him well.  I did not give into fear of transsexuals and remove my post of Ellen Page now that Elliot Page had replaced her.  I stood up for something.  I was proud of that.  I still am.  I suppose that's why they call this month of June "Pride Month."

Overall, though, I'm not really proud of my beautiful-women picture blog in retrospect.  The subject was all wrong for a blog, and over time, it became difficult to sustain indefinitely.  And that's partly why it stopped being fun.  And to be honest, I should have ended it sooner.  But it doesn't matter now.  I have ended it.  

And I'm free.  Free from having to maintain the blog, free from having to come up with new subjects for posts, free from having to keep a second blog going even as I keep this one going.

Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty (and the "PERMANENTLY DELETE" button) I'm free at last.