Chests versus Breasts

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/05/18/what-makes-a-body-obscene/

Andrej Pejic is a young male model whose career is centered around his androgynous look, successfully modeling both male and female clothing lines. Sometimes in the same show. Last winter he was featured on the cover of New York based Dossier Journal (picture above) hair curled and shirt in the process of being removed. Barnes and Noble and Borders bookstores "bagged" the magazine - a practice usually reserved for explicitly pornographic magazines.

In our culture male chests are not viewed as pornographic. We see them all the time as a ubiquitous feature on many men's health magazine covers. Even if we hold off on the greater question of why male torsos are appropriate and female torsos obscene, why would America's two largest booksellers (at the time) force a pornographic blinder on what they knew and accepted to be a male figure? 

Their answer? No comment of course. But the center of this controversy, this confusion, is the unease generated in the general public over the merest possibility of blurring the lines between male and female bodies. But more than that, what right do Barnes and Noble and Borders have to declare and propagate the one acceptable male body form? It's hard to disentangle this particular case with sex and sexuality, because it's not simply about body types or aesthetics - it's about the deep pipelines of our aesthetics leading directly to our sense of self and sexuality. Because many men are skinny, and androgynous looking, and they are not given covers on GQ, or Vanity Fair, or Men's Fitness. Because this bodily discomfort and obsession that plagues America seems to be rooted in accentuating the male/female differences which leave most of the spectrum far from the public eye.

I'm still confused how B&N and Borders could, with full intention, stand behind so archaic a policy.