CARNAL NATION

If you've spent the last six months curled up at the bottom of a hole somewhere in the Antarctic with no cell service or WiFi and only a few especially misanthropic penguins to talk to, you might have an excuse for not hearing about Sacha Baron Cohen's latest film, Brüno, wherein the comedian plays a gay Austrian fashion reporter. Even if your only company during that time has been a few mildly sociable penguins, you might be feeling like certain members of the CarnalNation staff—sick to death of all the hype. But however the movie turns out, some of the hype itself has inadvertantly brought the weird hypocrisy of America's attitudes towards sex and gender bubbling to the surface. Below is the cover of the latest issue of GQ, starring a very naked Sacha Baron Cohen. In NYC, the newsstand chain Hudson News recently declared that the issue would be treated as pornography, and would be sold with the lower half concealed.

But, as both Gawker and Shakesville point out, this month's issue of Esquire with Israeli model Bar Refaeli, above right, is not being sold "as pornography" by Hudson News, and you can easily find the two resting next to one another on Hudson's shelves, Refaeli proudly flaunting it all to the passerby in Grand Central Station while Sacha is discreetly covered up. What's the difference between the two? Why is Refaeli's nudity kosher in the eyes of Hudson, and Baron Cohen's nudity treyf? Does the judicious use of a Sharpie an image non-pornographic? Unfortunately, Shakesville takes an utterly predictable and cliché approach: "Because, duh, women's bodies are meant to be objectified and ogled," Melissa McEwan writes, "but doing the same to men's bodies is pervy and grody!" It's not that McEwan is wrong, as far as she goes, but in going straight for the "objectification" argument, she relies on a stock argument that doesn't go any deeper than a bumper sticker. Also, McEwan's zinger implicitly accepts the pathologizing of nudity—and specifically sexual nudity—as being something degrading. The logical conclusion from McEwan's post (and most arguments that use "objectification") isn't that in an ideal world Baron Cohen should have been left uncovered, but that both should have been covered for the sake of their—and society's—dignity.

And yet Hudson's awkward fear of Baron Cohen's bare ass seems very strange indeed, even if they're not unusual for Americans. Naked guys are scary, for some reason. There's something much more "pornographic" about male sensuality in the American mind, whether because male sexuality is seen as inherently aggressive, always that one step away from rape, or the belief that Sacha Baron Cohen in the buff is going to turn scores of straight men into raving homos as they pass the newsstand on their way to catch the Lexington 4/5. Most likely it's both; after all, much homophobia is predicated on the supposedly predatory, uncontrollable nature of gay desire.

Lest it seem like we're bashing McEwan too much on the basis of one sentence, she does make a very good observation about the cover in a post from last month: Baron Cohen is a straight man playing gay in a movie; would the editors of GQ feel as comfortable putting an actual gay man in a similar pose on their cover—or even on the cover at all? Based on what she can tell, the answer is no. " I went back through every cover since Jan. 1990," she writes, "and among the hundreds of actors, singers, athletes, politicians, and other famous men pictured, not a single one of them is gay and out." Sometimes it feels like instead of working to develop a sophisticated sexual vocabulary, Americans still need to build an alphabet.