One of my least favorite metaphors compares humans to frogs. If you dropped a frog onto a hot stove, the story goes, it would immediately leap right off. But if you put it into a pot of cool water on a stove and turn the heat up ever so gradually, the frog will boil to death before it realizes what is happening.
So it is with people, goes the moral of the story. Take away their freedom a little at a time, expose them to small doses of coarsening influences, do anything corrosive and corrupting in small bits, and humans will be like that frog: dead before they know what hit them.
Aside from being revulsed by the gruesome nature of the frog story–where was PETA when this boiling idea was being tried out?–I don’t like the metaphor because it usually is uttered by people preaching doom and gloom, and I’m not into those.
And yet there is such a thing as erosion–the wearing away over time of sensibilities, of quality, of standards. Last week, two images appeared in the Tribune that some people thought were emblematic of such erosion.
On Sunday, Feb. 11, the Chicago Tribune Magazine carried a spring fashion spread that included a photo of a female model wearing a black suit jacket with wide lapels and a look on her face for which the French created the word “insouciant.” The jacket is open and, from the throat to below the navel, there is nothing except bare skin.
“It’s a sad day when a newspaper like the Tribune thrusts sexually provocative women’s fashions into our homes,” wrote one woman who described herself as a longtime subscriber from a southwest suburb. “These racy fashions are offensive, unacceptable and may even help stimulate aggressive sexual action against women.”
In fact, it wasn’t the fashions that were provocative or racy; they were actually quite modest, even conservative (appropriate for clothing designed to hark back to the 1980s, the age of Ronald Reagan). It was the pose–and the absence of anything underneath the jacket.
It would appear that this reader missed the Sept. 8, 1996 issue of the magazine, where on Page 16 there was a fashion model in a virtually identical pose–and in a suit made of leather no less. And the March 3, 1996 issue, where the model’s relatively demure pose on Page 16 included having one button on her jacket fastened–the better to emphasize the bare skin and the barely concealed breasts underneath.
Clearly, bare skin and models in provocative poses are not new things in the Tribune magazine. The fact that this reader’s was the only letter I received on the subject–a senior staff member also expressed dismay–suggests they are widely accepted. But are they acceptable?
Brenda Butler, senior features editor of the magazine, points out that fashion magazines such as W and Glamour routinely publish photos far racier and more provocative than anything that goes into the Tribune magazine.
But those magazines do not serve the same audience as a Midwestern newspaper of general circulation, an audience that welcomes the paper into the house on the assumption that it will be fit for all members of the household to look at and read. That’s a reality we can never afford to lose sight of.
I tend to agree with Butler that the fear someone will be inspired to “aggressive sexual action against women” because of a fashion photo in our magazine is overblown. Then again, maybe we are both like that frog in the pot with the burner on low. (Is it just me or is it getting a bit warm in here?)
I mentioned that there were two images that provoked concern. The second appeared last Friday on Page 14, along with the continuation of a Page 1 story on the controversy over the Brooklyn Museum’s display of “Yo Mama’s Last Supper.”
That five-panel color photo is a caricature of Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper.” At the center of the artwork, posed as Jesus Christ, is the artist who created it, Renee Cox, and she is completely, frontally nude.
The New York Times, which had its own photographer at the exhibit, found a clever way to show the artwork: It positioned Cox in front of it and at a sharp angle, so that her nude image in the work was all but indiscernible.
Tribune editors had only wire service photos to work with and elected to run a head-on shot of the artwork from Reuters. Two contradictory ideas were at work in this decision. On one hand, it was felt the picture was necessary to tell the full story of the controversy. On the other hand, it was felt that the image size would be small enough not to call undue attention to itself and so would be inoffensive.
The first idea was debatable at best. In an opinion expressed by several writers and callers, Lorna Streit, a South Side resident, said that the verbal description of the work was sufficient to let readers understand the controversy. The picture, she said, was a gratuitous slap at Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular.
As for the image size, it wasn’t small enough to keep at least a dozen readers from seeing it and being offended enough to call or write in protest.
Significantly, this photo made it into the paper without being seen by Tribune editor Ann Marie Lipinski, who was preoccupied with other tasks when this decision was made. That will not happen again, however.
There’s a new protocol in place in the Tribune newsroom: No nude or dead bodies go into the paper unless the editor has seen them.
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Don WycliffDon Wycliff is the Tribune’s public editor. Address e-mail responses to dwycliff@tribune.com
