The buzz over Angelina Jolie's leg-revealing dress from the Oscars has thankfully died down. This helps me answer a question first raised when the public took note of Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino's abs: If we each get 15 minutes of fame, how much should an individual body part get? Thankfully, significantly less.
The question that's still unanswered is: why? No, I don't mean the grand, soul-searching "why?" that I ask myself every time I deal with popular culture. I mean, even accepting for a moment that the human race has bizarrely distorted priorities, I can't figure this out.
I had the same question a few years ago after Madonna and Britney's infamous kiss at the MTV awards. Yes, there are lots of people who want to see that sort of thing. But if you want to see women kissing (among other activities) it's also easy to find. Even if it was specifically Madonna and Britney Spears that you wanted to see kissing (among other activities) there's probably a Photoshopped image of it out there somewhere.
Similarly, I can understand why many people would want to see a beautiful woman's leg, but it's simply not that hard to see in our society. I just Googled "Angelina Jolie," and verified that yes, among the images you'll be shown, there will be pictures revealing one or more bare legs. (The things I do for this blog! No, seriously: I mistakenly Googled it after I had logged in to Google to write this post. Thanks to Google's new everything-is-shared security policy, they know who I am, and now think I have a celebrity leg fetish.)
My guess is that it's all part of the fragmentation of society. With so little in common across society, the touchstones that form the bulk of water-cooler conversation and late-night monologues become rarer and more basic. A few more decades and all we'll be able to talk about are colours: "Did you see that? She was wearing a red dress!"
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