I had been working on this piece for a few days last week for a Respectable News Website, but then it got squashed at the last minute. Apparently they didn't like the idea of arguing for MORE BABY DIX ALL THE TIME. Sigh. By the time I got started sending it around elsewhere it was kind of old news. Now it's even older news, in internet time, since anything that happened more than a day ago slides off the side of the earth into the sun, but I still think it's an interesting issue. I touched on some of this last time in Barstool Sports, child pornography, and the case of Tom Brady's penis, but here's another look at it, with 50% more baby dix. Also, not for nothing, but you would not believe how much traffic the search terms "Tom Brady's kid's penis" is bringing to PTSOTL. You weirdos.
There are probably more tactful ways for a sports blog to earn mainstream attention, but posting pictures of an NFL quarterback's penis seems to do the trick. It certainly helped raise the profile of Deadspin last summer, when they broke the story of Brett Favre's misguided, cell-phone come-ons. You know how the Internet works, though: It's a never-ending race to the nadir of decency. A quarterback's penis is old news—been there, seen that, can never un-see it. To gain some elbow room in a crowded market, an enterprising site has to give us something fresh, like the penis of an NFL quarterback's two-year-old son, for example.
Barstool Sports Boston, already known for pushing the boundaries of good taste via their boner- minded, frat-boy galumphing stepped to the edge of the taste chasm last week, and asked themselves, “I wonder how low this thing goes?” Pretty low, it turns out.
For a site with recent posts titled “Indiana Court Upholds the Rights of Sluts to Act Like Sluts”, and “Guess That Ass,” the distinction between porn-culture sports boobery and outright obscenity may seem porous or even nonexistent. But the media outrage machine whirred into action with alarming speed after site editor Dave Portnoy, aka El Presidente, posted a series of paparazzi shots that showed New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady's son Benjamin frolicking naked on a beach with his mother, Giselle Bündchen. Above the pictures read the headline, “Check Out the Howitzer on Brady’s Kid.” There were also some T-shirt mockups, depicting Brady's son with a cannon between his legs.
Among other public condemnations, Portnoy was summarily banned from sports talk radio station WEEI, where he had often been a guest. Their meaty-finger-wagging scolds fanned the flames of statewide concern-trolling. (Keep in mind this is the son of Massachusetts' most beloved sports hero we're talking about here.) “We will not have Portnoy on again,” tweeted station manager Jason Wolfe. “What he did was completely irresponsible.” Listeners asked for his head, as did many of Barstool’s loyal readers—or Stoolies, as they call themselves—who called the editor despicable and depraved. “Its disgusting considering hes fucking 2 years old and second of all its somebody’s kid,” one wrote. “How would you feel if it was your son?”
“[F]or two hours straight WEEI encouraged people to call up and say I should be murdered,” Portnoy wrote, taking a shot at the station. “So you tell me what’s worse? Posting a picture of a baby with his wee wee out or literally trying to incite a riot to get ratings for the first time in 3 years. Not to mention the fact if the picture was so awful why were they telling everybody and their grandmother to go look at it?”
Others have been calling for the site's advertisers to withdraw, including the blog Boycott Barstool, which has been documenting Portnoy's antics, listing phone numbers of the site's advertisers, and recommending people throw Barstool's newspaper boxes in the trash.
Even Howard Stern, nobody's idea of an arbiter of good taste, took the blogger to task: “I saw the picture and, quite frankly, I do think it’s kiddie porn. I don’t think you should put a picture of a 2-year-old nude.”
“As I’ve already said a million times I’m honestly shocked this got blown so far out of proportion,” Portnoy responded. He also received a visit at home from two detectives from the office of state Attorney General Martha Coakley, asking him to take the photos down.
“We asked Mr. Portnoy to remove the postings and appreciate that he voluntarily chose to do so,” a Coakley spokeswoman said in a statement. “At this time, no further action is pending.”
Portnoy has pulled the naked baby pics from the site—simply to avoid the aggravation, he says—and has remained notably defiant throughout the ordeal. “To me anybody with a normally functioning brain should have looked at this blog, hopefully laughed, and moved on.”
Maybe he’s right. Why all the excitement and police activity? Images of naked babies playing with their mothers are everywhere. There are dozens of them available in any parent's Facebook photo album, judging by my circle of friends alone. Portnoy has pointed out that this isn’t even the first time a blog has posted pictures of Brady’s supermodel wife and her naked child on the beach, and the images themselves came from a Brazilian photo agency whose reputation remains intact (or at least unchanged). So when and how, exactly, does a little baby penis cross the line from innocence to scandal?
The real crime, it seems, was in Portnoy’s assertion that it's not such a little baby penis after all. "That's what MVP QB's do,” Portnoy wrote in his post. “They impregnate chicks and give birth to big dicked kids." It’s hard to imagine that he’d have caught any flack if he had the pictures go without commentary, as others already had. Nor would he have earned the approbation of Howard Stern for posting the lewd, sexualizing commentary without the pictures they referred to. (It’s worth nothing that no one accused Larry David of indecency, let alone kiddie porn, when he joked about the size of a baby’s penis on an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.) For many observers, it’s the juxtaposition that matters—as if the boorish commentary could itself turn a baby picture into porn.
A commenter at the Boston Herald website explained the distinction between the Barstool posting and the naked-baby images posted elsewhere: “Portnoy was the only one that posted disgusting, quasi-sexual comments to accompany the pics. THAT is the difference, dude … the blogger added sexual context to the picture when he posted it. He transformed an innocent kid picture into porn by attaching a commentary devoted entirely to the genitalia.”
Perhaps, but comments like that one are what really pushed it over the edge. Portnoy’s jest may have introduced the penis concept, as distinct from the penis image, into the discussion, but it was the set of reactions to that post— all the comments about his comment, online and over the airwaves—that fully transformed the image of young Brady with a wave of the magic, kiddie-porn wand. Portnoy never intended the image, or the caption, to be received as anything other than a dumb joke.
Or maybe what we're talking about here is just a poor choice of venue. On a site with galleries of near-naked co-eds called “Local Smokeshow of the Day,” unrelated images tend to absorb some of the horny miasma. Information both rises, and sinks, to the level of its company. The fact that Brady’s toddler happened to be cavorting on the beach with one of the world’s most iconic sex symbols also lends it a porny-gravitational pull. “PS - The mom's ass ain't bad either,” Portnoy wrote in his original post, as if his readers needed a reminder. On a site like Barstool, when images of a bikini-cavorting hottie turn up, even a mom, or perhaps especially a mom, the natural reaction amongst them is to start thinking with their own baby dicks.
It's not even the first time Bündchen has been photographed with her naked child on the beach, as Portnoy pointed out, reposting a similar set of pictures from the gossip blog Celebitchy. “I’m not being so anal retentive that I’m crying 'inappropriate' on general public nakedness on a baby - it’s a baby,” the Celebitchy post reads. “Let the baby be naked, who cares? But when you’re on a public beach, and the paparazzi are snapping photos of you and your naked baby…? Is it weird?”
I don't think so. Apparently no one else did when these photos were posted last year either. It's certainly not even remotely approaching the realm of child pornography, one of the most despicable offenses imaginable. But, as literally every article ever written about pornography will tell you, porn is hard to define, yet you'll know it when you see it. The nude human form in an art gallery takes on an entirely different meaning than the nude form on the internet. So can we say decisively that one set of pictures on a blog with a largely female readership like Celebtichy are transformed into something completely different when a similar set appears on one read mostly by men?
It's an issue raised by another recent controversy surrounding the porn actress and new mother Madison Young, who is currently engaged in a multi-media art project called “Becoming MILF” in which she attempts to address the dichotomy between the Madonna and the whore. The series includes a baby quilt made of “burp clothes & porn star panties,” and images of Young breastfeeding her child.
Predictably, outrage has ensued, with critics complaining that the photos might serve as fodder for pedophiles. “The online controversy proved Young's point even better than her art project could. Since she sometimes uses her breasts for sexual purposes, they can't be desexualized when performing a different function,” Jezebel wrote.
The same double standard is being levied against Bündchen. Since Barstool readers are accustomed to fantasizing about her loins, they're guilty by association for doing so while the fruit of said loins are within eyesight. The people who want Portnoy murdered don’t care that he was making a goofy joke—they insist on seeing the post as more masturbation material for Barstool’s cretinous readers. They're wrong about that.
Joking about a baby’s penis does not imply “lascivious intent” – as one pearl-clutching editorial in the Patriot Ledger suggested, hinting that perhaps a little prison time might be in order – anymore than joking about an adult’s penis implies a desire for sex. And jokes about adult penises are the basis for an entire subcategory of American comedy. We may not always like it when we're examining it from the outside looking in, or admit it in polite company, but show me a man who hasn't made a thousand penis jokes in his life, or a father who hasn't at least considered making one about his own child's, and I'll show you someone with a lot more psycho-sexualized hangups than one who has.
It's not just our own penises that are fair game either, the penile exploits of great men – and Tom Brady is about as close to the ideal to a great man we have in pop culture now – have been fodder for conversation since the invention of both conversation and penises. That's what Portnoy was getting at, gracefully or not, in his original post. Not a baby with a big penis, but the fact that a beloved sport hero is so virile, so emblematic of the ideals of masculinity, that even his offspring are well endowed.
I never thought I'd be in a position where I'd end up defending Barstool Sports, the internet equivalent of a fat guy in cargo shorts who knows what time the shifts change at all the strip clubs in town, but I cannot, in good conscience as a fellow blogger of questionable taste, and, more importantly, as a guy who thinks baby penises are hilarious, sit idly by while people call this dumb joke child pornography. It's an insult to the horrors of actual child pornography. And to comedy too, maybe, but it's nowhere near worthy of all the moral outrage it's brought about.
Or, as Portnoy sums it up: “To say that there was any sexual intent or innuendo behind it is flat out ludicrous. It was a blog about Tom Brady and him being awesome at everything he does and being better than Peyton Manning and showing Gisele’s ass. Same blog I’ve written a zillion
times.”
In other words, sometimes a baby dick is just a baby dick, and sometimes an adult dick is just being a dick.
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2 comments:
I have to say, I admire you're thoroughness in examining Portnoy's complaint (I know, I know), to the point where I've come around from my initial knee jerk revulsion (while it still crosses the line into pretty bad taste, it never bothered me when, say, John Waters did it) to acknowledging you have a point about the puritanical, hypocritical hysteria surrounding the whole thing. You are indeed doing the Lord's work.
Thanks, I think when it comes to drawing lines in the sand between would-be comedians who go a step to far and moralizing scolds, I'm more often than not going to err on the side of humor, successful or not.
I reserve the right to say the exact opposite next time though.
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