The Curious Case of Barack Obama’s Christmas Pectoral Photos
I’m sure you’ve all heard about this: President-elect Barack Obama was walking out of the gym half-naked–which in some cultures is referred to as “wearing shorts”–and some photographer nabbed a bunch of shots of his fairly well-shaped pectoral muscles.
Suddenly, photo editors in the upper echelons of journalism found a renewed professional focus: Buying shirtless Obama pictures and finding other “historical” photos of presidents with no shirt on.
This, America, is no way to spend the holidays.
I’m sure that to a few people, nothing says “Merry Christmas!” quite like a picture of a 47-year-old dude walking out of a Marine Corps gym with his shirt off. But I don’t know who those people are, and I’ll hazard a guess that neither do most sociologists.
Nonetheless, our nation’s newspapers have decided to devote a shockingly undue amount of resources toward catering to that obscure, really weird sector of the populace.
These shirtless Obama photos were somehow considered front-page news in major cities around the world. They made The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Times of London, and, perhaps less impressively, La Nacion in Costa Rica. In addition to shirtless Obama pics, The Chicago Tribune has an online gallery, currently accessible from their home page, that shows pictures of other former presidents–saggy-bodied hombres like Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton–with no shirt on.
But the spot-on coverage from The New York Post, as it so often does, takes the cake. Their headline: “O MY BOD! IT’S BEACH BARACK: NEXT PREZ HEATS UP HAWAII.”
The thoughtfully scribed article that followed actually included the following sentence:
“It’s a sight that Americans are increasingly getting used to–an extremely hard-bodied 44th president of the United States, whose toned pecs and abs have become as well documented during the transition process as have his policy positions.”
WHAT?! That is a completely untrue statement. His toned pecs and abs have not been remotely as well-documented as his policy positions. Also, I don’t know anybody who has conversations that start with, “You know, I’m increasingly getting used to our extremely hard-bodied president. Aren’t you?” And while the guy appears to be in pretty good shape, he is by no means “extremely hard-bodied” anyway. That’s a descriptor typically reserved for other famous people who have entirely shunned shirt wearing–people like Evander Holyfield and Matthew McConaughey.
How about refocusing our societal lens back on some of our more frequently practiced holiday photography traditions? For many people, that could mean doing things like taking pictures of happy children unwrapping presents or strange uncles in terrible sweaters, or simply gathering around an album to show someone’s fiancee embarrasing snapshots from childhood. For others, it means clutching a dimming Polaroid of their estranged wife whilst slurping down lukewarm Chinese food before crying themselves to sleep.
Either way you go there, it’ll be far more Christmasy than looking at shirtless pictures of old or middle-aged men. That having been said, let me openly acknowledge one thing: It’s Christmas Eve, and I just spent a whole lot of time looking at pictures of shirtless presidents in order to write this article.
Click here to read The New York Post’s Pulitzer-worthy take on these photos.
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