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One final note and then I'm done with this topic. To those who think calling Ann Coulter a "would-be pin-up" was over the line, I point you to Linda Hirshman's piece on Coulter today in The Guardian Online, which deserves an extended quote:
the media attention given to Coulter's staggeringly ghastly publications actually seems to be in direct proportion to the amount of her flesh on display. Her first book, High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton (1998), did not even have a customary headshot of the fair-haired girl, just a straight all-text cover. The head appears on the cover of Slander (2002), peeking coyly over a newspaper. 2003's Treason gives you the full Ann, hair to knees and a slightly scooped, but long-sleeved black T of some sort. Sleeves disappear with the publication in 2004 of How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must), revealing our Ann in a naughty leather sleeveless vest - sort of like the ones you see on weekend motorcyclists, but without the tattoos.The vulgarity continues with the again sleeveless but seriously scooped tight black dress cover of Godless, the godlessness apparently represented by the gold cross hanging just above the inch or so of tits revealed by the low neck. If the advance publicity is any guide, the new Liberal Brains book removes any doubt that Ann's can stand up without a brassiere, displaying the mysteriously ever-more youthful Ann in a low cut skin tight dress with skinny spaghetti straps.Ann is hardly the first female author to try to sell her work with titillating pictures of herself. But usually such author photos accompany, say, memoirs of anal sex, like ex-ballerina Toni Bentley's Surrender, rather than screeds on behalf of a political movement deeply rooted in American religious and social conservatism. Like the image of senator Larry Craig in the men's room, Ann Coulter's increasing nudity is revolting mostly because it stands in such contrast to the sexual pieties of the political movement she purports to represent. Will Jerry Falwell now have to consider whether Muslim fundamentalists hate the US because of the pornographic photographs on the covers of right-wing political diatribes?You can check out what she's talking about at Amazon.com. I'd never have noticed this myself but now that she points it out, Coulter's slow-motion striptease is pretty apparent, and reminds me of this article positing a relationships between increasing nudity and mental breakdown among Hollywood starlets.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
