Open Thread: Could a Female Editor-in-Chief Get Away With Full Frontal Like Noah Brand Did?

The male editor of @goodmenproject poses full-frontal nude and is praised for bravery.If female magazine editor did same, she’d be shamed.

— Hugo Schwyzer (@hugoschwyzer) May 25, 2012

Open Discussion question for Saturday:

Did you see our Editor-in-Chief Noah Brand posing bare as the day he was born for our series on body image?

Well, it’s aroused a lot of excitement… so to speak. People were all a-twitter!

When I saw the above tweet from Hugo Schwyzer, insisting that women wouldn’t be lauded as Noah has been, I couldn’t help but disagree. I countered him by saying that if a not-model-hot EiC decided to go face-to-face with society’s ideals of what a woman “should” look like (during body image week, nonetheless), that most people would praise her, just as we have been Noah. Here’s my tweet back:

@hugoschwyzer @goodmenproject i disagree. If a slightly pudgy female editor did that during body shame week, she’d be lauded by some too.

— joanna (@iproposethis) May 26, 2012

I’m not trying to be mean by calling Noah “slightly pudgy” here… In the piece he says this about himself:

BMI is one of those measurements like IQ. You can know perfectly well that it’s a bullshit metric based on a whole bunch of flawed assumptions, but you still want to know your number. And once you know it, you can’t get away from it. Mine is just over the line where “overweight” turns into “obese”.

If Noah were a woman—let’s call her Noreen—and the EiC of The Good Lady Project, would her every “flaw” be dissected and made fun of? Or would people stand up and applaud her for her stretch marks or saggy breasts or her curvy thighs?

Let’s be honest with ourselves here… If it were one of the female editors here at GMP, would we be considered cheap, or slutty? Would we be picked apart for our flaws the way tabloids do to every poor actress who dares take a swim in Malibu or South Beach? Or would we be held up and respected as brave, the way Noah is?

Is there a double standard here?

And no, I’m not going to test the theory. Sorry, friends!

(But why not? Does that speak to the double standard?)