I am considering liking the cover for the juxtaposition that these male actors are supposed to equally the hotness of the original female actors when they “get together” in the next incredibly stupid RomCom to star them. It would underscore this stupid “a guy who bathes once a week equals Angelina Jolie hotness” idiocy.

I doubt that was what was intended though.

Paul Rudd is funny.

Why the bodysuits, though?  Were they just too homophobic to take the gag all the way? 

Or are naked men just too emasculating?  Somehow?

The look on Paul Rudd’s face is awesome

Paul Rudd’s face is awesome.

I don’t know who any of them are, I take it they’re famous. Does that matter to the intended joke?

“Why the bodysuits, though?  Were they just too homophobic to take the gag all the way?  “

Well, that and two of those guys are overweight. And NO ONE wants to see nekkid fatties! eeewwwww
Fatties are just for being funny, get it?  harharhar.

on a sidenote: I want to like Paul Rudd. But, he seems to only make the douchiest, unwatchable movies.

I took it as “no one wants to see these men naked”. And of course the best looking one in the group is fully dressed. I don’t think the bodysuits are completely because they are men, I think it has a lot to do with the fact that none of them have the ideal male body.

However, it does (unintentionally) bring up the fact that men can be imperfect and appreciated for their talent & women cannot.

Yeah, the fact that the one guy you really want to see naked is in clothes seems to punctuate the mean, gloating swipe at women, highlighting male privilege.  Women don’t generally get to be the roly-poly comedians who still get the guy at the end.  You get to be in if you’re hot (and Paul Rudd—-rwowr), but unlike Paul Rudd, you don’t get to keep your clothes on.

I agree that Paul Rudd is the reason to laugh at the picture. In response to Gypsy Lee:

on a sidenote: I want to like Paul Rudd. But, he seems to only make the douchiest, unwatchable movies.

Clearly you’ve never seen a movie that starred Dane Cook or Larry the Cable Guy.

It’s funny. But only because of Paul Rudd and his sincere reveling in in whatshisname’s manly odor. If you took that out, it would just be kind of stupid.

Gypsy: I know.  He was so good in “Knocked Up”, but his character made me want to kill myself.  He and Leslie Mann’s marriage was, I guess, darkly funny, but it was also insanely depressing.

I really enjoyed Jason Segel’s nakedness in the Forgetting Sarah Marshall breakup scene. A really good way to portray his vulnerability in that moment. Which I only bring up because these guys don’t seem to have much trouble getting naked in public. The body suits… a really bizarre choice.

Especially since mainly bodyhair would have reinforced the gender play.

That said… I didn’t get this at all when I saw it at HP. Thanks for linking to the Vanity Fair thing, for context. I dunno… just, all around puzzling. Considering some of the themes that have come out in the Apatow movies (especially Knocked Up), I’m not surprised to see them kinda blowing the gender politics while they try to be funny.

They need little spermy hats or something.  That would make it complete.

Nice cycles. Seth Rogan, airbrushed beyond recognition… that’d be worth a giggle.

“Clearly you’ve never seen a movie that starred Dane Cook or Larry the Cable Guy. “

I have, alas, seen one Dane Cook movie - something to do with his being a stock boy after Jessica Simpson. If there’s more, I’m (blissfully) unaware of them.  That movie didn’t strike me as nearly as douchey as Knocked Up, Superbad, etc.

“He was so good in “Knocked Up”, but his character made me want to kill myself.  He and Leslie Mann’s marriage was, I guess, darkly funny, but it was also insanely depressing.”

Ugh, exactly.  I can appreciate he is a good actor, but does he do anything in which he’s not cringe-inducing?

Did they choose body suits or did Vanity Fair say to use body suits, cause these guys have shown in their movies that they are pretty willing to take it off.

I find the body suits distracting. It would have been pretty funny without them but with them its just kinda weird to me.

It’s weird I have that reaction, too, because I love many actors who play roles to maximize the pathetic nature of them. And sometimes in that movie it worked well, like the Vegas scenes.  Tina Fey as Liz Lemon, Larry David as Larry David, pretty much everyone in “The Office”—-I like my comic actors playing deeply flawed people where the humor comes from their flaws.  But I dunno.  Maybe it’s because the movie seemed to assume we’d be rooting for them?  I was like, “Break up! Save yourselves!”

It’s lame that they’re not naked.  Personally, I expect more from these guys than this.  If they were going to do this pic, they should have done it right.  The unitards are a cop-out.

I dunno, I think it’s fairly funny—as a meta-joke about Vanity Fair, and as a comment on how absurd it is that men are not asked to do things like this to advance their careers, and as a second-order comment on how it’s possible to be not particularly attractive by most measures and still have a career in Hollywood if you’re an Apatow dude. 

I’m not getting the “duh, that’s for ladies” vibe from it at all.  I just don’t think it reinforces the idea that women _are_ asked to do things like this, and it’s a Good Thing.  OK, it may be pivoting on the idea that naked fat bodies are inherently mockable (bolstered by the fact that the handsomer and thinner Rudd is not in odalisque pose). 

Sure, it _could_ have been more radical, but, you know, half a loaf, etc.

I see this picture and I get the reference. I think I even understand the displeasure of the result that Amanda puts forth. And, it seems like the overall context, why the photo was taken (publicity for something?) and where it was located in the magazine (not on the cover), just make this picture even more of a head scratcher.

If it were me, I’d think that reproducing the original cover only switching the roles of who had clothes on or not (women dressed, man naked) might have been more significant. Of what though, I’m not sure I could say.

It looks like they’re the cast of a weird new ballet, or doing performance art or something. The body suits completely override the sexuality aspect. I hadn’t seen the original, and I had absolutely no idea that they were going for gender play.

I’m glad it was worth a laugh for some, but it completely fails for me. And is in bad taste, for reasons that have been fully elaborated on here.

It could have been funny if they did it without the bodysuits, partially because some people would get squicked out for all the reasons mentioned (homophobia, ewww naked men, whatever) and that would reveal gendered double standards in all their glory. With the bodysuits, it’s just an awkward “we were too scared to do this right” schtick.

Also would have been funny if they all had their body hair removed, which I think is part of the reason for the bodysuits—to try and get that “bare flesh” look. But it would have been much more over-the-top if they went all the way and did it naked and hairless, just like their female counterparts.

Of course, there’s not a whole lot I suppose you could do to use a little gender-reversal to mock the original cover.

Of course there is.  Same actors, sans bodysuits, painstakingly photoshopped to look all SeXXXay.

I don’t know who any of them are, I take it they’re famous. Does that matter to the intended joke?

I think part of what could have actually made this funny is the fact that these guys are “famous” in sort of the same way the barely clad starlets usually featured on Vanity Fair covers are.  They’re basically interchangable “comically shlubby yet telegenic youngish dude actors”. 

It also would have been funny if Natalie “enigmatic pixie waif” Portman had been the one in the suit.

Oh, and crap.  What Holly said.

I think the awkwardness and half-way-ness of the image is very much part of the concept—a feature, not a bug.  I don’t think the actors are _actually_ embarrassed to show more of their bodies, but part of the pretext of the image (IMHO) is that they are.

Women don’t generally get to be the roly-poly comedians who still get the guy at the end.

Unless you’re Janeane Garofalo in The Truth about Cats and Dogs.  Who isn’t nearly as roly-poly as half these guys.

Nude men- clothed woman.  Otherwise, it simply doesn’t work.

And it’s OK if Paul Rudd is the nude front man.

It is rather overwhelming in the amount of flesh that would be showing if they were showing flesh.

Same actors, sans bodysuits, painstakingly photoshopped to look all SeXXXay.

True, but you’d have to be able to recognize them as the Apatow crew so that you could mentally compare their photoshopped doppelgangers to their actual selves.  Non-photoshopped, their shlubbiness is much more evident.  I still think the body-hiding aspect of the bodysuits makes the absurdity much clearer.

Yeah, Janeane Garofalo is actually tiny by normal standards.  And I don’t mean compared to the average weight.  I mean compared to the ideal weight they give you in medical offices.

It also would have been funny if Natalie “enigmatic pixie waif” Portman had been the one in the suit.

But Portman doesn’t have a connection to Judd Apatow.  In fact, the image could be playing around with the idea that the dudes-first, homosocial Apatowverse is being rendered homoerotic here.  Sort of.

Flip, since all these chubby actors are routinely paired off with women who wear size negatives in movies, I don’t think we can say it’s any kind of subversion.  That’s their gravy train, and this is just drawing attention to that.

Which isn’t to say that I don’t like these actors.  I do.  But it’s just disappointing to me to see them play to a sexist standard instead of treat that as one more thing to really mock, not just pretend mock.

put lean, naked men in a picture to be gazed at by a famous lesbian,

Great idea!  Although, I guess we wouldn’t need the famous lesbian.

Someone should make a parody of this parody with Roseanne Barr, Bea Arthur, and (I can’t think of any other famous women with less-than-ideal looks)

Which movie, TV show, magazine, play, sport, or other thing should I have been exposed to in order to know who these people are?

@ Bosworth:  The TV series “Freaks and Geeks” and “Undeclared,” the movies “Forty Year Old Virgin” and “Superbad” (among others), and more.

@ Amanda:  I agree that it’s calling attention to that gravy train, but instead of just straightforwardly reveling in it, I think there’s another element of pointing out how lucky they are to be able to benefit from a much looser set of beauty standards.  The photographer seems to me to be working on a meta-level where it’s important that the image be strange rather than straightforward.

It would have been funny if it had been a gal in the suit.  The bodysuits I can go either way on—they’re either a copout or another layer to the joke, so I can see the difference.

Definitely, I can conceive of all kinds of _more_ subversive remixes of the image if the concept were to be “Why is it different to gaze at the male body than the female body?”  I think the Guerrilla Girls have been working on that for, like, 20 years.

But I think the concept here is much more specific to Judd Apatow and the way he has built a stable of male actors who don’t match up with norms for Hollywood attractiveness.  That’s why the picture is trying to glam up Apatow men, Vanity Fair-style, on the pages of Vanity Fair—and only partly succeeding, if at all.

Why would they save Chris Penn’s DNA like that?

It would have been funny if it had been a gal in the suit.

Except that one of the criticisms of Apatow is that women don’t much matter in his universe of shlubby slacker men.  He has conventionally beautiful women pairing up with an array of losers, as Amanda pointed out.  I think keeping women out of the picture is itself an element of the Apatow meta-commentary the picture provides—and perhaps celebrates, depending on your perspective.

Why would they save Chris Penn’s DNA like that?

@ norbiz:  Let’s hear it for the boy!

I dunno, I think it’s fairly funny—as a meta-joke about Vanity Fair, and as a comment on how absurd it is that men are not asked to do things like this to advance their careers, and as a second-order comment on how it’s possible to be not particularly attractive by most measures and still have a career in Hollywood if you’re an Apatow dude.

It was very mildly amusing as a cultural reference.  I doubt it has enough thought behind it to act as a deliberate comment on gendered relations, otherwise they probably would have appeared nude.

I recall a Rolling Stone pictorial on Kate Winslet which twigged my attention.  I couldn’t figure out why until I realised that the very dressed Ms Winslet was deliberately using porn posing, presumably as a sarcastic comment about having to shoot a pictorial in order to give an interview as a serious actor.  My respect for her intelligence went up several notches.

It would’ve worked if they hadn’t gone for the bodysuit cop-out.  But maybe I’m just saying that because I want to see Seth Rogen naked.

...I’m sorry.  It’s the glasses.

As it is, the only statements the shoot makes are a) these guys won’t go all the way on their own “you know how I know you’re gay?” dude humor, b) bodysuits are really creepy-looking, and c) B-list comedy actors are granted more dignity in Hollywood than A-list actresses.

Incidentally, mad respect for Rachel McAdams for refusing to participate in the original Vanity Fair shoot.  The actresses weren’t told in advance that they were expected to pose nude, and when McAdams walked out she was mocked in the magazine’s copy for being a poor sport.

looks like they’re the cast of a weird new ballet, or doing performance art

Right. I was thinking a cross between Pilobolus and the Blue Man Group.

I think it’s funny.  Thought-provoking funny.  Not laugh-out-loud funny.  I think they’re making fun of a culture of contrived masculinity and of female objectification disguised as contemporary pop culture (faux-art) photography . . . at least as it was portrayed in the original VF cover.

It’s telling that they didn’t get naked.  Not sure whether that was a VF photo shoot designer decision or if it came from the comics themselves.  But I’m definitely not interpreting this as avoiding sexist stereotypes.  I suppose it could be more effective (like some people have written in comments) if a woman were to be clothed and surrounded by naked males but then it might be a little too political or threatening.  With comics mocking the absurdity of the Tom Ford cover, it’s a little more palatable to a wide audience.

c) B-list comedy actors are granted more dignity in Hollywood than A-list actresses.

I don’t know if I’d say “dignity,” but, yes, I think part of the gag is that up-and-coming male actors are treated completely differently from up-and-coming female actors, including the expectation that they be Artistically Nude in middlebrow magazines.  (Then, add to that the idea that up-and-coming male actors in the Apatow cohort don’t even have to be particularly handsome.)  But I don’t think that the gag then concludes, “And that’s how it should be!”

Then make the gal in the suit Margaret Cho!

looks like they’re the cast of a weird new ballet, or doing performance art

I actually know a dude who looks not unlike the chubbiest guy at the bottom of the composition who used to do a performance piece that involved him doing a strip tease down to a sort of creepy/awkward unitard not unlike this.  It was kind of brilliant.

Not sure whether that was a VF photo shoot designer decision or if it came from the comics themselves.

Which is interesting in light of the information that, in the shot this parodies, the actresses apparently had no control over whether to be nude or not.  Rachel McAdams was apparently not offered the option of wearing a bodysuit.

Unless you’re Janeane Garofalo in The Truth about Cats and Dogs.

Garofalo’s conceit has always been to play the role of the women who isn’t that good looking when, in fact, she is totally beautiful. It kind of chafes a bit to see her trying to become an icon for the homely yet confident women when her claims to being “plain looking” ring pretty false.

I think it’s funny, although in a more thoughtful and not in a “laugh out loud” kind of way.

First, total nudity would not have been funny. Honestly, I think it would’ve been obvious and kind of humorless. Yes yes, we all know that the prior cover was blatantly sexist. And look, we can make that very obvious point by reversing the sexes!

Second, the bodysuits are what make this picture funny/interesting. Their artificiality CALLS ATTENTION to the artificiality of the women’s initial nakedness. That is, by effectively asserting that a man in a bodysuit is equivalent to a naked woman—which he obviously is not—the picture reminds the viewer that the women’s nakedness is no more “natural” than the men’s bodysuits. Both are constructed, for the viewer, based on cultural ideas of appropriateness (woman=Sexxx-aay; man=too manly for Sexy).

Ultimately, I guess I just think that having the men be naked would elide the whole reason the picture is interesting (and maybe even provocative, for a mainstream publication). I don’t think it’s too much for a magazine to ask its readers to exercise a bit of critical judgment as to the picture.

Garofalo’s conceit has always been to play the role of the women who isn’t that good looking when, in fact, she is totally beautiful. It kind of chafes a bit to see her trying to become an icon for the homely yet confident women when her claims to being “plain looking” ring pretty false.

FWIW, she probably has no real control over that.  When you’re an actor, you take the work you can get.  It’s a job.  Is she beautiful?  Yes.  But she doesn’t have a “central casting” look about her, and when you want to work as an actress in Hollywood and you don’t match that, the roles that are offered to you are “spunky plain girl makes good!” projects.  Or you just don’t work until you’re 45 and even then only get the occasional Put Upon Housewife Patricia Healy sort of role. 

The fault doesn’t lie with Garofalo at all, it lies with the system.

“Garofalo’s conceit has always been to play the role of the women who isn’t that good looking when, in fact, she is totally beautiful. It kind of chafes a bit to see her trying to become an icon for the homely yet confident women when her claims to being “plain looking” ring pretty false.”

@Tyro Although it’s your opinion that Garofalo is beautiful (I agree), her contention has always been that in Hollywood she is considered an overweight troll. Even in her movie “The Truth about Cats and Dogs” she played the ugly friend to Uma Thurman’s gorgeous model character.  In one of her stand up acts she even acknowledges that in different parts of the country (she was referencing San Francisco) the way she looks doesn’t phase anyone. But from the moment she lands at LAX she’s a fat eyesore. She’s not being disingenuous, she’s pointing out the hypocrisy of an average or even an attractive woman constantly being told she’s ugly and fat by Hollywood.

They not only should have been naked, they should have been shaved—from the neck on down, just so that they and everyone else could see how ridiculous it is that women have to do this.

Let’s remember that Hollywood cast Olivia de Havilland as the “plain” Melanie Wilkes. Media has been at this a long time. Uma Thurman has even been referred to as an “acquired taste” in some mag article because she is not quite the classic Hollywood type.

It’s funny to me on one level because the guys in the photo are funny guys in general.  The bodysuits and that fact that these funny schlubs are used, rather than naked chisled male model equivalents of the female models, annoy me because it’s yet another instance where the message of “women who aren’t hot looking don’t matter and might as well not exist” is communicated.

Is it wrong to think it’s kinda hot??
There’s that bit of man-on-man action. RROWR!

The Rachel McAdams part of that story was (yet another) something I didn’t know… sickening.

I’d note that Janeane Garofalo did her time as a alternative sex symbol in the 1990s. I was in junior high and high school at the time, and me and all of my lesbian friends drooled mightly over her, helped in no small part by a few pictures that popped up on the internet. Typical magazine photo shoot stuff, just a little suggestive, not nearly as misogynistic as the Vanity Fair thing (if at all).

...of course, I don’t think any of us were motivated by the sexuality that motivates that Vanity Fair shit. I don’t know if it is a coincidence, but I’m not interested in Kiera Knightly or Scarlett Johanson, at all. Give me a Rosario Dawson or a Catherine Keener. And my thoughts on Rachel McAdams have seen a recent uptick.

I guess my point… the politics around the original photo were the point, not some coincidence. And this doesn’t really challenge those politics, at least not in my mind.

I didn’t think it was at all funny, but that’s because (1) I have no fucking idea who those dudes are and (2) I have no fucking idea what the original photo being alluded to is.

Opoponax you beat me to my point (this time about Garofalo) as usual. I think you must think and/or type much faster than I do.

There’s a rule of thumb in comedy—if you have to explain why something is funny, it isn’t funny. I’m going to suggest a corollary: if you have to explain why it isn’t funny, it probably is.

Speaking of Garofalo, shlubs, and beauty standards: http://world-o-crap.com/blog/?p=1244

(Soon after that, this: http://world-o-crap.com/blog/?p=1256)

I saw it on Jezebel and agreed with whatever of their writers who complained that the actors just didn’t commit to it enough.  I don’t know if it was the fear of gayness, the desire to not be seen naked, or the magazine’s fear that a nude shot wouldn’t sell (or be sold on newstands, which is where “controversial” and “event” covers need to make a lot of money, which supplements a lot of missing ad revenue whenever those covers aren’t present.)  But whatever it is, the cover seems half-assed and lame as a result.

You’d think an actor who had a (not in the final film) bit in Knocked Up about how he was disappointed that Ledger and Gyllenhaal didn’t get it on graphically enough in Brokeback would know a thing or two about not giving the people what they want, but then I remember that they’re actors.

And all those wanting photoshopped and haircropped versions can make their own.  I’m sure they’re already out there if you really want to check.  I can’t say I do, but a few moments on alltheweb or google would probably pay off for someone out there.

Someone at Jezebel theorized that a lack of bodysuits (that is, nudity) might send the message that they were trying to be sexy and failing. Keeping in mind that a lot of people commenting didn’t know the original image and/or didn’t know the actors, the suits might also have been kept in as a clue that the image was supposed to be funny, something that might not have been clear otherwise. I’m not sure if I totally agree, but it’s a thought. The suits also emphasize the total smoothness of the women’s bodies in the original, of course. Scarlett actually does look like she’s wearing a bodysuit, or at least a shitload of powder.

The Jezebel post juxtaposes the two photos and really makes the contrast clear. I think the photo is funny, but yes, one of the underlying messages makes me grit my teeth. Men are allowed to have unattractive hair and moles on the cover of magazines, no less, and even if it is as a gag, the funnymen involved aren’t assumed to have humiliated themselves.

But whatever it is, the cover seems half-assed and lame as a result.

IMHO it’s deliberately absurd and unfinished-seeming.  That’s part of the joke. 

Men are allowed to have unattractive hair and moles on the cover of magazines, no less, and even if it is as a gag, the funnymen involved aren’t assumed to have humiliated themselves.

Not every photographer is necessarily self-aware, but some of them are, and I think this is one—the difference between the male imperfection on display here and the female (pseudo) perfection on display in the original Tom Ford VF image is The Point.  The bodysuits here point to the artificiality of the original image:  it’s the ultimate in lousy airbrushing to wrap an entire body in nylon until it’s featureless, especially Jason Segal’s crotch.

Annejumps they have humiliated themselves, insofar as they are Men lowering their status to that of women. That’s the funny part: Women are constantly objectified, so here’s some real human men objectifying themselves as women. It’s clearly not a role reversal, as they’re still the unknowing (or unenthusiastic) objects for the swingin’ dude in the picture to consume.

I thought it was pretty funny when I saw it, and clearly a send-up of the original image, which I had a particular bee in my bonnet about. Still, talking about anything for 70 comments is bound to grind humour out of anything.

I don’t know the actors, but I’ve seen the photo it is sending up, and I think it is mildly amusing, at least. The bodysuits are a plus, not a minus: they say “people lounging around nude like in the girl photo is not something that happens in real life, anymore than this looks normal; you’re so used to magazine shots of naked women, you may have forgotten how artificial it is.” Also, bodysuits are an intrinsically humorous thing. They are supposed to look like nudity, but they don’t unless seen only from a distance and with layers of lace, sequins, etc over them: only sexy as part of an elaborate layered theatrical costume such as an ice-skater might wear.

Now whether the photographer, actors, and/or magazine were really trying to make a point, I don’t know. It would seem odd for a shallow magazine to do a critical revision of one of their famous photos, but maybe there’s a new editor or the photographer was clever about getting it through. At any rate, I think a lot of people will have a new view of the old cover after seeing this.

I was initially convinced that this photo was a bad idea that could not, in fact be made funny… but the “photograph them naked and airbrush them into Serenity-poster levels of unrecognizability” idea is growing on me.

I’m a little disappointed to see so much of an apologia for putting men in bodysuits.

FlipYrWig: The bodysuits here point to the artificiality of the original image:  it’s the ultimate in lousy airbrushing to wrap an entire body in nylon until it’s featureless, especially Jason Segal’s crotch.

No, it’s not the ultimate in lousy airbrushing. The ultimate in lousy airbrushing would actually involve airbrushing naked dudes.

They’re wearing bodysuits because they’re dudes, and dudes don’t appear obligatorily naked in magazines. Editors don’t demand it, photographers don’t expect it, and dudes have the agency to stand up against it without anyone batting an eye.

On top of that, can you imagine the outcry if innocent straight men were to be exposed to such a thing? Sure, to the uneducated eye, it might seem as though they’d be uninterested, but the standard-issue straight man has a mighty crotch-tropism towards naked dudes that could destroy Western Civilization if it were to be unleashed.

Yes, this photo points out the fail of the original… but it adds buckets more of its own. Jezebel was right. Commit to the damned joke.

I don’t know why bodysuit/naked is the same thing as halfway/committed to the joke… when the bodysuit is part of the damned joke and possibly the whole damned joke.

The ultimate in lousy airbrushing would actually involve airbrushing naked dudes.

It’s funnier to use bodysuits to create the smooth and hairless doll-body effect—it makes it more obvious how artificial the whole enterprise is.  Airbrushing lumpy Apatow guys would make them artificially glamorous, thin them down, sex them up—that’s all true—but then the picture would _require_ its audience to know who the guys were and what their real-life bodies looked like.

They’re wearing bodysuits because they’re dudes

There’s a consensus emerging that that’s what’s going on.  I can’t buy that, I’m sorry, because these particular dudes—and a lot of the whole Apatow ethos—is about being a dumpy-looking or odd-looking guy and being unashamed about it.  I can’t see why a person would say so definitively that the photographer got shy, or that the actors got shy, in real life, rather than that the picture is staged deliberately that way _as part of the joke_. 

They’re wearing bodysuits because they’re dudes, and dudes don’t appear obligatorily naked in magazines.

Right, exactly.  They’re almost naked, but not quite, _because_ they’re guys, because their lumpy guy-ness hasn’t deterred them from being movie stars.  That double standard is the core of the joke.  They aren’t pretty, and they aren’t naked, and no one expects them to get naked, and no one expects them to get prettied up.  That’s the joke.  That whole issue is placed in quotation marks here and drives the comedy of the image.

Anyway, I stand by the idea that the bodysuits point up the absurdity of this image and, by extension, the original Tom Ford image, _more so_ than actual nude flesh would have.

If anything, I’d think that the picture’s ideological failing was in its presumption that fatness and ridiculousness are so closely related.

Oops, I think I contradicted myself, and quoted the same thing twice… Bah.  Anyway, the main idea is that I don’t think putting the guys in bodysuits is a sign of actual nervousness on anyone’s part, but instead is a nudge-and-wink to this whole conversation we’re having about why they’re not naked.  It’s meta.

I think that if there’s anything amusing about this photo, it’s the facial expression of the fat guy in the front.

Not every photographer is necessarily self-aware, but some of them are, and I think this is one—the difference between the male imperfection on display here and the female (pseudo) perfection on display in the original Tom Ford VF image is The Point.  The bodysuits here point to the artificiality of the original image

I thought I’d said as much when I said “The suits also emphasize the total smoothness of the women’s bodies in the original, of course. Scarlett actually does look like she’s wearing a bodysuit, or at least a shitload of powder.”
*At the same time,* however, the parts of the men NOT in the suits are allowed to have hair and moles. That’s more what I was getting at.

Annejumps they have humiliated themselves, insofar as they are Men lowering their status to that of women. That’s the funny part: Women are constantly objectified, so here’s some real human men objectifying themselves as women. It’s clearly not a role reversal, as they’re still the unknowing (or unenthusiastic) objects for the swingin’ dude in the picture to consume.

With these men, it’s not permanent, and it’s not real humiliation. They’re poking fun at themselves; they have the agency here.