Monday, January 13, 2014

A New Year

Gentle readers, it has been a month since I last posted.  I would like to say that the hiatus was caused by the evil Time Warner Cable or my hectic holiday travel schedule or some fabulous job that swept me away.  Sadly it is none of these things.  Rather it is a malaise that has settled upon my posting for the past year as I realize that however much I post about male shirtlessness in the media, there continues to be no actual shirtlessness in my life.  I started the blog half as a joke and half as a clever way to discuss the female gaze and the lack of its acknowledgement in the media.  I still believe that women are largely ignored in the creation of media content (Why are female newscasters so much more made up and attractive than their male counterparts?) and think that following the shirtlessness often results in finding places where the heterosexual female gaze is acknowledged.  Often implicit in this acknowledgement are gay men who are also largely ignored in the mainstream media.  And let's face it, it has been fun to post about good male shirtlessness over the past 7 years!  But sometimes a girl wants her own actual gaze to be acknowledged, and that hasn't happened for quite some time.

This is in no way a farewell post.  I will continue to write about the instances of good male shirtlessness that I witness as I always do.  But I am going to slow my posting schedule to once a week on Mondays.  Maybe that will leave space for live shirtlessness to come into my world.

In the meantime, I do have to post my yearly tribute to the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater.  The program I saw last weekend blew me away, in particular a piece choreographed by Aszure Barton called "Lift" which is pictured above.  In once section two dancers perform an entire duet with the woman's face attached to the man's chest as you see here.  It was one of the most intimate moments I have ever witnessed in dance.  This duet was so riveting that I did not even care about the shirtlessness.  I felt as if the entire audience was holding its breath.  So here's to a new year in which perhaps shirtlessness can be overshadowed by artistry.  Until next week, I am...

Yours in shirtlessness,
Nandita
President
IMS