I opened my curtains this morning and boom! There was Kim Kardashian’s crotch. Smooth, pink, hairless, in shades of apricot, clad in a “flesh-colored” g-string apparatus. Above the crotch are balloons spilling out of a matching bra. This teenage boys’ fantasy image is freshly mounted on the 500 square foot billboard out the window from my home.
To be fair and accurate in my reporting: It may not be Kim Kardashian’s actual attached-to-her-body crotch—how would I know for sure?—but it is indubitably Kim Kardashian’s Kompany’s Krotch; I know this because the brand name is written in giant letters across the model’s—Kim’s?—apricot-colored boobs.
There is more. Krotch girl shares a piece of her billboard with most of another underwear model; this one is paler and the proportion of underwear to flesh is higher.
But these two are not alone: Five more torsos join them on extensions of the billboard facing me.
Four are in a horizontal line. They are nicely diverse in color, as is their underwear. Each shows that she indeed has a crotch and a chin that presumably has a head above it. Beyond that, the billboard gives little information. No legs, no mouths, no eyes. However, these ladies have hands and they are using them. Four of our six beauties are grabbing their undies, kind of pulling them away from their bodies ready to snap back. Ouch.
There is another giant looming over this girlband—unique in that she has a face to go with her underwear-clad shiny bod. She is pretty in pink curly hair and a smooth pink underwear item. Neither she nor anyone else is grabbing her underwear.
This all demands some introspection. Clearly I do not like looking at these images. But to be fair, I don’t like looking at most of the images on the billboard out my window. I’d rather look at the skyline or the ocean.
However, these billboards offend me. They show too much. And what they show is too peculiar—all that shine—and too big. Crotch showing and viewing should be voluntary. Showers and viewers alike need the privacy option. Presumably the models were willing to model, but billboards don’t offer the option of not looking. ❏
Jane Barowitz lives in NoHo, in case you were wondering.
