Amy Schumer Gets Naked. That’s Brave, Because She Isn’t Beautiful. Or Something.

The left’s trolling has now reached a higher echelon.

The new Pirelli Calendar – a highbrow calendar that for some five decades has featured beautiful women in various states of undress – now features the “artistic” stylings of Annie Liebovitz, the woman most famous for sexualizing a 15-year-old Miley Cyrus. Liebovitz’s photography subjects include comedienne Amy Schumer and tennis player Serena Williams.

Here are their released shots:

Why? “I wanted the pictures to show the women exactly as they are, with no pretense,” Leibovitz said. Which is odd, considering that Schumer doesn’t routinely walk around in public in her undies, and Serena Williams doesn’t pose against walls topless on the street. Magazine editor Tavi Gevinson, who appears in the calendar, explained, “A white, able-bodied cis-gendered woman being naked is just not revolutionary anymore. I don’t think anyone is going to be like, ‘Damn, I wanted those naked chicks.’” Schumer and Williams are the only two “naked chicks” in the calendar.

Here’s the new leftist logic: If you are beautiful, you getting naked is evidence of the patriarchy, because you will be objectified. If, however, you are less-than-beautiful, than your nakedness is empowering, because it shows that your nudity isn’t for the gratification of the patriarchy. Thus, women who get naked and are beautiful are cowards, and women who get naked who are not beautiful are brave.

The attempt to characterize unattractive women getting nude as brave misses the fact that when the entire media characterizes your risk-less behavior as brave, it’s not particularly brave. Lena Dunham without the media is merely an untalented screenwriter desperately attempting to get attention by taking off her clothes. But start promoting her as a new wave feminist, and suddenly she’s a hero.

The “pictures of unattractive women naked is brave and wonderful” line neglects another factor: human nature. It turns out that men who want to see Amy Schumer naked still get a thrill out of it, and men who don’t, don’t. If women feel empowered by Amy Schumer’s nudity to love their own bodies, that’s fine – but they shouldn’t expect men to do so based on their own standards. It turns out that people still think beautiful is beautiful, and attempting to redefine the word to mean something it doesn’t, as leftist wish to do, will fail. That’s why this pretentious tweet from Schumer simply sounds silly:

Beautiful, gross, strong, thin, fat, pretty, ugly, sexy, disgusting, flawless, woman. Thank you @annieleibovitz pic.twitter.com/kc0rIDvHVi

— Amy Schumer (@amyschumer) November 30, 2015

We all know that women can be any of these things to any particular person. But adjectives are not mutually exclusive, nor are words completely subjective; a woman can’t be everything to everybody. The guy who thinks Amy Schumer is beautiful doesn’t think she’s ugly. The guy who thinks Amy Schumer is disgusting doesn’t find her flawless. The call to murder definitional meaning is a tyrannical one. Perhaps Schumer’s point is that only her opinion counts. Okay, so why is she getting naked publicly?

In the end, Schumer can’t dictate that others regard her the same way she regards herself. That would be shallow, stupid, and dictatorial. We only pretend it isn’t because of the innate sexism that suggests women can’t handle truth about the fact that people of all sexes routinely evaluate the physical beauty of others. When we reverse the sex in Schumer’s formulation, the absurdity becomes clear:

Beautiful, gross, strong, thin, fat, pretty, ugly, sexy, disgusting, flawless, man. Thank you @annieleibovitz pic.twitter.com/2GRKaQqyX4

— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) November 30, 2015

We all know this guy is fat. That’s because he’s fat. All the shameless attempts to redefine the word fat in the world won’t make him skinny, or beautiful, or pretty, or thin, or flawless. But in the left’s Feelingsland, we’re supposed to pretend reality doesn’t exist so that precious snowflakes like multimillionaire Amy Schumer feel better about their bodies. How brave it is for the leftist media to dictate to all of us how we ought to feel about our own perceptions of beauty.