Both these guys are great. I'm entirely unsurprised that Scalzi joined in; he just seems like a great guy along with a great author. Read his essay on why being a white male is like playing a video game on the easiest setting.

The Hawkeye Initiative is my new favorite tumblr/blog.

Both those photos are hilarious. Props to both authors. I've been a fan of Scalzi for several years now, and like the humor in some of his books, so I'm not too surprised he'd pose for this. I haven't read any Hines yet; maybe I should check him out.

Hines has the nicer legs, but Scalzi has better camera presence.

If I were a woman who'd been to a ball,
Been hailed as a princess to one and to all;
Would I start weeping like a bathtub overflowing?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Doz5w2W-j…

Definitely funny.

However,

Sex sells. Always has, always will. If the artists start drawing realistic looking women, sales will plummet.

Clothing catalogs that experiment with using 'human' (i.e., bigger than size zero and no airbrushing) looking models? Their sales fall off a cliff.

Humans are not very evolved. Accept it. Sex sells.

But sex doesn't sell anything but sex. Ads featuring boobs have more trouble establishing the brand over the boobs than ads without them. Viewers only remember the tits, basically. It doesn't motivate them to buy.

@7: Except it's not even necessarily sex selling the product- for example, in women's clothing ads, it's not like women are lusting after the models. The idea is that the models look like what women think men want. The fact that what women think straight guys like does not actually line up with what straight guys like should make us think a little more about what "sex selling" really means.

@7 re: "bigger than size zero" -- you need to read this:
http://www.hanneblank.com/blog/2011/06/2…

@7, references please?

Before anyone says "men are objectified tooooooooo!" here is Jim Hines posing like a man:

http://www.jimchines.com/2012/04/posing-…

The answer is more objectification, not less. The Yaoi fangirls know where it's at.

Three years ago I took home one of Vicki Pettersson's novels from a Slog Happy and read it on a dare. It is still the worst fucking book I've ever read.

@8,9,
Attractive people have "stopping power." A sexy model will get a buyer's attention more than a non sexy model.

Yeah, it doesn't always translate to a sale, but research does show that people tend to like things more just by viewing them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere_exposu…

These are comic books. Teenage boys read them. Teenage boys like looking at attractive women.

@10,

I read it. I'm not sure how it relates to anything I wrote. Everyone who's ever seen a women's apparel catalog knows what the models are going to look like. Sure, they could put fat women on it, or really ugly women, or bald women, or women with hairy armpits. If they did that, you know what would happen? Some people would say, "Great job! Finally! Thank you!" There might even be a brief uptick in sales. But I'd bet sales would drop fast.

People like to look at attractive people. That shouldn't be surprising to anyone.

@11,
If you put Sex and Advertising (or marketing) into google scholar, you'll get more references than you could imagine.

Sex (and attractive people) get attention. Does it translate into an immediate sale? Maybe not, but attention is attention.

The Hawkeye Initiative seems terribly homophobic from what I saw.

It would be entirely possible for comic artists to continue to make the female figure beautiful without resorting to giant tits, high heels, and weird contortionist poses.