Sex In The City: Cowboy Up

[Bowbridge]

Times Square. Great way to break the ice..

[Edward]

I found out last week that Naked Cowboy supports the war in Iraq.

[TLOZ Link5]

Well, we have the right to our opinions, even if we don't agree with one another.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Cowboy up?

It's Johnny Damon, getting ready for his off-season job, which should start any day now.

[Schadenfrau]

In a metaphorical sense, it seems all the publicity has caused the Naked Cowboy to get too big for his britches. To his certain disappointment, the same can't be said for the literal sense.

[TLOZ Link5]

Originally Posted by Schadenfrau

In a metaphorical sense, it seems all the publicity has caused the Naked Cowboy to get too big for his britches. To his certain disappointment, the same can't be said for the literal sense.

Oooh, burn! That's gotta hoit.

[brianac]

April 21, 2008, 3:44 pm

Times Square Weathers a Brief Shower, With No Beef

By Jennifer 8. Lee


Models posed with the Naked Cowboy for a PETA-sponsored event today in Times Square. (Photo: John Marshall Mantel for The New York Times)

We all know how territorial the Naked Cowboy is about Times Square (a place all too familiar with flesh-baring), having sued Mars for the Naked M&M’s appearance in tighty-whities.

So how would a naked cowboy take to a couple of “nude” vegans showing up in Times Square and showering as part of a PETA stunt on persuading people to go vegetarian?

The logic for linking meat and showering might seem a bit tenuous but it goes like this: Pople for the Ethical Treatment of Animals says it costs 5,000 gallons of water to produce a pound of meat, citing the book “The Food Revolution” by John Robbins. That is how much water an average person consumes in a year in showering, PETA says. Hence, PETA decided to parade two “nude” vegans in a shower for an hour today at noon.

These figures are strongly contested. The food industry-financed Center for Consumer Freedom (one of those Washington groups with an Orwellian name) says it actually gets 435 gallons for each pound of meat (citing industry figures) and assuming 10-minute showers at 2.5 gallons a minute, it takes 18 showers’ worth of water to produce a gallon of meat.

“If these PETA nuts are only showering 18 times a year, we have a new reason PETA stinks,” said David Martosko, director of research at the Center for Consumer Freedom.

Either way, meat issues aside, you still have two “nude” women in Times Square, which attracted a sizable crowd. Cameraphones, point-and-shoot SLRs and video cameras were all raised to capture the tattooed flesh of Ashley Lou Smith and Chloe Jo Berman that peeked out above and below the shoulders-to-thigh shower curtain.

The reason “nude” is in quotes, is that the women were not actually nude, no matter what the PETA news release may say. When one dropped a bar of soap (oops!) and bent down to get it, you could see she was wearing flesh-colored underwear. And they had stickers covering certain body parts.

One of the models growled at a man with his cameraphone raised up, “Not too close.” He looked down at the image captured on his phone and said, triumphantly, in Spanish, “Todas!”

About 15 minutes into the performance, the Naked Cowboy sauntered into the scene, surveying his competition.

In the end, to feed the media machine, if you can’t create a newsworthy conflict (whether or not you beat ‘em) and you should join forces and leverage publicity (this is a driving logic behind all those sightings of celebrity pairing in gossip pages).

The cowboy hopped in, for a shower ménage à trois. “I never know what I’m getting into when I get into work these days,” he said.

The vegans and the cowboy faced the cameras, their divide over meat processing clearly set aside. The Naked Cowboy smiled and said, “For the animals — like me.”

Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company