Today I stumbled across a post from Amanda Hess at the DC alt-weekly Washington City Paper that takes on the Huffington Post for its sexist entertainment section.

The money line:
"People--even progressive, conservative-hating, liberal-minded people--will click on nipple slip slideshows and boob jobs guessing games, and that's a big part of the Huffington Post's model."

Arianna did an interview a little while ago where she mentioned that more than half of the site's traffic comes from non-political stories, a figure I was a little surprised to hear - perhaps because I personally don't really go to HuffPo for entertainment news, or at least I didn't that much before (normally, if I was in the mood for celebrity gossip or similar 'news,' I'd check out ONTD or Best Week Ever or even, ack, Perez Hilton). Now that I'm thinking about it, though, I realize that most of my clicks at HuffPo nowadays are related to entertainment, and I never visit those celeb gossip sites anymore (also a factor: I know most of the day's political news anyway - and much more in depth, may I say - given how closely I read TPM everyday). Is it HuffPo that's changed, or me, or a combination of the two?

The point being - sex sells, we all know it, the Huffington Post certainly knows it, and I'm a progressive guilty of clicking on some of those shameful links. That's not to say I don't shake my head at the headlines and nature of it as I do it - the focus and amount of the coverage has alarmed me as of late - and Hess's post and other writings certainly give me pause. She has other good stuff, including "sexism on a liberal website is still sexism" and "Huffington Post continues nipple parade."

An interesting sidenote to all this: someone at HuffPo read Hess's posts and decided to scold the Washington City Paper for linking to their site (!), though Arianna asserts it wasn't really scolding. The hullabaloo even caught the attention of David Carr at the New York Times, prompting him to post "HuffPo gets huffy over parody," where the term 'peekabo sexism' comes from. I think it describes it well, and though Carr focused more on the exchanges that went on between the two websites, my hope is that more traffic is driven to the sexism write-ups - if they get a tenth of the traffic that Rihanna's nipple slips get, we could have some good meta media discussion instead.