Just discovered Barstool\u2019s \u201cGrading the Newest Sex Scandal Teacher\u201d where every few days since like 2009 they put up the hottest photos they can find and a few hundred-word lascivious \u201creview\u201d of female teachers caught fucking their students (they\u2019re pro-)
\n\nBarstool actually reminds me of the turn-of-the-20th-century \u201csporting press\u201d. Focused around sports, with an eye on reports of use to sports bettors, these publications were really a men\u2019s press, circulated through masculine outlets like saloons and barbershops, offering up tittilation and sex industry advertising on the side, playing to a rough tits-n-beer (-n-fisticuffs) single men\u2019s culture. Y\u2019know, punters. The guys on the barstools.
\n\u2028Some vestiges remained in America - racing forms, Sports Illustrated\u2019s swimsuit issue, the way \u201calt-weekly\u201d urban tabloid newspapers took a gritty tone and sustained themselves on prostitution ads. But Europe\u2019s stronger sports betting and prostitution culture (arguably both downstream from a stronger urban working class culture absent the US\u2019s midcentury \u201cmass middle class\u201d suburbanization) and national publication markets means the tradition carried on more intact.
\n\u2028And now we\u2019ve got the internet, and a return to the cities, and moves to open up sports betting, and a new sex work culture and a growing men\u2019s culture that doesn\u2019t even aim at bourgeois respectability (both downstream from the end of the mass middle class) so no surprise Barstool\u2019s a thing RN