Just discovered Barstool’s “Grading the Newest Sex Scandal Teacher” where every few days since like 2009 they put up the hottest photos they can find and a few hundred-word lascivious “review” of female teachers caught fucking their students (they’re pro-)
Barstool actually reminds me of the turn-of-the-20th-century “sporting press”. Focused around sports, with an eye on reports of use to sports bettors, these publications were really a men’s 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’s culture. Y’know, punters. The guys on the barstools.
Some vestiges remained in America - racing forms, Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue, the way “alt-weekly” urban tabloid newspapers took a gritty tone and sustained themselves on prostitution ads. But Europe’s stronger sports betting and prostitution culture (arguably both downstream from a stronger urban working class culture absent the US’s midcentury “mass middle class” suburbanization) and national publication markets means the tradition carried on more intact.
And now we’ve 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’s culture that doesn’t even aim at bourgeois respectability (both downstream from the end of the mass middle class) so no surprise Barstool’s a thing RN
Post-Gawker and its diaspora are the only media people with enough perspective to appreciate that Barstool becoming a thing is a thing
The NYC black strip club war between lightskin Instagram celebrity bartenders and darkskin sex worker dancers
ESPN trying to renew its connection with the common man through a Barstool Sports linkup and their Proud Professional Woman staffers not letting them