It seems like it should be unnecessary to point out that models are human beings, but a lot of people seem to have difficulty with this. Nobody is as beautiful as their best photo or as hideous as their worst. Ugly may go to the bone, but beauty is still only skin deep. All true.

The nature of digital interaction makes the relationship of humans with their images more difficult. Once upon a time, my unsavory pals and I could hang out at our punk rock group house and, if someone said a model in some of the trannie porn in our living was not feminine enough, nobody’s feelings were going to get hurt.

Today, a lot of people seem to be polarized in their responses to imagery, in particular in their responses to sexual imagery. On the one hand, there are people who callously and casually critique a model’s weight or body parts in public, even though the human being in those photos is going to see those comments. On the other hand, there are people who, on some deep lizard brain level, feel that, if they have seen someone’s hoo-ha, even someone who was paid to show it to them, that person is practically their mate.

It does not make you respectful and/or feminist, if you pathetically slavishly agree with everything someone ever says or posts because you have seen naked pictures or video of them, especially members of your gender of preference.

It does not make you intelligent/ and/or nonconformist, if you aggressively criticize all erotic media and the people who appear in it, especially members of your own gender.

Someone can appear in updates on your favorite website or the boxcover of your favorite DVD or the cover of your favorite magazine. You can appreciate their work and that is awesome. But they probably are not rich for life off of the work you enjoyed (or didn’t). The world has enough pain in it. Don’t be cruel to someone who was generous enough to share their naked selves with you. Just don’t be a lapdog either. You know that whole rather walk beside me and be my friend thing? Treat models like human beings.

In the internet age, most of us become somewhat reduced to our avatars and how we come across when typing. Nonetheless, models are still human beings and no more or less human, no more or less right, no more of less deserving, for having had more pictures taken of them than the average person.

A lot of models are afraid to go interact in public because people online can be so critical and most models know they are not as beautiful as the best photos where they were lit well, made up just right, dressed in clothing they may not own, shot with good composition, and post processed to perfection. In real life, people tend not to say the sort of rude things they write when in keyboard warrior mode. But, after seeing one’s best efforts nit-picked to death online, not just models, but most creative people find it more difficult to interact IRL.

Photos of models or real world parties or whatever are posted here from time to time. If you have something nice to say about them, by all means do. If you don’t have something nice to say, please don’t fake it, but don’t go out of your way to be a dehumanizing cruel jerk either.

Ashton Kutcher is the pretty much undisputed leading twit on Twitter. As of this moment, he has 2,839,413 followers, outflanking people like Barack Obama, Perez Hilton, Shaquille O’Neal, Britney Spears, and Oprah Winfrey, and even CNN and Twitter itself. He has held the number one spot for quite some time. So, when Ashton Kutcher tweets that his wife Demi Moore has gotten a mohawk, people listen.

I know an awful lot of extremely physically beautiful people, yet, even among celebrities, Ashton Kutcher is so freakishly good-looking that I remember him being in the movie Reindeer Games, even though I don’t think his character had a name. And I think his part was so small it consisted pretty much of stumbling into a bathroom or something at the wrong time. So I stop and think about it and realize that I can’t come up with any other movie Ashton Kutcher has ever been in. I know he was on a TV series called That 70’s Show which ran for a long time, but I don’t even know what network it ran on. So I go and check IMDB and I have actually never seen Ashton Kutcher acting in anything other than Reindeer Games. Yet he is clearly up there at the top of Mount Celebrity. I’ve apparently never really seen him act, yet I know that he dropped out of a biochemical engineering college program to become a male model.

Ashton Kutcher has managed to parlay a certain kind of famous access into something far larger than most. He is a perfect spokesman for digital cameras and micro-blogging services because he has managed to commodify certain parts of his existence in such a flawless and innovative way that, in 2009, the rest of society is panting to catch up.

The Punk’d reality show Ashton Kutcher co-created with producer partner Jason Goldberg at Katalyst Films took the Candid Camera genre to a whole new level. By playing pranks on recognizable people, Punk’d made the viewer feel much more invested in the show; it made the show feel ironically more real and most of the punked celebs more humanized. Maybe this makes some sort of statement about the alienation of modern man and how so many people feel more connected to famous faces on television and online than their, err, IRL peeps. Punk’d was spoofed on The Simpsons as the show Chop Shop with the pranked person crying out anguished “Why would you do that?” in response to their car being chopped for the purpose of filming their reaction for reality television.

Why would Ashton Kutcher do that? To get paid? To become a powerful producer? To be feared? To amuse himself? To get MTV to foot the bill for expensive pranks he wanted to play? To be able to have people to play pranks for him? To come across as more of a man’s man and less of just a pretty boy? To become that special sort of celebrity of the new millennium where he is nominally a famous actor, but the real description is much more complex . . .

So anyway, it appears that Demi Moore would look really hot with a mohawk. But the widely-covered haircut is just a photochop (Chop Shop!) Ashton Kutcher posted to his Twitter via TwitPic. Most of the news covering Ashton Kutcher punking the news media with what is not the most convincing photo manipulation say that Ashton Kutcher actually photoshopped the image. Never mind that minutes after posting the chop with the tweet ” wifey just got a new hair cut what do you guys think? I love it”, he tweeted, “@mrskutcher I”m just playing baby but I think you’d look great with that cut”. Which apparently was enough to convince a large proportion of the news media that Demi Moore actually had gotten a mohawk hairstyle. Because the Punk’d guy would never play the prankster in such matters. And apparently some pundits have poor reading comprehension. Which is ironic, given how many serious think pieces I have seen about Twitter decreasing people’s aptitude to comprehend complex thoughts. How much more complex than j/k are they themselves capable of? And what makes them think Ashton Kutcher did that photoshop job? Surely someone, who can pay other people to do pranks for him, has people for that.

When I started writing this article, a short time ago, the Demi Moore mohawk TwitPic had 179,571 views and now it has 181,371.

Last week, superstar Dita Von Teese launched her Wonderbra special glamour collection. There was some scuttlebutt that her supposedly scandalous past was going to somehow mess up the deal. Personally, given that Dita Von Teese first became famous for her unique sexiness, I think the rumors that she might lose the Wonderbra campaign over it were either astroturf or more likely haters. Yes, that’s right, a beautiful woman who creates and really embodies her own individual style can go as naked and as naughty and as fetish as she likes and still have the world revolve around her. Dita Von Teese is simply a combination of someone who was special to begin with and also was willing to plan and work really really hard. Kudos to her. The video above has some info on the Sexy Science by Dita launch and the video below has the smashingly hot and fun commercial for the lingerie line. I haven’t tried any of it on yet, but I’ll keep y’all posted.