Around the World in 1000 Babes

The point of this site is to take a unique tour of the world online. This is a tour of the sights and sounds of the beautiful women of the world. My main page here gets thousands of visits a year because of a post I did during Lebanon’s pro-democracy demonstrations the “Cedar Revolution” of 2005. The tongue-in-cheek title and topic was “Lebanese Chicks are Hot” and I made note of the fact that these girls weren’t in burkas. A friend pointed out, rightly, that Lebanon has long been a cosmopolitan society of multiple religions identifying much more with Europe than with the fundamentalist Islam of the Middle East. That was something that I already knew, but I still remembered during the civil war in the 80s seeing nothing but violence on news reports and women, when women were shown at all, clad in the drab gear of the fundamentalist. My point, other than a bit of simple joy at seeing the great things happening in Lebanon politically, was that in eating the pabulum the media feed us we often do miss the fact that people are so much alike and where there are differences we often miss the richness of them as well.

Those of us in the US are so used to seeing the media’s depictions of poverty in other countries, that we can be surprised to see wealth in places like Indonesia or Panama. We’re so used to seeing depictions of rural lifestyles or urban slums that we’re surprised to see urban life more similar to the US. (And that brings up the whole topic of US rural life. Around here there are people whose lifestyles are closer to the third world in many ways than they are to the lifestyle of the residents of New York or Los Angeles.) We see the slums of Calcutta and forget that India is the home of the Taj Mahal.

In the 70s and 80s, when we saw Soviet women, they were middle aged or older, typically with drab gray clothes and drab gray scarves covering the gray hair on their heads and, probably because the Communist government wanted to counter the truth of starvation in Russia, they were universally fat. The big revelation when the Iron Curtain fell? There were millions of gorgeous young women in Eastern Europe in all shapes and sizes and not a gray scarf on any of their heads.

When I first got the idea to start this little site, my intent was to post a photo of a beautiful woman once a day until I had one from every country in the world. I started with the United Nations member list, but realized immediately that I wanted to include a Palestinian woman. Then I thought, but what about the Basques, the Chechens, the northern Irish? What about Germany, was it worth showing a Prussian and a Bavarian? How about the United States, where we have diverse regional cultures that have little or nothing to do with ethnicity?

That thinking opened up a whole new kettle of fish…

Do I show those wonderful cultural events, backdrops, even costumes or do I try to show nothing but the sameness from place to place? Do I show the Lebanese protester and ignore the traditionalist? Do I show a Japanese model, a Cosplayer, a geisha?

What I decided was that I wanted to show it all. So, from the original idea that was something like “Around the World in 180 Babes,” I ended up setting my numerical sights at 1000. While I still absolutely want to include every country, I’m not going to stop there. I’ll include every region with a strong identity of its own. And while I still want to include photos, like the photos of the Lebanese protester that inspired the idea, showing how people are the same, I also want to include images, like the famous photo from National Geographic of the Afghan girl with the haunting eyes, that are culturally defining.

Ah, and I said sights and sounds. My original thought was photos, but with the explosion of YouTube, podcasting, etc. expect more. Photos, video, music, speech, drawing, painting, sculpture.

A final note. There will undoubtedly be lots of people who see this effort as exploitative, the word “babes” as demeaning and the whole idea as politically incorrect. So be it. The effort is meant to be inclusive, uplifting and uniting. The inclusion of a lady in the 1000 is meant to be complimentary. My best advice to those who don’t approve is to just go away.