Fear of Kim Kardashian's Derrière

I spend a fair amount of time trying to duck Kim Kardashian, but what with her bold attempt to break the Internet last week, I thought I owed it to her to look at the pictures of her behind on the cover of Paper magazine balancing a glass of champagne.

This was a new concept: rear end as end table. And living in a small New York apartment as I do, I had to admire it. It would have been even more impressive with a small plate of cheese and crackers, but to paraphrase Bette Davis, why reach for the stars, when you have the moon?

True, it was not quite what the sisters and I had in mind when we were talking about women taking control of their bodies in the 1970s. But it's Kim's behind; she has the right to do whatever she wants with it. What concerns me is that Kim is clearly not thinking about the future.

I don't mean the immediate future, which I think will offer all sorts of opportunities. I'm not in the movie business, but if I were, I would be thinking 'North by Northwest' remake. And this time, we'll have Cary Grant dangling off Kim's left cheek.

No, I'm thinking about Kim's long-term future and the terrible, unexpected things that can happen in life, even when you're married to someone as conservative and stable as Kanye West.

What if the Kardashian fortunes suddenly change and Kim and Kanye have to live in a fourth-floor walk-up? She'll need two Sherpas to get up the stairs. What if Kim has to fly tourist?

How happy do you think Kim will be with her enormous can at 80? There she'll be, trying to negotiate narrow supermarket aisles with her wheelie cart and her massive derrière, although it is true, given her talent with the champagne glass, she may be able to put a few containers of Metamucil on it.

Then there's the issue of copycats. I have no interest in having a behind like Kim's - like I say, I live in a little New York apartment. But there may be impressionable women out there who right now are marching into the surgeon's office and saying, 'Gimme that' - women with whom I am going to have to share a subway seat one day.

A public plea to the Kims of the world: Before you throw these pictures all over the web, think of the power you wield. The sidewalks are crowded enough. If this big-butt thing takes off, we'll be walking in the gutters.

Meanwhile, while Kim is getting more publicity than the ice bucket challenge by flaunting a body part, Jose Canseco, the former baseball star and steroid enthusiast, goes after his piece of the Internet by claiming to a credulous public (a group in which I have always played a part) that one of his fingers had fallen off during a poker tournament in Las Vegas.

The claim (which TMZ forced Jose to admit a few days later was a prank) involved a finger that had been reattached after Jose shot it off in a gun accident in October. But that was after he had sent out a series of vivid and somewhat nauseating tweets. He also posted a photo, which appears to have since been taken down.

'This is my finger before it fell off,' he wrote. 'Maybe I will sell it on ebay. After all that finger hit 462 mlb homeruns.'

Now I enjoy a jolly prank, but this photo was even scarier than the one of Kim. It was the stub of a finger, darkened with blackened clumps of sutures and loose stitching. It made you wonder which drive-through clinic Jose chose for treatment. The surgeon couldn't even trim the loose threads? If Jose came over, I would have told him, 'Hold on a second, Jose, let me get my nail scissors and trim that for you, because that's just the sort of thing that can get stuck in a zipper.'

That was not Jose's only tweet on the subject. There were others, building up to it.

'Ok well I might as well tell you,' Jose wrote last Friday. 'I was playing in a poker tournament last night and my finger fell off. Someone took a video of it.'

And then: ' My finger should have been amputated from the beginning. It was very loose with no bone to connect it. It was also smelling really bad.'

Jose, three little words: dignity, dignity, dignity. You were a contestant on 'Celebrity Apprentice,' for heaven's sake - there are people looking up to you. Is this the message you want to send, even in jest, that in pursuit of celebrity there is nothing too crude, too disgusting, to use as grist?

There is a grace in knowing when to graciously cede the spotlight to others. Consider Kanye. What did he do when everyone was checking out his wife's rear end? He replied with a modesty and eloquence that was positively Lincolnesque (had Mary Todd Lincoln, in an attempt to take a battered nation's mind off war, released a daguerreotype of her naked behind - as it was a sedate time, she would have been balancing a small glass of sherry on her powdered posterior).

'I don't understand why everyone is focusing on Kim's booty,' Kanye said in an interview on Chicago rap station WGYN, adding that he certainly loves it. 'That's why I married her,' he said. But, Kanye added, nobody has a rear end like his own.

'My booty is like Michelangelo level, you feel me?' Kanye said. 'It's like a sculpture. It's like something that should be sitting in a museum for thousands of thousands of years.'

His wife's behind? It was nice, Kanye said, 'But it's not at that level.'

You see, Jose? That's the gentlemanly way of ceding the stage.