One Hundred Pages of Nothing Useful

Japan, in the summer of 2015, produced the first issue of a fan magazine called I Love Everyone! Man’s Nipple.—a publication devoted entirely, without apology or irony, to male nipples. The medically purposeless, culturally under-theorized, oddly photogenic nub of flesh that half the population walks around displaying in public while nobody has a formal opinion about it. Until someone did, and published it.

Light, dark, large, small, smooth, hairy—the magazine covered the full range. Fan-made, sold through a doujinshi retailer, about five euros a copy. The kind of thing that exists because niche desire, taken seriously enough, eventually produces its own infrastructure. You don’t get a magazine without an editor who genuinely cares. Whoever put this together cared.

The internet produces an essentially infinite supply of women’s bodies for consumption—catalogued, rated, archived, sold. A publication where the male chest is the object of desire rather than the viewing subject is at minimum a shift, even arriving as it does via Japanese fan-publishing culture rather than any organized theoretical project. It doesn’t need to be more than what it is. Appreciation is appreciation. Niche is niche.

Sold out by now, obviously. Still—worth knowing it existed.