FLESHBOT:
Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna go? Whatcha gonna do when you’re featured on the Tumblr photo blog called Hot and Busted? The blog features thousands of police mugshots of college age cuties who have been caught by the long arm of the law. Most of the boys are studly enough to be featured on any porn site from Corbin Fisher to Broke Straight Boys. But as is obviously the case when criminality is sexualized, the hot factor also brings up controversy.
The photos are legally found through public Sheriff department records. You think the boys are interesting? Check out the creator’s response to comments. On asked about his inspiration for the blog, he says:
…getting arrested introduced me to the booking process and the entire experience of incarceration. I realized that mugshots weren’t just photographs – rather, they served as the quintessential visual symbol of one’s whole arrest and time behind bars. Furthermore, the mugshot provides an incredibly vivid portrait of one’s face and shoulders at their most vulnerable moment. The beauty of the human face and the cruelty of the criminal justice system collide in these curious images. Not to mention, of course, that “bad boys” possess a certain allure, and mugshots capture these alleged criminals at their most sinister.
Clearly, the last sentence is the real reason. Forget the faux social experiment gibberish used as justification. But the blog is turning heads for another reason, and it only takes a two-second glance at the thousands of criminal mugshots to guess why.
blog creator explains:
Hot and Busted only profiles white men because I choose not to advance the pernicious stereotype of nonwhite criminality, specifically when it comes to African Americans. As a white person, I recognize that some whites tend to envision their “race” as superior to others; this seems most apparent when considering the fact of white privilege. To wit, white people are never asked to defend or “speak for” their race, whereas this notion of a “racial representative” frequently arises among African Americans or Latinos.
On the whole, I wish white people would view themselves through the eyes of other historically stigmatized races and realize the perquisites of whiteness.
LOVE what writer Cedric DeWittison has to say about all of this… here’s a taste:
If he features only white dudes, so be it. It’s his blog, and we admit we’d schtup all the dudes featured. But nothing is more transparent than a guy who frames his racially selective desires into faux intellectual pro-race hogwash, as we’ve seen before. They’re unable to understand how their flawed arguments lack any real perspective into the debate on desire and race.
“Hot and Busted” can be fairly criticized for showing no people of color. That aside, the men on it are indeed, as its title says, hot. More babes should be arrested shirtless. In fact, shirtless mugshots must be made into law. Nipple placement is a critically important identifier.
Kudos to the horny dude who has the time on his hands to scour thousands and thousands of police records to find the cream of the crop, and bring it to the top. That’s called being a productive member of society. Bad boys, bad boys, we know what we wanna do when we come for you.
READ THE FULL STORY @ FLESHBOT
