Two naked actresses plus one clothed man: Anything wrong with this picture?

NEW YORK - Pick up this month's Hollywood issue of Vanity Fair and you'll see two lovely young stars-of-the-moment, Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson, posing alluringly in the altogether. Open the foldout, and you'll even see Johansson's bare buttocks.\nWhat you won't see is a third, equally lovely young actress, Rachel McAdams of "Wedding Crashers" fame. It seems McAdams arrived at the photo shoot and decided she didn't want to take her clothes off.\nAnd so, sitting between Johansson and Knightley is \nfashion designer Tom Ford, the issue's guest editor. He nuzzles Knightley's ear and, though he shows plenty of chest hair, is fully clothed. Presumably, no one thought of asking HIM to disrobe.\nIs it arty and fun, or does it say something about sexual politics in Hollywood? In 2006, four decades after the launch of the feminist movement, does a serious actress still need to take her clothes off to get attention?\nAnd where, oh where, are the naked men?\nThe reason female stars disrobe is simple, says Janice Min, editor of the much-read celebrity magazine US Weekly. "It's tried and true. You show some cleavage on an actress. You make her look sexy. You make her look hot." She NEEDS to be hot -- because in Hollywood, "you have to be sexy to be a successful actress. You just have to be."\nSo where's the nude photo of Brad Pitt? Or George Clooney, who appears later in the issue, dressed, amid a bevy of women in flesh-toned bras and panties? Let's face it, Min says: Women do like to see sexy men -- just not with all their clothes off.\n"Men just aren't viewed as sex objects in the same way that women are," Min says. "Women don't think about men being naked in the same way that men think about women." \nIn fact, she says, at her magazine's offices, when photos come in of a male star with no shirt on, "We say, 'Gross! Put some clothes on!'" (Imagine that being uttered about an attractive female.)\nFor one expert on the magazine industry, it's a little more complicated. \n"There's an inherent fear in this country of pictures of naked men," says Samir Husni, a journalism professor at the University of Mississippi. "We've been trained to look at pictures of naked women, but we haven't been trained yet to look at pictures of naked men"