Destination: HORROR -- Labor Day Special

Websites, especially entertainment websites, like lists. I understand that. Lists are easy to write, they're easy to read, they spark debate, and most importantly, they give whichever site is using them a ton of page views, because all the site has to do is come up with some random premise like "The Top 50 Badass Women in Norwegian History" and put each woman on a different page and suddenly they've got fifty page views from a single computer. More page views = higher ad sales, especially when they can point to the comments section and say, "Look how many people are reading our site! Look how interested they are in what we have to say! Give us more money!"

The problem with lists like this is that they're often completely arbitrary, based either on whatever is topical at the moment or on an idea the author came up with five minutes before his deadline. In other words, they're usually pointless. Lists are tailor-made for people who like looking at pictures while arguing ("What do you mean that was included and this wasn't?"), and the little blip descriptions that go along with each item rarely have anything interesting to say, because how much depth can you achieve when you're working with a maximum of one hundred words or less? Lists are a lot like plums: you think they're going to be good, but more often than not when you bite into them they're sour and tough and all-around disappointing.

I should have been more wary, then, when I opened up the website AfterElton on Monday and found a holiday list entitled Celebrating Labor Day...With Hot Laborers. AfterElton is a gay entertainment site that I sometimes skim when I'm bored but otherwise try to avoid because it irritates me, for reasons too numerous to name here. (Except one: the editors and writing staff of AfterElton are generally very anti-Old Media -- meaning newspapers and print magazines -- and take great delight whenever they can highlight a headline that The New York Times allowed to go to press with a typo, yet they also champion Twitter, the place where grammar goes to die, and get defensive whenever readers point out the myriad typos in their own articles.) You're probably asking yourself, "Why would you even open an article called 'Celebrating Labor Day With Hot Laborers'?", and for that I don't have a good answer, any more than I do for why I occasionally stop and waste a half hour watching The Real Housewives franchise, except to say that the Shallowness Vortex has a strong pull. I readily admit that I had ample warning that the list was going to be stupid, including the fact that the picture accompanying the article was a publicity shot of George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg in The Perfect Storm.

Could I have predicted just how stupid it was going to be, though? No. For starters, a more accurate title for the article would have been "Celebrating Halloween...With Hot Costume Ideas," because the "laborers" included on the list seem more likely to compose the bargain bin at Trick'or'Treat World: gladiators, firemen, cops, fishermen, cowboys, road workers, pool boys and gardeners, superheroes, and coal miners. (Who doesn't have an active Gladiator Union in their hometown?) Canned, uninteresting pictures of Hollywood actors illustrate each of these jobs for us, along with enlightening commentary by author Kelley Mathys: "Road Worker: Most people have probably forgotten at this point that many of our favorite True Blood boys were all employed together on the county's road crew way back in Season One. Luckily, I am a dork, so I know these things, and now we have an excuse to post some gratuitous photos of Ryan Kwanten shirtless."

Naturally, the editors of AfterElton chose to follow that write-up with a helpful picture of Ryan Kwanten...with his shirt on:

I understand, of course, that the point of a list like this is to entertain people, and that I shouldn't analyze it the same way I would an article on the condition of the American economy, but parts of this particular list are so offensively dumb that I don't see how it could entertain anybody. The worst entry is the write-up for "Fishermen," with the aforementioned picture of Clooney and Wahlberg: "I don’t think that most people realized what a difficult job it was to be a fisherman until the TLC show Deadliest Catch came out. Unfortunately for TLC, most people don't look like movie stars, and those guys are in Alaska where folks don't worry as much about appearances, so that show isn’t exactly chock-full of shameless man-candy. But you know what is? The Perfect Storm, which was a pretty bad movie but nonetheless, had some very nice looking lead actors." I assume what Mathys was trying to say was that guys like the fishermen on Deadliest Catch don't have time to maintain the perfect stubble of an actor like George Clooney, which is true, but what she actually says is that people in Alaska don't care as much about how they look, and that the only way you're going to be "shamless man-candy" is if you do care a lot about how you look, and therefore let's not burn our retinas looking at real fishermen when we can look at movie stars instead. I'm going to take the opposite point-of-view and say that the only way this list might have been interesting is if they actually had used pictures of real fishermen (and construction workers, and coal miners), but that would have prevented them from mentioning Spartacus: Blood and Sand for the eleventy-billionth time, so I don't suppose there was much chance of that happening.

Truth be told, I might have forgiven all of this if it hadn't been for the Cowboy write-up, which went on about Brokeback Mountain for awhile and then gave this list of "Sample Hotties": "Jake Gyllenhaal, Heath Ledger (Brokeback Mountain); Daniel Craig (Cowboys and Aliens); Robert Redford (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid)." And then used this picture:

Hell no. Denigrating an entire state by claiming they don't care how they look is one thing, but to give a list of hot cowboys and mention Robert Redford in Butch Cassidy without mentiong Paul Newman, even when he is right in front of you -- well, ma'am, you have gone too far. Too far. I wash my hands of the entire situation.

DESTINATION: HORROR.